Antagonisms: A Gathering

SCHEDULE

1PM – 2PM

[Essence of] Touch of RED

Board of Officers Room

Dance duet choreographed by 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient Shamel Pitts | TRIBE, performed by Shamel Pitts and Tushrik Fredericks.

2:30PM – 3:30PM

Panel Discussion: A Livable World: The Revolutionary Hopes of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin

Veterans Room

An introduction by Claudia Rankine, Tavia Nyong’o, and Helga Davis, followed by a reading of an excerpt of A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, as adapted by Claudia Rankine, read by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Russell G. Jones. A conversation between Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Robert Reid-Pharr follows.

3:45PM – 4:45PM

Panel Discussion: Writing, Form, and Black Life

Veterans Room

A reading of an excerpt of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, as adapted for the stage by Jaye Austin Williams, read by Jaye Austin Williams, Oge Agulué, and Kineta Kunutu.

A panel discussion with Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, and Christina Sharpe follows.

5PM – 6PM

Panel Discussion: Listening for Silence

Veterans Room

A conversation between Homi Bhabha and Anna Deavere Smith.

6PM – 7PM

Reception

North Hallway

MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY ANTAGONISMS – A GATHERING

saturday, june 1, 2024 from 1pm to 7pm

featuring

[Essence of] Touch of Red by Guggenheim fellow and choreographer Shamel Pitts | TRIBE performed by Pitts and dancer Tushrik Fredericks

panel discussions with scholar and postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, poet and novelist Dionne Brand, Queer Black troublemaker alexis pauline gumbs, acclaimed scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman, Armory Curator of Public Programming and Scholar-in-Residence Tavia Nyong’o, poet and playwright Claudia Rankine, African American culture specialist Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Studies writer and research Christina Sharpe, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith

and artistic interventions by Helga Davis and Jaye Austin Williams

SEASON

Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Thompson Family Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, The Shubert Foundation, Wescustogo Foundation, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, Mary W. Harriman Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Richenthal Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature as well as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams. Armory board members include Chairman Emeritus Elihu Rose, PhD; Co-Chairs Adam R. Flatto and Amanda J.T. Riegel; President Rebecca Robertson; Vice Presidents David Fox and Pablo Legorreta; Vice President and Treasurer Emanuel Stern; Marina Abramović; Abigail Baratta; Joyce F. Brown; Cora Cahan; Hélène Comfort; Paul Cronson; Jonathan Davis; Tina R. Davis; Jessie Ding; Sanford B. Ehrenkranz; Roberta Garza; Kim Greenberg; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; Samhita Jayanti; Edward G. Klein, Brigadier General NYNG (Ret.); Ralph Lemon; Jason Moran; Janet C. Ross; Stephanie Sharp; Joan Steinberg; Dabie Tsai; Avant-Garde Chair Adrienne Katz; Directors Emeriti Harrison M. Bains, Jr. and Angela E. Thompson; and Wade F.B. Thompson, Founding Chairman, 2000–2009.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Making Space at the Armory Public Programming series is thrilled to welcome to our historic rooms a convening that could only have been imagined by Claudia Rankine. Poet, playwright, artist, and public intellectual, Rankine has long been posing the difficult questions that strike to the heart of our fractious civic dialogue, in books like Citizen: An American Lyric and Just Us: An American Conversation. In 2022, we invited her to our Idea Lab—a space for artists and thinkers to work out new concepts with collaborators—and she chose to investigate an important conversation between the writers James Baldwin and Audre Lorde.

Published forty years ago in Essence magazine under the title “Revolutionary Hope,” this dialogue reads as fresh today as it did when it first appeared. The only time these two famous intellectuals met and spoke in depth, the exchange contained all the fearless dynamism that Baldwin and Lorde always brought to their public engagements. At times finding fervent accord, and at others sounding depths of disagreement, their dialogue sparked an ongoing investigation in the Idea Lab of how we continue to speak across differences. In both explicit and implicit ways, this gathering brings the legacy of this encounter alive for our times.

Joined in readings and dialogue by long-time collaborators and esteemed interlocutors, this gathering also brings to the fore Rankine’s deep interest in dance as an art of communication. Today’s gathering opens with [Essence of] Touch of RED, a dance work performed and choreographed by Guggenheim fellow Shamel Pitts. A duet that deconstructs the form of the boxing ring, discovering new forms of intimacy in the wake of combat, [Essence of] Touch of RED will open a day of verbal exchange and introspection with the power of movement.

