BEM Books
Canal Street Research Association
Soft Network
Big Apple Gifts and Souvenirs
SHRITS

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 

accompanied by a reading and book launch of 

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

 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 

—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.

is curated by Executive Director Manuela Moscoso.

Neo Muyanga (b. Soweto, South Africa) is a composer and artist whose work uncovers the many interwoven sounds comprising the history of protest song within the Pan-African and diasporic contexts. Muyanga’s practice seeks to foster and preserve love and appreciation, and to develop memories and knowledges that have been variously erased, obscured, or violently debarred by dominant global powers throughout history. Blending new opera, jazz improvisation, Zulu, and Sesotho idiomatic songs, Muyanga’s sonic interventions are nourished by their attention to communal storytelling, reciprocity, and interdependence. A co-founder of the duo Blk Sonshine alongside Masauko Chipembere, he also created the Pan African Space Station (2008) with Ntone Edjabe – a platform for experimental Pan African music on the internet. He has released eight albums, including “Second-hand Reading with William Kentridge” (2016), “MAKEbdA” (2019) which was a featured sound installation during the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2019), “A Grace Project” (2021) is commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2021, and released in collaboration with SAVVY records.

Neo Muyanga: A Mass of Cyborgs

.

As a prologue, Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is pleased to present 

, a public program unfolding over three weekends in July and August 2022. Shaped by scholars, artists, musicians, writers, shamans, machines, sonic technologies, and many other life-forms and undefinable disciplines, 

 braids invocation, incantation, questioning, un-earthing, and ceremony to open space for future (un)doings. 

Convened by 

, Executive Director, conjuring weaved voices inspired by each of their own practices and research throughout the program and beyond. Out of this process of forging new collaborations and expanding our networks, we are happy to present various evolving forms of live and situated experimentings.

How do we dream not only about ourselves?

 That is to say, to dream not only about ourselves, but about each other, about beings of the forest, of water, of animals, buildings,  shelters—of concrete or invisible beings, as porous interdependent entities reliant on each other and everything around us. Such collective dreamwork requires a deep and thorough understanding of the shifting mechanisms of oppression and the realities of racial capitalism. It demands the undoing of Western categories and demarcations of thought; linear and quantifiable time-space notions, and inadequate dichotomies of body and spirit, rational and organic, nature and culture, dreaming and waking. Each invited conjurer will speak to and through these conditions for collective and liberatory dream practice—listening with care to what emerges from these future ancestries, and tending their rich and opaque transmissions.



 are free and open to the public. We have limited capacity, so reservations are required.


7:00 pm	Doors Open
7:45 pm	Opening Remarks
8:00 pm	

Composer and musician Sugar Vendil will share an evening of music that encompasses her practice as a chamber musician, soloist, and budding synthesizer queen. Vendil will share new semi-improvised pieces for synth & voice. The opening installation-style performance of “ooh wo aa oo wa o” for vocalizing chamber ensemble will feature her ensemble The Nouveau Classical Project: Laura Cocks, flute; Marina Kifferstein, violin (NCP alum); cellist Thea Mesirow; and guest clarinetist Yuma Uesaka.


Aldrin Valdez will present writing that thinks through romances, histories, and movies.

Les The DJ will play an all-vinyl set of music from the Philippines and its Diaspora, and create musical narratives that evoke nostalgia and curiosity.


1:30 pm Doors Open
1:45 pm Opening Remarks
2 pm 

Lavender Suarez leads a group discussion about dreaming and listening, then invites us to close our eyes and enter a hypnagogic sonic world with a live meditative sound bath.


Prompted by poems from Kemi Alabi's award-winning debut collection Against Heaven, this interactive reading will lead listeners through a sonic spellwork experiment.


A collective and somatic experiment in communal dreaming. Beginning with a conversation between Camille Barton and Annika Hansteen-Izora on dreaming as a source of radical imagination, participants will then collectively engage in a communal dreaming activity to meditate on and hold deep presence with the futures we dream of.

6:00 pm	BREAK
7:00 pm	Doors
7:15 pm	Opening Remarks
7:30 pm	

charles will read from their manuscript-in-progress, 

Queer Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax

. Like meeting on the dance floor, these poems posit that citation is an active form of friendship, a method of reaching across generations to reconstitute queer and trans language into a collective moment.

Poet & drag performer Chan will be reading from Togetherness, their debut collection of poetry which tells "stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant and culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking."

Nicole will read a selection of newer writings // works in progress + poems from their chapbook, 

Drawing from their individual practices Maria Hupfield and Electric Djinn reunite in the shared collaborative space, to create new work through the combination of organic sound, electronic music, movement and materials.


: ᎤᎩᏥᏕᏱ ᎠᏗᏗᏍᎪ ᏧᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᏱᎩ

ᎤᎩᏥᏕᏱ ᎠᏗᏗᏍᎪ ᏧᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᏱᎩ is a sound installation and performance by Robbie Wing and Kite comprised of quadraphonic speakers, three sculptures, and a 20 minute performance. Field recordings taken at dusk and dawn at No Flesh Creek and Kyle Dam in Kyle, South Dakota surround a prairie root system, a sonified pillow, and dreaming medicines. The performance includes body interface, banjo and field recording composition.


