Indoor masking is encouraged during our programs at this time. We ask that visitors stay home if feeling sick, or have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 10 days. Testing is before joining us at CARA if feeling symptomatic. Masks will be available for free for anyone who needs one.

The closest wheelchair accessible subway is 14th St/8th Avenue station. The entry to CARA is ADA-compliant and our bookstore and galleries are barrier free throughout with all gender, wheelchair accessible bathrooms. CARA shall accommodate guest wheelchair needs if requested in advance via bookstore@cara-nyc.org. Service animals are welcome.

Join us for a cybernetic exchange between Salome Asega and Victor Peterson, whose overlapping practices in poetic computation and critique of technology will be presented in dialogue with Neo Muyanga's 

 Free and open to the public. Reservations encouraged. Kindly RSVP 

is an artist and Director of NEW INC at the New Museum. Her work invites the playful and absurd to critique the speed in which technology develops and poses new consentful tech futures leveraging the power of collective imagination. Salome is a 2022 United States Fellow and an inaugural cohort member of the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab developed by the Rebuild Foundation and Prada. She is also a co-founder of POWRPLNT, a Brooklyn digital arts lab for teens. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and Recess and has exhibited at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, Carnegie Library, August Wilson Center, Knockdown Center, and more.

is a Cheryl A. Wall and Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice fellow at Rutgers University. His research centers Articulation theory--how relations of subordination and dominance emerge--as well as global conceptions of blackness and the sound of social movements. His most recent work develops a model of improvisation as poetic computation, attending to the strategies, technologies, signifying practices, and resources to rearticulate socio-cultural and political arrangments. His monograph, 

, was just released in Routledge's African and African Diaspora Series. For more information, visit: 

Salome Asega and Victor Peterson in conversation

 Walk-ins are welcome on a first-come basis. Reservations are encouraged. 

Doors will open at 6:30pm. The program will begin promptly at 7:00pm and is free. 

. Order inquiries: bookstore@cara-nyc.org.

Indoor masking is encouraged during our programs at this time. We ask that visitors stay home if feeling sick, or have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 10 days. Testing is strongly recommended before joining us at CARA if feeling symptomatic. Masks will be available for free for anyone who needs one.

with Nicole Fleetwood, Lauren Mackler, and Nicole Miller in conversation

L-R: Nicole Miller, Nicole Fleetwood, Lauren Mackler


Published by CARA and Public Fiction, this first monograph on artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller focuses on a single sculpture by the artist: 

This book brings together a cohort of writers and other artists through newly commissioned texts and works for the page, as well as republished texts and images that exist as their own whole. Some texts hinge on the sculpture, others are tangents. The book’s texts and images build on each other, functioning as a prism for the publication’s subject.

is edited with introduction by Lauren Mackler and Nicole Miller, and designed by Lauren Mackler. It includes text and image contributions by Jared Sexton, Hannah Black, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Greg Tate, Ocean Vuong, Negar Azimi, Anna Deveare Smith, Nikita Gale, Kazu Hiro, Ligia Lewis, and Jasper Marsalis, and interviews with Bradford Young, Nicole Miller, Dr. Yvonne Cagle, and Alonzo King.

 (2018) is a bronze cast of Michael Jackson’s kneeling figure, poured from a mold made directly from his body around 1986. This talismanic object comprises myriad aspects of celebrity and image: the objecthood of the performer, the potency and perversity of objects, death, and grief. This sculpture is an outlier in Miller's work, though it excavates some concerns she has similarly articulated in moving image: her recurring interest in the self-performance of her film subjects; the dehumanizing effects of the mass gaze; the celebrity as a host object for contemporary projections; the tactility of film, the sculptural qualities of editing; and the potential for self-storytelling to reconstitute an individual’s wholeness.

Doors will open at 6:30pm. The program will begin promptly at 7:00pm and is free. Walk-ins are welcome on a first-come basis. Reservations are encouraged. Kindly RSVP 

Photos: Arlene Mejorado (Nicole Miller), Naima Green (Nicole Fleetwood), Reynaldo Rivera (Lauren Mackler). Book Photography: Justin Lubliner.

lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022); SFMoMA, San Francisco (2019); The High Line, New York (2014); K-W, Berlin (2014); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneve (2014); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2009). Miller has received numerous prestigious awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award (2018), Rome Prize (2016), William H. Johnson Prize (2015), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2013), Artadia Award (2013), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award (2011), among others. She is an associate professor in the department of visual arts at University of California, San Diego.

 is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is the author 

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

 (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also the curator of the traveling exhibition, 

Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration

, which debuted at MoMA PS1 (September 17, 2020-April 5, 2021). The exhibition was listed as “one of the most important art moments in 2020” by 

 and among the best shows of the year by 

On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination

Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness

 (University of Chicago Press, 2011), which was the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. Fleetwood is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, which focuses on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration. She is a series associate editor of the ten-volume series, 

Gender: Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.

