Reception and Talk: Staging Collaboration

Patron, Circle, Fellow, and Sponsor members

In this talk, Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow Ayanna Dozier will explore how live collaboration can synthesize unexpected new forms while foregrounding the tension of disparate elements, viewpoints, and social histories. The work of jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran will anchor the discussion. His installations and performances extend one of the essential tenets of jazz: the “set,” in which musicians come together, improvising and riffing off of one another to create the experience. Moran’s current exhibition at the Whitney prominently features collaborations with other artists, from Joan Jonas to Julie Mehretu. This lecture will explore these projects against the backdrop of historic Black jazz culture and also introduce comparisons from the career of Jasper Johns, specifically Johns’s forays into theater and music with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. These contexts help illuminate the ways in which collaboration is tied to the potency both of community and of the unpredictable moment of live encounter.

Ayanna Dozier is a PhD candidate in Art History & Communication Studies with a graduate option in Women & Gender Studies at McGill University. 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.

Patron, Circle, Fellow, and Sponsor members are invited to this event. The invitation is for two individuals per membership household.