Study Sessions: Saretta Morgan

Floor Three, Laurie M. Tisch Education Center, Hearst Artspace

Study Sessions is a new ongoing event series inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of study as “what you do with other people.” For each Study Session, an artist, writer, or cultural worker selects an artwork on view in the Whitney’s galleries as a departure point for thinking through an urgent question in our contemporary political landscape. Participants are invited to join in open-ended discussions, and engage with creative practice. Study Sessions may take the form of workshops, listening parties, performances, readings, or film screenings. This session is led by Saretta Morgan with guests t'ai freedom ford, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Erica Hunt.

Saretta Morgan works in text and found objects. She has received support from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization among others. She is a member of the feminist collective press, Belladonna* and a 2016-2017 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident.

t’ai freedom ford is a Cave Canem Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee. She received her MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She is the winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO). Her first poetry collection, how to get over is forthcoming from Red Hen Press, May 2017. t'ai lives in Brooklyn, New York where she teaches brown and Black children how to code switch and survive.

As a poet, essayist, scholar, and organizer, Erica Hunt draws on critical race theory, history, jazz, and experiences of the everyday in her work. She is the author of the text Arcade (1996), a collaboration with artist Alison Saar. Her other collections of poetry include Local History (1993; expanded and republished 2003), Piece Logic (2002), and the chapbook Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes (2006). She is the Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing at Long Island University. 

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and a National Book Critics Circle Finalist. She is currently working on a trilogy on African-Americans and utopia: Harlem, Haiti, and the Black Belt of the American South. Rhodes-Pitts runs a pop-up bookstore, BLACKNUSS: books + other relics, and organizes public projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau.

This event is free with Museum admission. Pre-register for express admission.

Please let us know if you have any requests for accommodations, such as an accessible seating location or ASL interpretation. If you have questions about accessibility, please email accessfeedback@whitney.org or call (646) 666-5574 (relay calls welcome). Learn more about access services.

SCHEDULE

March 10 Geo Wyeth
April 7 Saretta Morgan
May 19 Chinatown Art Brigade
June 9 Codify Art
July 21 Baseera Khan