 With Sarah Tobias, she co-edited “The New Status Quo: Essays on Poverty in the United States and Beyond,” a special issue of 

Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora

, art catalogues, and edited anthologies. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and public programs on art and mass incarceration at MoMA PS1, Zimmerli Museum of Art, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture, Cleveland Public Library, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and Worth Rises. She is the inaugural Genevieve Young Writing Fellow of the Gordon Parks Foundation. Her work has been supported by Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Council of Learned Societies, the Art for Justice Fund, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Whiting Foundation, NJ Council for the Humanities, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, Ford Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Denniston Hill Residency. She is represented by Janklow & Nesbit and is finishing a nonfiction book titled 

 that will be published by Little, Brown.

 is an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles. In 2010, she founded

, an ongoing forum for staging exhibitions, performances, and programs by contemporary artists and writers, as well as a journal with the same mission in print. Recently, she co-curated the 2020/21 Los Angeles biennial, 

, at the Hammer Museum and The Huntington; co-edited 

published by Semiotext(e) and distributed by MIT Press; and co-published and edited 

published by CARA and Public Fiction. Mackler has organized exhibitions and catalogues for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Artissima LIDO, Turin; the Berkeley Art Museum; Frieze Projects New York; the Hammer Museum; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture’s Schindler House; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. From 2017–2020, she was the managing editor of Sublevel — the literary magazine housed in the CalArts School of Critical Studies. She has been on faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the UCLA Graduate Department of Art, and Otis College of Art and Design. Her art writing, essays, and criticism have appeared in exhibition catalogues and publications including Artforum, Art Agenda, BOMB, Cultured, Flash Art, Los Angeles Review of Books, Numéro, Prada Art Foundation, Walker Art Center’s Reader, and more. She is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and was awarded the Rome Prize in 2015.

Book Launch: Michael in Black by Nicole Miller

by Steffani Jemison
with readings by Jemison, Thomas Jean Lax, and Simone White

Please join Primary Information and CARA for a reading and discussion to celebrate the release of Steffani Jemison’s book, 

In October 2022, Primary Information released Steffani Jemison’s novella, 

.  Moving deftly across narrative genres and styles as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality, and the limits of performance, Jemison’s book follows a young Black woman who lives at the hazy border between Brooklyn and Queens in the not-so-distant present. As she rides the subway, walks around her neighborhood, visits the doctor, watches movies, attends dance class, and tries to heal her body, she recalls formative experiences from her childhood and absorbs the world around her; in the process, we are brought into her conflicted relationship with language. Acutely conscious of the soft, responsive nature of her physical self, and pushed and pulled by forces she cannot control, the narrator is vulnerable, terrifyingly open. Jemison’s writing asks, 

Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between yourself and others?

Doors will open at 6:30pm and attendance is on a first-come basis. The conversation will begin promptly at 7:00pm and is free. CARA is located at 225 West 13th Street. Books will be on hand for purchase.



 was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at JOAN, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Nottingham Contemporary; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Bordeaux; Museum of Modern Art, New York; RISD Museum, Providence; and LAXART, Los Angeles, among others. Collaborative and group presentations have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum; MoMA PS1’s 2021 Greater New York; the 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Brooklyn Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the New Museum, and elsewhere. Jemison is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University – Mason Gross School of the Arts.

 and scholar specializing in black art and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, they co-organized the exhibition 

 (2022) with Lilia Rocio Taboada in collaboration with JAM’s founder Linda Goode Bryant. In 2019, they worked with colleagues across MoMA on a major rehang of its collection and co-organized the exhibition 

Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done

 (2018) with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph. Their other collaboratively organized exhibitions include the Projects Series for emerging artists; 

, inspired by the cultural theorist Stuart Hall; the contemporary art quintennial, 

; and commissions with artists including Neïl Beloufa, Maria Hassabi, and Steffani Jemison. Previously, they worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years, where they organized 

When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South

 and participated in the landmark “f show” contemporary art series.

