Holden Chapel
Presented by the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies
Please join us as multimedia artist Steffani Jemison reads from her debut novella, A Rock, A River, A Street (Primary Information, 2022). Titled after Maya Angelou’s poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” Jemison’s experimental narrative follows a young Black woman living in the not-so-distant present, whose movement through neighborhoods, dance classes, and memory traces the boundaries of language, performance, and the self. Following the reading, Jemison will be joined in conversation with AFVS graduate students Olivia Crough and Aden Solway.
The event will begin with a screening of Jemison’s 2019 video work Similitude (2019), and is free and open to the public.
Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at JOAN, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Nottingham Contemporary; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Bordeaux; Museum of Modern Art, New York; RISD Museum, Providence; and LAXART, Los Angeles, among others. Jemison is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University – Mason Gross School of the Arts.
The event is made possible by the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities and Prof. Karthik Pandian’s GENED 1072 Video Commune. With special thanks to Nancy Shafman and the Department of Music.