News

October 31, 2017

Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Dance concludes Reclamations! Lectures in Black Feminist Performance with award-winning interdisciplinary artist Autumn Knight

Final event of the Reclamations! Lectures in Black Feminist Performance series

woman leans on wall

Houston-based artist Autumn Knight performs her work WALL (2013), a series of performed sound, rituals, and actions used to re-imagine the concept of the Wailing Wall — a religious prayer site in Jerusalem — and the Galveston Seawall — a ten mile long hurricane barrier located in the city – as psychological, spiritual, and embodied places.

Princeton Arts Fellow and faculty member Jaamil Olawale Kosoko curates Reclamations! Lectures in Black Feminist Performance, welcoming award-winning interdisciplinary artist Autumn Knight on Monday, November 6 at 7:30 p.m. This performance lecture of Knight’s Documents is free and open to the public and will be held in the Roberts Dance Studio in Princeton University’s new Lewis Arts complex.

Knight’s performance lecture of Documents involves an interactive public reading of the documentation that serves to authenticate or legitimize citizenship through various documents addressing the embodied specificities of race, class, and gender to contest whether these categories accurately reflect the bodies they are meant to represent – while underlining different audiences and relationships to power.

Autumn Knight works with performance, installation, and text. Her performance work has been featured in group exhibitions at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and Krannart Art Museum (IL). Knight has been in residence with with In-Situ (UK), Galveston Artist Residency, YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan), and Artpace (San Antonio, TX). She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University. In 2015, Knight was an Artadia awardee. Knight is currently a 2016-2017 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY).

autumn knight

Interdisciplinary artist Autumn Knight. Photo courtesy of Autumn Knight

The series is part of a fall course being taught by Kosoko and cross-listed in dance, visual arts, and African American studies, “An Introduction to the Radical Imagination.” Using an interdisciplinary visual and performance studies approach to explore various sites of contemporary art practices, the course provides students an introduction to radical performance practices through which artists consider the gendered and racialized body that circulates in the public domain, both onstage and off.

Kosoko is a Nigerian-American curator, poet, and performance artist from Detroit, Michigan. He is a 2017 Jerome artist-in-residence with Abrons Arts Center, a 2017 Association of Performing Arts Presenters Leadership Fellow, a 2015 American Express Leadership Fellow, a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, a 2011 Fellow as part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and an inaugural graduating member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University. He has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center, among others. Kosoko is a 2016 Gibney Dance boo-koo resident artist and a recipient of a 2016 U.S. Artists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. His newest performance work #negrophobia received a 2016 New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award nomination and is currently touring throughout Europe. As a 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, Kosoko is in-residence at Princeton, teaching and continuing to develop new work and research.

Presented by Princeton’s Program in Dance, the series is cosponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Committee on Race and the Arts.

Press Contact

Steve Runk
Director of Communications
609-258-5262
srunk@princeton.edu