6660 Manasota Key Road
Englewood
FL 34223
“Black Women in our Collective Culture”
with Hermitage Fellows Delita Martin and Imani Perry
Friday, May 12 at 6:30pm
Hermitage Beach (entrance at 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, FL 34223)
Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.
Two acclaimed Hermitage Fellows – visual artist Delita Martin and author Imani Perry – share a common subject: redefining the role and representation that Black people and Black women occupy in our collective culture. Combining various creative practices such as collaging, drawing, painting, printmaking, and sewing techniques, Delita Martin has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Author of seven books including South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Join these two incredible artists and educators on the Hermitage Beach to hear and see insights into their important work.
Hermitage Fellow Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and a MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Primarily working from oral traditions, along with vintage and family photographs as a source of inspiration, Martin’s work explores the power of the narrative impulse. Her finished works combine collaging, drawing, painting, printmaking, and sewing techniques, placing her figures amid patterns to visually represent what it looks like when we become the spiritual other. Martin’s layering of technique and material, as well as her use of pattern and color, signifies a liminal space – the space between the waking life and the spirit life. By fusing this visual language with oral storytelling in this different space she offers other identities and other narratives for women of color. Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently, Martin’s work was shown at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC and welcomed into the Library of Congress. She served as 2021 Keynote Speaker for the Mid-America Print Council. Martin’s current work deals with reconstructing the identity of Black women by piecing together the signs, symbols, and language found in what could be called everyday life from slavery through modern times. Martin’s goal is to create images as a visual language to tell the story of women that have often been marginalized, offering a different perspective of the lives of Black women.
Hermitage Fellow Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of AfricanAmerican Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of six books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. It was named a 2018 notable book by The New York Times. Her book, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, was the winner of the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award, the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction. Her book, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. In 2021, Perry was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2019, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Perry has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Harpers, Oprah Magazine, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review. Her most recent book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation, was released in 2022.