 (Factory School, 2010); the poetry chapbook, 

 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013); and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook, 

 (with Kim Thomas) (Q Ave, 2008). Her poetry and prose have been featured in 

Artforum, e-flux, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Chicago Review, The New York Times Book Review,

 Her honors include a 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry, Cave Canem Foundation fellowships, and recognition as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. She is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She lives in Brooklyn.

 is a non-profit organization founded in 2006 to publish artists’ books and writings. The organization’s programming advances the often-intertwined relationship between artists’ books and arts’ activism, creating a platform for historically marginalized artistic communities and practices. Primary Information facilitates intergenerational dialogue through the simultaneous publication of new and archival books, providing a new audience for out-of-print works and historical context for contemporary artists.

A Rock, A River, A Street by Steffani Jemison

Inspired by Neo Muyanga’s “A Maze in Grace” installation in the exhibition 

, this dialogue will highlight stories and storytellers of Black Liverpool and Black New York, forging connections between people and places central to the history of enslavement and resistance to it. Jacqueline Nassy Brown is an anthropologist at CUNY, and Kamau Ware is an artist, historian, and creator of the Black Gotham Experience.

This exchange is part of a series of programs at CARA inviting artists, scholars, and thinkers to present their work, in dialogue with 

Free and open to the public. Reservations encouraged. Kindly RSVP 

is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work treats place and other geographical phenomena as lenses through which to understand contemporary formations of race and nation. She also contributes to diaspora theory, feminist geography, and the anthropology of Black Europe. She is the author of 

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool 

(Princeton, 2005), which deploys ethnographic research to show the inextricable relationship between racial politics in Liverpool on the one hand, and the politics of place in Britain writ large on the other hand. It also argues for treating the local and the global not merely as spatial categories but as profoundly racialized ones, while also offering a feminist critique of the Black Atlantic paradigm. Some of Dr. Brown’s courses include The Anthropology of Black America, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. (a.k.a. Racialization and Resistance in the U.S.), and The Anthropology of Race. Her current book project examines the politics of New York City exceptionalism, or the view that the city is totally unique within the U.S., addressing questions like: How is the category of the New Yorker culturally constructed? What role does race play in these dynamics and how do these politics play out in everyday life?

is an artist and historian best known for his flagship storytelling project, 

(BGX), a visual storytelling project founded in 2010 that celebrates the impact of the African Diaspora on New York City through a series of walking tours and graphic novels. BGX has been in residence in the Seaport District of Lower Manhattan since 2017, serving as a gallery, event space, and visitor’s center for walks, and has been recognized by The Atlantic, The New York Times, Atlas Obscura, and Columbia University’s History in Action Project Award, among others. In 2021, Kamau led a successful movement to have July 13th officially recognized by the Borough of Manhattan and the 27th District of New York State as “Black Vision Day”. He has also worked with Community Board 2 of Manhattan to pass resolutions to mark land owned by Black people in the mid 17th century known as Land of the Blacks. Kamau has been commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Apollo Theater, the Mile Long Opera, the New York City Public Design Commission, and The Shed, and has spoken at the New York Historical Society, the Public Theater, SXSW, Yale University, and the Municipal Archive in Amsterdam. He has developed classes, tours, and workshops for NYU, Columbia University, the New School, and K-12 schools across New York City.

Sound Waves: A Diasporic Dialogue, with Jacqueline Nassy Brown and Kamau Ware

Left: Ladi'sasha Jones. Photo: Rachell Morillo. Right: Akeema-Zane.

A conversation on Black sonic portals, history, and remembrances between 

 This special exchange is part of a series of programs at CARA inviting artists, scholars, and thinkers to present their work in dialogue with 

 is a writer, designer and curator from Harlem, NY. Her research-based practice explores Black cultural and spatial histories through text, design and public engagement. She has written for Aperture, Avery Review, Arts.Black, Gagosian Quarterly, Houston Center for Photography, Art X Lagos, Temporary Art Review, Art-Agenda, The Art Momentum, and Recess among others. Her project, Black Interior Space / Spatial Thought was commissioned by THE SHED (NYC) as a part of Open Call 2021 and was the recipient of a 2021 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She is currently a PhD student in Architecture at Princeton University.

 is an artist and researcher working in the mediums of literature, sound, film and performance. The artist is currently an artist fellow at UnionDocs CoLab and a board director of the School of Making Thinking. a²z is the arm  which houses the artists' music/sound practice which includes deejaying, composition and scoring/sound design. Akeema-Zane has been published in various literary and musical works in the digital and physical realms including "There's a Monopoly On Change" (2015),  and albums of artists Liv.e, PinkSiifu, L'Rain and lojii.

