Artist Discussion and Screening: Autumn Knight
Thurs, Sept 19, 2019
8–9 pm
Documentation of Sanity TV (2016–) by Autumn Knight, performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, June 20, 2019. Photograph by Daniel Carroll and Cori Spencer
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Floor 3, Theater
Open to all members
2019 Biennial artist Autumn Knight will discuss her work with scholar and artist Ayanna Dozier. The conversation will situate Knight’s practice within a long tradition of Black women’s storytelling in literature and performance, reaching back to the nineteenth century. Blurring folklore, ritual, theater, and dance, these historic expressions refused clear resolution and simple interpretations.
Over the course of the Biennial, Knight staged multiple iterations of Sanity TV, a fictional television talk show in which she, performing as host, instigates humorous and uncomfortable interactions with the audience. Her video Roaches Aren’t the Easiest Creatures to Milk, also included in this year's Biennial, is a deadpan fake infomercial that riffs on an NPR report that cockroach secretions might be a source of nutrition in the future. Together Knight and Dozier will explore how we might understand Knight’s contemporary work through its historical lineage.
Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, and text. She has presented work at The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, among other venues. Her performance work is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem where she was also a 2016–2017 artist in residence. Knight attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University.
Ayanna Dozier is an artist working with photography, film, and performance as well as a PhD candidate in Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University. She is also a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney. Her writing on Black feminist philosophy, experimental cinema, comic books, and performance art can be found in Cléo Journal, Feminist Media Studies, and Liquid Blackness Journal.
This event is taking place in the Museum's theater on Floor 3 as part of Member Night. The theater will open at 7:45 pm. Seating is first come, first served.
