Join us as poet and visual artist Pamela Sneed and photographer and ICP faculty member Keisha Scarville discuss Scarville’s debut monograph “lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound” (MACK, $50). The conversation will be accessible in-person and online will be followed by a signing in the ICP Café.
This event is free to attend with the price of Late Night ICP admission.
About the Book
Keisha Scarville has spent much of her life tracing routes of movement between the Caribbean and America in order to investigate her own lineage. Attempting to understand how notions of belonging and identity are formed and structured, her image-making practice visualises the latent narratives inscribed within the thresholds of memory across generations.
This first publication by Scarville unfolds as a sprawling, hypnotic visual essay, evocatively interweaving the artist’s striking black-and-white photography with archival imagery, passages from books, collages, personal texts, and film stills. Moving between practice and archive, Scarville uses the form of the artist’s book to reflect on what it means to create new genealogies by disrupting conventional, linear histories. The result is a journey through a multiplicity of personal and historical narratives of the Black diaspora. With this book, Scarville reflects on a process of becoming shaped by the diasporic imagination of Black people throughout the world.
Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with transformation, place, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the Studio Museum of Harlem, Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London, ICA Philadelphia,Contact Gallery in Toronto, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts, Lightwork Syracuse, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Higher Pictures Generation Gallery, and Baxter Street CCNY. She has participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Stoneleaf, Baxter Street CCNY, BRIC Workspace, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in publications including Vice, Transition, Nueva Luz, Small Axe, Oxford American, Hyperallgeric, and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at the International Center of Photography and Parsons School of Design in New York.
Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet, performer and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and Funeral Diva published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award. Funeral Diva was recommended by The New York Times alongside Baraka Obama’s memoir. Additionally in 2021, Sneed was a finalist for New York Theater Workshops Golden Harris Award and received a monetary award. In 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, NYU’s Center For Humanities. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets and more. Her visual work was featured in the group show Omniscient at Leslie Lohman Museum. She won the 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award for her leadership and literary talent. She will participate as a reader in 2022 Whitney Biennial and is a narrator for Coco Fusco’s film, also in the Whitney Biennial . She is an online professor in the SAIC low-res program. She has been a guest artist for 6 consecutive years. She also teaches poetry and art across disciplines in Columbia Universities MFA in Visual Arts program.