An Exchange on Black Sonics

for a special CARA weekend! Our holiday market will host BEM Books & more, Big Apple Gifts & Souvenirs, Canal Street Research Association, Palto Flats, SHRITS, Soft Network, and W.O.W. Project, and will be up 

A preview of some of the Holiday Market featured projects:

 is a curated bookstore of titles related to food and the African diaspora. BEM believes food opens a door to life, to sustenance, to love, to politics, and community. 

 is an artist-run souvenir shop that honors New York and New Yorkers. Operated and created by Azikiwe Mohammed. 

For CARA’s holiday market, Canal Street Research Association continues their ongoing retail experiment, Çanal Street Researçh Assoçiation, in reference to the Canal Street legacy of artists using the shop as a medium. This particular market is an homage to the junk shops that once lined the block, whose surplus materials drew so many artists and curiosity seekers to create new experiments at the threshold of legitimate, illegitimate and semi-legitimate enterprise. As usual, on offer will be a selection of objects that straddle the line between real and fake, gleaned from and inspired by Canal Street, as well as select publications and artifacts from the annals of Canal Street Research Association’s archive. w

 is a record label, event producer/presenter and publisher based out of NYC. The label’s focus is on bringing attention to underrecognized artists from throughout the world, including contemporary and archival works. The music and artists they represent are multi-genre, leaning towards the experimental, electronic and accessible. 

is a collaboration between artist Andrew Kuo and dealer Pascal Spengemann. We make limited edition T-shirts and hats mostly concerning artist and musicians that we admire. 

supports artists and artist estates through inter-generational exhibitions, editions and collaborative programming. Soft Network was established in 2021 by Chelsea Spengemann and Sara VanDerBeek, of the Stan VanDerBeek Archive, and expanded in 2022 with the participation of Marie and Max Warsh, of the Estate of Rosemary Mayer. For this Holiday Market, Soft Network presents editions, ephemera and publications produced by and with artists and artist estates featured in their projects since 2021 including: Ray Johnson Estate, Kite, Joyce Kozloff, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Estate of Rosemary Mayer, Miriam Parker, Kamau Amu Patton, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Sara VanDerBeek, Stan VanDerBeek Archive and Alisha B Wormsley. 

sustain ownership over Manhattan Chinatown’s future by growing, protecting, and preserving Chinatown’s creative culture through arts, culture, and activism. As a community-based initiative, W.O.W. envisions the future of Chinatown as one that centers women, non-binary, queer, and trans people as leaders in building intergenerational bridges of understanding across Asian American communities and beyond. Our projects include artist residencies, youth programs, and public artworks and events. 

CARA's Holiday Market!

The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila. The recipient of a 2021 Rauschenberg Foundation Artist Grant, he was a featured artist in Greater NY 2015 and Queens International 2018: Volumes. He has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason) and collaborated again recently with filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs on

, a short film that premiered at BAM Cinemafest. He is the author of four previous full-length books and lives with his family in Jackson Heights, NYC.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of poet 

True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside

Paolo’s poesis arrives from variegated and unexpected sources, such as diaries, dreams, lists, conversation, photographs, articles, blogs, DMs, music lyrics, instructions, comics, maps, film dialogue, interviews, slang, paranormal accounts, film theory, birthday cards, letters, “and other people’s poetry–to name a few.” 

 is an incendiary new collection where outlaw archiving meets postmodern bricolage, disjointedly mapping disorientating experience, and yielding flashes of unexpected clarity through a strong sense of place.

“This book is the most on a name with the past for the future. We find ourselves in the loss of translation, as a posthuman ancestor pattern woven into an at least thirty thousand year aspect from the ground— face— interface—inner face—inter face — inner phase— inter phase—inter faze— inner faze—Paolo Javier is knocking on everyone's door.” —Roberto Harrison

This event at CARA will also serve as the in-person Mannahatta launch for 

(Nightboat Books, 2021), Paolo's groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed exploration of comics (&) poetry. 

