6660 Manasota Key Road
Englewood
Florida 34223
“Interrupted History”
with Hermitage Fellows Jeffery Renard Allen and Yasi Alipour
Thursday, July 25 at 6:30pm
Hermitage Beach (entrance at 6660 Manasota Key Rd, Englewood, FL 34223)
Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.
In the works created by these remarkable Hermitage artists, time collapses and worlds expand; the future is present and history is interrupted. Both work on paper to create narrative, but Jeffery Renard Allen uses letters while Yasi Alipour prefers lines and intricate patterns. Splitting time between New York and Johannesburg, Allen is an award-winning author of six books, including the critically acclaimed debut Song of the Shank. His latest work “Fat Time and Other Stories” is a collection of short works described by The New York Times as a “fierce itching dazzle.” Alipour, a celebrated visual artist interested in paper, politics, and performance, explores systems of math and history in her work. Informed by her time studying at the University of Tehran, intricately folded pages take on three-dimensional presence when imbued with her intuitive and highly technical art. Hear from both of these artists about why they make the work they make, and what they hope an audience will see and hear when they encounter it.
Hermitage Fellow Jeffery Renard Allen is the award-winning author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the celebrated novel Song of the Shank, which was a front-page review in both The New York Times “Book Review” and The San Francisco Chronicle. Allen’s other accolades include The Chicago Tribune‘s Heartland Prize for Fiction, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-First Century Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a grant from Creative Capital, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, residencies at the Bellagio Center, Ucross, The Hermitage, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Jentel Arts, and fellowships at The Center for Scholars and Writers, the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Allen is the founder and editor of Taint Taint Taint magazine and is the Africa Editor for The Evergreen Review. His latest books are the short story collection Fat Time and the memoir An Unspeakable Hope, the latter co-authored with Leon Ford. Making his home in both New York and Johannesburg, Allen is at work on several projects, including a two-volume memoir entitled Mother-Wit and a short story collection called Try Me. Find out more about him at www.WriterJefferyRenardAllen.com.
Hermitage Fellow Yasi Alipour is an Iranian artist, writer, and folder who currently lives in Brooklyn and wonders about paper, politics, and performance. She is a teacher at Columbia University and SVA and is currently a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio program. She uses text and intricately folded pieces of paper to explore systems of math and history. In her series “As Dreams Become History,” Alipour asked Iranian friends born after the revolution to share secondhand memories of that decade shared by family and older friends. She paired these texts with sheets of paper printed with black ink and then folded them into geometric tessellations referencing Middle Eastern abstraction. Her research-based practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, writing, lectures, and experimentation, probing personal history to parse issues around political instability and interrupted histories. Columbia University, MFA 2018. For further information, please visit YasamanAlipour.com.