I am deeply grateful to Homi Bhabha, Dionne Brand, Helga Davis, alexis pauline gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, Robert Reid-Pharr, Christina Sharpe, Jaye Austin Williams, and Anna Deavere Smith, not only for their pathbreaking contributions to literary and critical dialogue, but also for contributing their voices and visions to this experiment in gathering. At a time when free and fearless speech cannot be taken for granted, these artists and thinkers have also sharpened our ability to listen to others.

Tavia Nyong’o, Curator of Public Programming and Scholar-in-Residence, Park Avenue Armory

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

HOMI K. BHABHA

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. At Harvard, he served as the director of the Humanities Center, founding director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and in the inaugural position of Senior Advisor to the President and Provost. He is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His works include The Location of Culture, the edited volume Nation and Narration, and forewords to Frantz Fanon’s major works. He is a Corresponding Fellow at The British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Criticin-Residence at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

DIONNE BRAND

Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her twelve books of poetry include Inventory; Ossuaries; The Blue Clerk; and Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Her six works of fiction include At the Full and Change of the Moon; What We All Long For; and Theory. Her nonfiction work includes A Map to the Door of No Return and the forthcoming Salvage. Brand is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, among them the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Toronto Book Award, and the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She is the Editorial Director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and University Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph.

TUSHRIK FREDERICKS

Tushrik Fredericks—recipient of Princess Grace Award (Chris Helman dance honor)—is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. Growing up he found himself drawn towards the style krump. He graduated from the Peridance Certificate Program June 2015 and has worked with Ate9 Dance Company (Danielle Agami, Artistic Director), Sidra Bell Dance New York, and UNA Productions. Fredericks was an assistant lecturer to Sidra Bell at The University of the Arts Philadelphia for Sophomore students (2016-2018). In May 2021, Fredericks received Third Prize for Dance at the SoloTanz Festival in Stuttgart for his self choreographed solo (territory) of the heart; the work was subsequently presented at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in November 2022.

ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS

alexis pauline gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, and has a forthcoming biography, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. She is/they are the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.

SAIDIYA HARTMAN

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; Norton, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. Hartman received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a University Professor. B A, Wesleyan University; PhD, Yale University.

TAVIA NYONG’O

Tavia Nyong’o is a scholar and curator of performance. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009), which won the Erroll Hill Award for Best Book in Black Performance Studies; and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award for Best Book in Theater and Performance Studies. He writes regularly for Frieze, Artforum, The Baffler, and other venues. He is currently Chair and Wiliam Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale and Curator of Public Programming and Scholar-in-Residence at Park Avenue Armory. He was recently awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in Theatre Arts and Performance.

SHAMEL PITTS

Shamel Pitts, a 2024 Doris Duke Award recipient, is a performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, director, and teacher. He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance and BJM_Danse Montreal. Pitts danced with Batsheva Dance Company for seven years under Ohad Naharin and is a certified teacher of Gaga movement language. Pitts has created a triptych of award-winning multidisciplinary performances with his arts collective TRIBE, known as his “BLACK series,” which has toured extensively since 2016. He is an adjunct professor at Juilliard and a guest faculty member at Princeton, NYU, Wesleyan. Awards and honors: Princess Grace Award in Choreography; NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow; Jacob’s Pillow Artist-in-Residence; 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship; Harvard University Artist-in-Residence; first prize, National Arts Competition, YoungArts; Martha Hill Award for Excellence in Dance, Juilliard. Training: LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts; The Ailey School; BFA, The Juilliard School.

CLAUDIA RANKINE

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP (premiered March 2020, The Shed) and The White Card (premiered February 2018 ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater, published Graywolf Press 2019); collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press 2020); as well as numerous video collaborations. She is Co-Editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind and Co-Founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Awards and honors include the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and National Endowment of the Arts. Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and current member of NYU’s Creative Writing Program.

ROBERT REID-PHARR

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A prominent scholar of race and sexuality studies, he is the author of four books and dozens of articles on African American life and culture. His work has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Humboldt Foundation, among others. He lives in Brooklyn where he is currently at work on a biography of James Arthur Baldwin.

CHRISTINA SHARPE

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Ordinary Notes (2023)—winner of the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction, and finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. In April 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

Anna Deavere Smith—actress, playwright, teacher—is credited with having created a new form of theater. Her work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. President Obama awarded Smith the National Humanities Medal (2013). As an actress— Television: Inventing Anna, For the People, Black-ish, Nurse Jackie, The West Wing. Films: The American President, Philadelphia, Ghosted, Rachel Getting Married. She serves on Biden’s President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. She is a professor at NYU.

PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Russell G. Jones, Oge Agulué, Kineta Kunutu, Jaye Austin Williams Dramatic Readers

Nathan Riley Stage Manager

Omri Schwartz Lighting Programmer

Zen Perry Audio Engineer

Silas Rodriguez, Naomi Santos Production Assistants

Special thanks to Helga Davis, Jaye Austin Williams, Sarah Schulman, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Shakespeare & Co, Rus Snellings, and the entire Tribe production team.

ABOUT PUBLIC PROGRAMMING AT THE ARMORY

Park Avenue Armory’s Public Programming series brings diverse artists and cultural thought-leaders together for discussion and performance around the important issues of our time viewed through an artistic lens. Launched in 2017, the series encompasses a variety of programs including large-scale community events; multi-day symposia; intimate salons featuring performances, panels, and discussions; Artist Talks in relation to the Armory’s Drill Hall programming; and other creative interventions, curated by professor and scholar Tavia Nyong’o.

Highlights from the Public Programming series include: Carrie Mae Weems’ 2017 event The Shape of Things and 2021 convening and concert series Land of Broken Dreams, whose participants included Elizabeth Alexander , Theaster Gates, Elizabeth Diller, Nona Hendryx, Somi, and Spike Lee, among others; a daylong Lenape Pow Wow and Standing Ground Symposium held in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the first congregation of Lenape Elders on Manhattan Island since the 1700s; “A New Vision for Justice in America” conversation series in collaboration with Common Justice, exploring new coalitions, insights, and ways of understanding question of justice and injustice in relation moderated by FLEXN Evolution creators Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray and director Peter Sellars; Culture in a Changing America Symposia exploring the role of art, creativity, and imagination in the social and political issues in American society today; the 2019 Black Artists Retreat hosted by Theaster Gates, which included public talks and performances, private sessions for the 300 attending artists, and a roller skating rink; 100 Years | 100 Women, a multiorganization commissioning project that invited 100 women artists and cultural creators to respond to women’s suffrage; a Queer Hip Hop Cypher, delving into the queer origins and aesthetics of hip hop with Astraea award-winning duo Krudxs Cubensi and author and scholar Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls; the Archer Aymes Retrospective, exploring the legacy of emancipation through an immersive art installation curated by Carl Hancock Rux and featuring a concert performance by mezzo soprano Alicia Hall Moran and pianist Aaron Diehl, presented as one component of a three-part series commemorating Juneteenth in collaboration with Harlem Stage and Lincoln Center as part of the Festival of New York; legendary artist Nao Bustamante’s BLOOM, a cross-disciplinary investigation centered around the design of the vaginal speculum and its use in the exploitative and patriarchal history of the pelvic examination; Art at Water’s Edge, a symposium inspired by the work of director and scholar May Joseph on artistic invention in the face of climate change, including participants such as Whitney Biennale curator Adrienne Edwards, artist Kiyan Williams, Little Island landscape architect Signe Nielsen, eco-systems artist Michael Wang, and others; Symposium: Sound & Color – The Future of Race in Design, an interdisciplinary forum exploring how race matters in creative design for live performance hosted by lighting designer Jane Cox, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, set designer Mimi Lien, and sound designer and composer Mikaal Sulaiman and featuring collaborations with Design Action and Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Juke Joint, a two-day event spotlighting the history of the juke joint in Black American social history and its legacy in music and culture, including performances by Pamela Sneed and Stew; Hapo Na Zamani, a 1960s-style happening curated by Carl Hancock Rux with music

direction by Vernon Reid, and presented in collaboration with Harlem Stage; Hidden Conversations, a celebration of Dr. Barbara Ann Teer with National Black Theatre; and Corpus Delicti, a convening of artists, activists, and intellectuals imagines and enacts transgender art and music as a vehicle for dialogue across differences presented in collaboration with the NYC Trans Oral History Project.

Notable Public Programming salons include: the Literature Salon hosted by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose participants included Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Jeremy O. Harris; a Spoken Word Salon co-hosted with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; a Film Salon featuring the works of immersive artist and film director Lynette Wallworth; “Museum as Sanctuary” led by installation artist and Artist-in-Residence Tania Bruguera, curated by Sonia Guiñansaca and CultureStrike, and featuring undocu-artists Julio Salgado and Emulsify; a Dance Salon presented in partnership with Dance Theater of Harlem, including New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan and choreographer Francesca Harper, among others; Captcha: Dancing, Data, Liberation, a salon exploring Black visual complexity and spirit, led by visionary artist Rashaad Newsome and featuring Saidiya V. Hartman, Kiyan Williams, Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes, Ms.Boogie, Puma Camillê, and others; and Seasons of Dance, a contemporary dance salon featuring conversations with “mother of contemporary African dance” Germaine Acogny, Tanztheater Wuppertal dancer Malou Airaudo, and dancers from The Rite of Spring / common ground[s] at the Armory.