Boy has many identities: it is a comics poem and a manifesto on comics poetry; an experimental comic book sequel to a poem twenty years in the making; and an homage to the Mimeo Revolution, weird fiction, Kamishibai, the political cartoon, Pilipinx komiks history, and the poet bp/Nichol.

“Though ostensibly rooted in Javier’s transcultural negotiations of family, romance and artmaking, 

’s themes are neither stated nor assumed, but structurally emergent in its chameleonic oscillation of text fragments, cartoons and mixed-media artwork.”—John Nyman, 

Paolo will present on both books, along with live readings by fellow poets 

 will be available for purchase in the CARA Bookstore.

Paolo Javier: True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside 

 (b. 1945) is an Atlanta-based writer and educator whose work spans fiction, poetry, biography, theater, and film. His oeuvre is distinguished by its attention to the musicality of speech and its balance of humorous, ironic, and political engagement with American history. In 1956, while a student at State University of New York at Oswego, Brown joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, moving south to register voters with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party near the Tennessee border, where he first began to write poetry. After an arrest at a demonstration in Jackson, Mississippi, he graduated college and moved to Rochester, New York, in 1968, where he became an active member of the Black Panther Party before returning to his native New York City to join writing workshops led by Sonia Sanchez and John Olliver Killens. In 1972 he was arrested as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War; in a statement to the draft board he quoted the Panther’s Ten Point Program, adding, with his signature use of idiomatic expression, “If you can’t relate to that, you can walk chicken with your ass picked clean.” He served an eighteen month sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, which informed the writing of his recently reissued first novel, 

 (Random House)—edited by Toni Morrison and released to wide acclaim by writers including James Baldwin, Donald Barthelme, and Ishmael Reed in 1978. His short fiction and essays have been published widely, from movement publications such as 

. For twenty-six years Brown taught literature and creative writing at Rutgers University in New Jersey. During this time he was involved with the National Association of Third World Writers; co-edited celebrated collections of multicultural American literature, authored the historical novel 

 (Cane Hill, 1994) and award-winning plays including 

 (1992); and wrote, with Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka, the screenplay for 

W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices

 (1996). After retiring, he relocated to New England, where he taught at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts and Bennington College in Vermont, and authored his third novel, 

 (Concord Free Press, 2009), and the short story collection 

 will be present to read from his latest novel, followed by a conversation with 

Free and open to the public. Reservation encouraged. RSVP 

Published by Blank Forms, the latest work from the veteran novelist called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin, “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme, and a “writer’s writer” by Ishmael Reed, 

 narrates one evening in August 1959, when, only eight days after the release of his landmark album 

, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath of Davis’s brief stint in custody, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and the woman he will soon marry, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently pressured into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis’s temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse—reckons with her strict upbringing, and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his Ferrari. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker, and the stilted world of the Black middle class he’s left behind.

 continues the contemporary reenagement with Brown’s work which began with last year’s new McSweeny’s reprint of 

, the author’s first novel. Published in 1978 and edited by Toni Morrison, 

 concerns Melvin Ellington, a man jailed for protesting the Vietnam War; Brown began work on the novel while himself incarcerated on the same charges. In 1992, the author wrote 

, a play about the death of street artist Michael Stewart, a victim of police brutality who died in custody. 

 again interrogates detention’s personal, political, and cultural consequences. 

A historical novel much like his 1994 volume 

 takes up the voices of a multitude of twentieth-century entertainers at a pivotal moment in American culture and race relations. Staging the conversations of not only Davis, Taylor, Horne, Parker, and Coltrane but also Eartha Kitt, Billie Holiday, and Bill Evans, Brown engages facts to explore relationships between artists of different generations, races, and genders, all of whom must negotiate their positions in what Davis irreverently calls “the business’ known as show.” 

“Miles Davis was a cruel, narcissistic bully who hated his skin color and cultivated an image as that of a pug. He practiced by beating up his wife, Frances Taylor, and Paul Chambers, but when it came to his business he was a pussycat. He played at Birdland, owned by the mobsters and where musicians were regularly called niggers and short-changed. He knew better than to raise his fists at these guys. He squandered money on the mob’s products. The cop who beat him up was probably owned by the mob too. New York cops at the time, authoritarian, catholic, hated race mixing unless it was them doing it.

