Workshop: 1–4 p.m., sold out
Performance and Panel Discussion: 6 p.m.

At a time when mass migration due to the effects of climate change has become a critical concern, artist, and designer Andres L. Hernandez, and artist and dancer Zachary Fabri ask how drawing can can be used as an interpretative act of movement to address pressing global issues.

Workshop
Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, drawing exercises, and discussion, this workshop led by Torkwase Dyson in partnership with Andres Luis Hernandez and Zachary Fabri asks participants to reconsider “the things the mind already knows,” a principle Dyson borrows from the artist Jasper Johns regarding innovation in approaching familiar objects or concepts.

No artistic experience is required for the workshop, though willingness to participate in both the discussions and artistic exercises is expected. All workshops are free, but RSVP is required and space is limited.

Performance and Panel Discussion
After the workshop, Hernandez and Fabri will present a new collaborative performance, followed by a panel discussion with Torkwase Dyson and D Soyini Madison.

Andres Luis Hernandez is an artist and educator committed to collaborative and community-based work, currently working on a range of projects with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. His work explores ways that private and public spaces are used to promote and sustain injustice, often taking the form of archival research, writing, public programming, participatory workshops, ephemeral interventions, and performances within the built environment. Hernandez received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and an MA in art education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Art Education.

Zachary Fabri is an artist working in video, photography and drawing. He has been awarded The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in interdisciplinary work. Fabri’s work has been exhibited at Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Barnes Foundation, Rockelmann & gallery, and Third Streaming. He has collaborated in multidisciplinary projects with choreographer Joanna Kotze at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, and most recently with artist Torkwase Dyson at the Drawing Center in 2018. Currently, he is making drawings on napkins he stole from the Trump Soho Hotel while working as a bus boy. Fabri lives and works in Flatbush Brooklyn.

D. Soyini Madison is professor of Performance Studies, with appointments in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Madison has lived and worked in Ghana, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar conducting field research on the interconnections between traditional religion, political economy, and indigenous performance tactics.

Image: Andres L. Hernandez, Untitled (Study for "JRRNYYMNN" in Hammons blue), 2018. Digital edit of photocopy on paper, dimensions variable

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

Workshop: 9 a.m.-12 p.m., limited capacity

This workshop asks participants to consider points of entry into urgent questions, such as what is global warming? What is climate change? How are they different and what do they have to do with uneven development and geography? This open discussion addresses these questions through drawing as they relate to time, motion, and transparency, as well as the distribution of energy and resources.

Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, drawing exercises, and discussion, this workshop led by Torkwase Dyson in partnership with Amanda Williams asks participants to reconsider “the things the mind already knows,” a principle Dyson borrows from the artist Jasper Johns regarding innovation in approaching familiar objects or concepts.

Intimate afternoon workshop sessions will be followed by public evening presentations. No artistic experience is required for the workshops, though willingness to participate in both the discussions and artistic exercises is expected. Any specific instructions related to the workshop will be sent following confirmation of attendance. All workshops are free, but RSVP is required and space is limited.

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her practice blurs the distinction between art and architecture through works that employ color as a way to draw attention to the political complexities of race, place, and value in cities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most inner cities. Williams’ installations, paintings, video, and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar, and in the process, raise questions about the state of urban space in America. Amanda has exhibited widely, including the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She is a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grantee, an Efroymson Family Arts Fellow, a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow, and a member of the multidisciplinary Exhibition Design team for the Obama Presidential Center. She has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cornell University and Washington University in St. Louis. She lives and works on Chicago’s south side.

Image: Color(ed) Theory Series: Flamin' Red Hots (Demolition Bus), 2018. Image courtesy of the Artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

Photo: Jason Chow

The poet Dionne Brand delivers a talk and shares selections from her forthcoming book, The Blue Clerk (Duke). Brand’s presentation—commissioned by the Graham Foundation in partnership with the Poetry Foundation—weaves narratives between Brand and the artist Torkwase Dyson as both address the language of shapes. Selections of this talk will be included in the Wynter-Wells School publication that will be published at the conclusion of the exhibition at the Madlener House.

Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet. Born in Trinidad, Brand attended the University of Toronto earning degrees in Philosophy and English and a Masters in the Philosophy of Education. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award; Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award; and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return. In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

Join us for a new performance by Graham Lambkin and Joe McPhee. In 1993 one of the chief concerns of Graham Lambkin’s then fledgling group Shadow Ring was to emulate, on a cheap Casio keyboard, the electronic textures of ’70s Joe McPhee collaborator John Snyder’s ARP synthesizer. Twenty-two years later Lambkin and McPhee recorded their Chance Meeting album using chimes, whistle, pocket synthesizer, tape, Baoding balls and other objects. The recording is marked by the jovial spirit and wry humor that characterizes their collaborative dynamic, both in performance and friendship.

Graham Lambkin (b.1973, Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist who first came to prominence in the early 90s through the formation of his experimental music group The Shadow Ring. A sound organizer rather than music maker, Lambkin looks at an everyday object and sees an ocean of possibility, continually transforming quotidian atmospheres and the mundane into expressive sound art using tape manipulation techniques, chance operations and the thick ambience of domestic field recordings.

Joe McPhee (b.1939, Miami, Fla.) has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scenes in the late 60s. Inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, he taught himself the saxophone and proceeded to cut two records that remain defining monuments to the civil rights era: the out free jazz of Underground Railroad and avant-funk of Nation Time. His odyssey since has taken McPhee through Deep Listening collaborations with Pauline Oliveros and countless left field improv sessions both within and way outside of the jazz tradition.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Image: Courtesy Steve Louie

Join us for an evening of discussion with scholar Christina Sharpe and artist Torkwase Dyson. First introduced through the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh’s program, Unruly Collaborations, Sharpe and Dyson continue their conversation at the Graham Foundation. Both share interests in tackling meaningful and ethically responsible ways to wrestle with the many challenging issues of contemporary society, including those influenced by post-civil rights and postcolonial landscapes.

Christina Sharpe is Professor of English, Africana, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. In July she will join the faculty of York University in Toronto as Professor in the Department of Humanities. Her second book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was published by Duke University Press in November 2016 and was named in the Guardian newspaper and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016. In the Wake was also chosen as a finalist in the category of nonfiction for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Her first book, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery, Subjects was published in 2010, also by Duke University Press. She is currently completing the critical introduction to the Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010) to be published by Duke University Press. She is also working on a monograph: Black. Still. Life. She has recently contributed essays to the book accompanying Arthur Jafa’s first solo exhibition Love is the Message, The Message is Death and an essay called “The Crook of Her Arm” for a collection on the work of the artist Martine Syms.

This talk is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School.

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

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