Artist Talks have featured esteemed artists, scholars, and thought leaders, such as: actor Bobby Cannavale; architects Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Elizabeth Diller; artist and composer Heiner Goebbels; choreographers Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, Bill T. Jones, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker; composers Philip Miller, Thuthuka Sibisi, Tyshawn Sorey, Samy Moussa, and Alexandra Gardner; composer and director Michel van der Aa; composer, vocalist, and scholar Gelsey Bell; conductors Amandine Beyer and Matthias Pintscher; designer Peter Nigrini; directors Claus Guth, Robert Icke, Richard Jones, Sam Mendez, Satoshi Miyagi, Ariane Mnouchkine, Ben Powers, Peter Sellars, Simon Stone, Ian Strasfogel, Ivo van Hove, and Alexander Zeldin; Juilliard president Damian Woetzel and Juilliard Provost and Dean Ara Guzelimian; musicians Helmut Deutsch, Nona Hendryx, Miah Persson, and Davóne Tines; New Yorker editor David Remnick; James Nicola, Artistic Director of New York Theater Workshop; performance artists Marina Abramović and Helga Davis; RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa; playwrights Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tony Kushner, Lynn Nottage, and Anne Washburn; Dr. Augustus Casely Hayford, Director of the Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art; visual artists Nick Cave, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Julian Rosefeldt, Hito Steyerl, and Ai Wei Wei; and writers and scholars Anne Bogart, Robert M. Dowling, Emily Greenwood, and Carol Martin.

ABOUT PARK AVENUE ARMORY

Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations—and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory provides a platform for artists to push the boundaries of their practice, collaborate across disciplines, and create new work in dialogue with the historic building. Across its grand and intimate spaces, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.

The Armory both commissions and presents performances and installations in the grand Drill Hall and offers more intimate programming through its acclaimed Recital Series, which showcases musical talent from across the globe within the salon setting of the Board of Officers Room; its Artists Studio series curated by Jason Moran in the restored Veterans Room; Making Space at the Armory, a public programming series that brings together a discipline-spanning group of artists and cultural thought-leaders around the important issues of our time; and the Malkin Lecture Series that features presentations by scholars and writers on topics related to Park Avenue Armory and its history. In addition, the Armory also has a year-round Artists-in-Residence program, providing space and support for artists to create new work and expand their practices.

The Armory’s creativity-based arts education programs provide access to the arts to thousands of students from underserved New York City public schools, engaging them with the institutions artistic programming and outside-the-box creative processes. Through its education initiatives, the Armory provides access to all Drill Hall performances, workshops taught by Master Teaching Artists, and in-depth residencies that support the schools’ curriculum. Youth Corps, the Armory’s year-round paid internship program, begins in high school and continues into the critical post-high school years, providing interns with mentored employment, job training, and skill development, as well as a network of peers and mentors to support their individual college and career goals.

The Armory is undergoing a multi-phase renovation and restoration of its historic building led by architects Herzog & de Meuron, with Platt Byard Dovell White as Executive Architects.

ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE

Image: Kevin Grady Alexandra Bell clash, 2023 neon tubing, transformers, and electrical wires

159.75 in x 30.175 in

clash is the first work in Alexandra Bell’s series Warning Signs: Disputations on the Power and Efficacy of the Fourth Estate, a collection of large-scale neon text works. Composed in the style of glossary entries, the texts allude to the Associated Press Stylebook, an important reference tool for journalists. Each neon presents a word, term, or phrase followed by a statement, definition, or query.

The neon sculpture operates as a literal highlight, a bright reflective point that serves to emphasize and call attention to a specific issue.

In this sense, the neon performs an instructive task meant to alert the public to the ways news media--through form and function--primes society for routine and overt state violence.

From wanted ads and criminal confessions in early antebellum broadsides to the biased headlines and mugshots of modern media, the “ubiquity of the Black condemned” is enshrined in the American consciousness through the distributive powers and discursive practices of the public press.

W a r n i n g S i g n s locates this legacy in the everyday language of contemporary news reportage.