Wesley Brown is a writer’s writer. His dialog in 

 is remarkable. He knows the varieties of the American language in and out. We get fascinating portraits of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Clark Terry, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Eartha Kitt, and others. An insider named Freeloader provides comic relief. Before the salespersons dictated trends in Black literature, a major publisher would have published this book. Thanks to Blank Forms and other midsize presses, the Black literary tradition, whose fictional standards were set by Brooks, Wright, Himes, Polite, Bambara, and others, is alive.”—Ishmael Reed, author of 

“Wesley Brown attempts a difficult thing with this book: He attempts to walk inside the consciousness of Miles Davis at a very complex point in his very complex life. Beaten by police for smoking a cigarette outside Birdland, married to a brilliant and accomplished dancer, leading a sextet that has genius at every station, and fending off demons that are co-authors of his being, Brown’s Miles is a man who is troubled and proud. This novella is lyrical, insightful, and beautiful."—A. B. Spellman, author of 

n is a gorgeous jazz composition. In love and in torment, Miles Davis and Frances Taylor are co-creators and lead soloists. Brown surrounds them with an ensemble of brilliant friends, rivals, and mentors: Monk, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Katherine Dunham, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt. All have their say—shrewd, ebullient, dissonant. When I closed the book, I wanted to begin it all overagain: see, hear, and re-experience every note of Wesley Brown’s wonderful prose music.”—Margo Jefferson, author of 

"As he writes about Miles and Lady Day in 

, Wesley Brown does more 'with less.' In this concise novella he renders the music and the musicians with intelligence, depth, clarity, and beautiful wisdom. An extra bonus: though it is a story of Miles, Frances, fully imagined, finally gets her due. 

 is a true gift from a great writer." —Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of 

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

Wesley Brown: Blue in Green

is a visual artist, writer and performer. She has presented her work at the Whitney Museum (NY), ACRE (Chicago), Sadie Halie Projects (Minneapolis), Visitor Welcome Center (LA), Ortega y Gasset (Brooklyn) and Rubber Factory (NY), among other venues. Residencies and fellowships include the Laundromat Project’s Create Change Fellowship (NY), Civitella Ranieri (Italy), New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (Brooklyn), Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice (NY), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Artist in Residence Program (NY), and the Studio Immersion Project Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Print Making Workshop (NY). Her newest book, 

slow and soft and righteous, improvising at the end of the world (and how we make a new one)

 was released in 2021 and published by Co—Conspirator Press, a publishing platform that operates out of the Feminist Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles. An honors graduate of Wesleyan University (BA, African American Studies) and alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Sonia lives and works in Harlem.

Join us for the official New York launch of 

The artist will read from the publication spanning five years of her writing. These collected texts take the shape of manifestos, scores, poetic essays and prose poems. Many were originally printed as giveaway posters at exhibitions of Davis’ visual artwork and/or incorporated into her live performances. Marks from her graphic notation appear throughout the book. Improvisation is both an artistic practice and a critical methodology for Davis. She states in the introduction: “I believe improvisation can be harnessed for the radical collective action needed to make the world we want to see.”

. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

Sonia Louise Davis’ reading and book launch is part of a series of programs at CARA inviting artists, scholars, and thinkers to present their work in dialogue with Neo Muyanga's exhibition 

is performed as a live choral act of revolt songs in Zulu — recomposed by Muyanga and sung by 8 singers of The Unsung.

These rehearsals vary and will transform over the course of the exhibition, through a process of continued correspondence between The Unsung collective and Muyanga.


3:30pm — Sonia Louise Davis
4:30pm — 

Reservations are encouraged. Walk-ins welcome. 

Sonia Louise Davis 


Studio Manuel Raeder has been engaged in designing, publishing and editing over 200 artist’s books in close collaboration with artists and has been responsible for the communication strategies and graphic identities of several cultural institutions and galleries including Kölnischer Kunstverein (2007 – 2011), Kunstverein München (2010 – 2015), Para Site Hong Kong (2012 – 2014), Artists Space New York (2009 – 2018), Galerie Neu Berlin (since 2005), Mendes Wood DM São Paulo/Brussels/New York (since 2014), kurimanzutto Mexico City (since 2016), as well as the fashion label BLESS (since 2004).


BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE is a small independent publishing house, a community of artists, graphic designers, authors, curators, cultural workers, craftsmen and craftswomen.
We specialize in artist books that are conceptualized as a part of an artwork or as the artwork itself. We attempt to play with the format of the book and reflect its medium. All of our books are produced in close collaborations with the artists themselves. Biannually, an editorial board meeting consisting of internal members of the publishing house and external advisers review all submitted books and project applications. The realisation of future endeavours is decided collectively.

Working in the long-standing tradition of alternative publishing practises, BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE focuses on collaborations with younger, not yet established artists or artists from outside of North America and Western Europe, i. e. from outside of an eurocentric discourse.

Join us for a presentation by Manuel Raeder, one of the designers of the unique furniture in CARA’s bookstore and public space. Studio Manuel Raeder is an interdisciplinary design studio based in Berlin and Mexico City since 2003. Its activities include a wide range of formats, exploring the boundaries between exhibitions, ephemera, books, type design, editing, publishing, furniture design, and textile design.

The project for CARA was carried out in full by

and Rodolfo Samperio; long-time collaborators working in exhibition design, mixed use spaces, signage and related objects under a perspective of playfulness and dialogue. Their design for CARA followed a simple principle: room for everybody. Raeder will discuss both the vision for CARA’s program space–lightness, variable scale, nesting furniture, contrasting textures–in addition to delving further in his own studio praxis.

Manuel Raeder’s practice includes architecture, publication, furniture as well as the fashion label BLESS (since 2004), all intersecting where design meets contemporary art. For over two decades, Raeder has been engaged in designing, publishing and editing over 200 artist’s books. In 2011, Raeder founded the publishing house

 to distribute and publish artists who have a strong interest in exploring the format of the artist’s book. In doing so, the studio has developed longstanding collaborations with artists such as Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Mariana Castillo Deball, Haegue Yang, Nora Schultz, Heinz Peter Knes, Leonor Antunes, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Eran Schaerf, and Sergej Jensen, amongst others.

Reservations encouraged. Walk-ins welcome. 

Studio Manuel Raeder

 singers are: Kalia Baptiste, Charles Carter, Patrice P. Eaton, Jay St. Flono, Karen Gonzalez, Olanna Goudeau, Elle Green, Angelo Johnson, Kevin Johnson, Tristan Layne, Asha Lindsey, Taiwan Norris, Ian Rawle George, Rodari Simpson, Michelle Trinidad, Clayton G. Williams. Directed by Tyrone Clinton Jr.


Gabrielle Davenport is an Oakland-raised, Brooklyn-based curator & creative producer whose work centers on forging community through music and food.

, a new home for food literature of the African diaspora, which she and her sister Danielle launched in January 2021.

Gabrielle has programmed music, dance, and performance for tiny clubs and large-scale venues alike since 2015. She is on the curatorial team at the 

 where she is proud to help introduce early-career and local artists to 200,000+ fans every summer alongside living legends across genres. Her earliest producing jobs in global music & jazz festivals ignited her drive to work in live arts that inspire, delight, and provoke.

(following the second rehearsal-performance at 2:30pm)

 will talk about songs, cyborgs, and the process of making 

 in collaboration with Neo Muyanga. The Unsung, directed by Tyrone Clinton, is a community-based music collective devoted to celebrating stories of the Black experience. In addition to performance, The Unsung is a non-profit dedicated to serving the local NYC community through expanding the confines of the Western musical canon and fostering educational relationships with those who are “willing to listen.”

, a live choral act of Muyanga's recomposed revolt songs in Zulu performed by 8 singers, The Unsung is in constant correspondence with Muyanga including bi-weekly live rehearsals. Davenport and The Unsung will explore how this collaboration has transformed the exhibition thus far and The Unsung's larger aspirations as a collective to expand their role in contemporary choral music.

The Unsung Collective in conversation with Gabrielle Davenport 

Produced live at CARA’s space, it includes a sound installation, video animations in collaboration with 

, and three live choral rehearsal-performances every other Saturday (with several holiday exceptions) through March 2023. The bi-weekly performances will vary and transform over the course of the exhibition, through a process of continued correspondence between 

Live choral rehearsal-performances dates for 

October 15
October 29
November 12
December 10

January 21 
February 4 
February 18
March 4 

RESERVE HERE

Walk-ins are welcome. Reservations are encouraged. 

is a live choral act performing revolt songs in Zulu — recomposed by Neo Muyanga and sung by 8 members of 

The bi-weekly live rehearsals will vary and transform over the course of the exhibition, through a process of continued correspondence between The Unsung and Muyanga. The next rehearsals will take place on 

 are hybrid, marginal figures drawn from centuries of literature emerging from the African Postcolony—historically recurring exiles, jesters, and outsiders are reanimated here as part-cyborg entities of the twenty-first century. While the characters assimilate many algorithmic technologies of violence defining their territory, they must also attend to the preservation of chance as a force for generating reciprocity, contingency, and solidarity. 

, these shifting figures weave through generations and timescales as a Greek chorus might—collectively narrating both the submission and precarity of their lives and the strength of their resistance amidst such vast, indeterminate, and often unforeseeable forces.

 is a collaborative project between South African artist and composer Neo Muyanga with The Unsung—a community-based music collective devoted to celebrating stories of the Black experience, directed by Tyrone Clinton, Jr.  

The project includes a sound piece and three live choral rehearsals performed every other Saturday beginning October 1.

Ten dates in total from October until March.


Directed by Tyrone Clinton, The Unsung Collective is a community-based music collective devoted to celebrating stories of the Black experience. Through contemporary music, The Unsung navigates countless stories that are the true fabric of historical and current events. The Unsung is comprised of members from the New York City area, and designed to stretch the confines of music of the Western canon. This ensemble and its members are born of the same community that bears the music by which these stories are told. As a result, The Unsung is dedicated to serving the NYC community through song, educating its audiences, and fostering relationships with those that are willing to listen.

Singers: Kalia Baptiste, Charles Carter, Patrice P. Eaton, Jay St. Flono, Karen Gonzalez, Olanna Goudeau, Elle Green, Angelo Johnson, Kevin Johnson, Tristan Layne, Asha Lindsey, Taiwan Norris, Ian Rawle George, Rodari Simpson, Michelle Trinidad, Clayton G. Williams. Sound Designer: Ben Manley

 by Neo Muyanga curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director.

Hymn to the Strange / Ongoing Rehearsal

Book Launch Date: 10. 01. 2022
Time: 12 pm

A focused study on a singular African American photographer, 

through an archival encounter with her documentation of the landmark FESTAC’77 festival.

While serving as the photographer for the US contingent of the North American delegation, Brooklyn-based photographer 

 made more than 1,500 images throughout the course of the festival—one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of FESTAC’77. Drawing from Nance’s extensive archive, most of which has never before been published, 

 chronicles the exuberant intensity and sociopolitical significance of this extraordinary event.

Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos 

How might human beings locate and relate to one another through a recognition of our shared vulnerability and porousness, rather than seeing in the Other the specter of self-ruin? 

How could we encounter the Other not solely as a subject conditioned by such violence, but as a being with whom to build a more just world?

—a community-based music collective devoted to celebrating stories of the Black experience weaving through generations and timescales as a Greek chorus might. Read more 

January 21
February 4
February 18
March 4

KINDLY RSVP HERE

, the first solo exhibition by South African artist and composer 

. The exhibition gathers recent and older works, deepening Muyanga’s exploration of how protest songs, sound, and voice can invoke memory, radiate empowerment, and be deployed as tools to prompt radical action. Muyanga’s work uncovers and animates long-standing archives of music and idiomatic song that ring out against the endless transformations of infrastructural oppression, preserving understandings of sound as both a vital form of knowledge, and as a measure of history.

For this exhibition, the artist draws on philosopher and critical theorist Achille Mbembe’s ‘necropolitics'—the politics of life and death—investigating how the State determines not only the conditions of a populations' existence, but also exercises the sovereign “power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death.” Necropolitics is deployed through “small doses” of death which shape and run through daily life; such as surveillance, harassment, the absence of basic social provisions, and the overarching military, and economic devices driving the persecution and elimination of certain human populations.

 moves through voice, fiction, and allegory to interrogate the violent enforcement of these conditions and the liminal spaces between life and death that they generate. It asks how biometric technologies have expanded conceptions of what constitutes a border, and how certain territories are rendered boundaries and uncrossable through this process. How might human beings locate and relate to one another through a recognition of our shared vulnerability and porousness, rather than seeing in the Other the specter of self-ruin? How could we encounter the Other not solely as a subject conditioned by such violence, but as a being with whom to build a more just world?

are hybrid, marginal figures drawn from centuries of literature emerging from the African Postcolony—historically recurring exiles, jesters, and outsiders are reanimated here as part-cyborg entities of the twenty-first century. While the characters assimilate many algorithmic technologies of violence defining their territory, they must also attend to the preservation of chance as a force for generating reciprocity, contingency, and solidarity.

Program

Current and upcoming