AfroOankali serves ritual bass: a hypnotic blend of low end frequencies and polyrhythms which celebrates the Afro-Caribbean influence in electronic music, underground club culture and the healing potential of bass music.

1:00 pm	Doors Open
1:30 pm	Opening Remarks
1:45 pm	

A conversation with members of COUSIN Collective discussion topics ranging from challenges, obstacles, and opportunities for Indiginous art, music, and film, and the need for collaboration and knowledge sharing in navigating spaces not designed for Indigenous Peoples.

When ants lose track of the pheromone scent that keeps them in contact with their main foraging party, they begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle until they die. This is called the “death spiral.” Uýra intercrosses this biological phenomenon with the sociocultural phenomena in Brazil: the resistance of interruption of smell and memory among Indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Diaspora. Uýra brings the feedback from the Forest—another spiral opens, as in a cycle renewal. This turn of the spiral refers to the exchanges and technologies of memories ensured by Indigenous people throughout centuries, countering historical erasure in Brazil.

For the closing performance of the first Conjurings series, interdisciplinary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom will share a long form sound work that explores her personal relationship to CARA’s new building. As the in-house electronics technician for DFA Records—the previous tenant in the building—as well as an artist on the label who recorded several albums in their basement studio, Rayna spent countless hours at 225 W 13th St. Her deeply personal performance will weave together electronic and acoustic sound with spellwork and mediumship.

 are free and open to the public. We have limited capacity, so reservations are required.
Click 

 will produce a commissioned installation in CARA’s main gallery, accompanying the program of performances, talks, and presentations. The second floor will also host an ongoing exhibition rooting the program in legacies of Black, Latinx and Indigenous intellectual frameworks and their many intertwined cultural expressions, with an intergenerational span of works by 

Amanda Piña, Betty Tchomanga, Grandma Baby Apothecary, June Jordan, Khari-Johnson Ricks, Marilyn Nance

. Presented in the ground floor gallery and CARA bookstore are works by 

, and the late Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet 

—Schedule is subject to change
—COVID-19 Protocol: For the health and safety of our staff, invited artists, and public, we shall be requesting everyone to mask during the performance programs.
—Accessibility: 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 

. Service animals are welcome. The closest wheelchair accessible subway is 14th St/8th Avenue station. 

Aldrin Valdez is a bakla writer and visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren't Here (Nightboat Books, 2018), selected as a 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. As for current plans, Aldrin is trying to take it easy, feel real, play video games, and tell their brain it's okay that it's still registering the year as 2020.

Aldrin Valdez

Annika Hansteen-Izora (she/they/he) is an artist, writer and designer. She/they/he explorers the intersections of design, radical Black imagination, art and technology to create ecosystems rooted in dreaming and care. Brooklyn, NY on unceded Lenape land. Annika has been exploring the topics of communal dreaming, digital gardens, creative ecosystems, queering friendship and communal care.She/they/he lives in Brooklyn unceded Lenape land.

Annika Hansteen-Izora

Camille Sapara Barton (they/them) is an artist and educator who explores creative interventions that sustain life.Rooted in Black Feminism, ecology and harm reduction, they use creativity as a means to grow the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Embodiment, healing justice and drug policy are key threads within Barton’s work. Camille is currently the head of

, a temporary masters programme at Sandberg Institute. They are based in Amsterdam.

rary masters programme at Sandberg Institute. They are based in Amsterdam. DJ 

 serves ritual bass: a hypnotic blend of low end frequencies and polyrhythms which celebrates the Afro-Caribbean influence in electronic music, underground club culture and the healing potential of bass music.

Camille Sapara Barton

is a collective supporting Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. We create and support work that is personal, proudly provocative and driven by strong, artistic voices. We celebrate this work and get it made, seen and shared.

COUSIN

charles theonia (they/them) is a poet, enthusiast, and transsexual without direction. They are the author of artist book Saw Palmettos and chapbook Which One Is the Bridge, and they co-edited

, a magazine of queer and trans affinities with femmeness.

charles theonia

 is indigenous to the Central Amazon. They are a biologist with a Masters in Ecology, and work as a visual artist, art educator and researcher. They live in Manaus; an industrial territory in the middle of the Forest, where they transform themselves to live Uýra, a tree that walks. Having the body as a support, they narrate stories of different Natures via photo-performance and performance. From the City-Forest landscape, they are interested in living systems and their violations, as well as decoloniality, memory and indigenous diasporas.

Emerson Uyra

 is an American-born New York City-based electronic music producer, performer, and inter-disciplinary artist. She works on site-specific multi-media installations, performances, and live music. These include the use of field recordings, electronic music, video, and movement. She holds certificates as a sound healing practitioner and incorporates this knowledge in her compositions, which include singing bowls, chanting, binaural beats, and healing frequencies. She investigates the therapeutic potential of music and sound through these arrangements.

Electric Djinn

’s visionary career in music reverberates expansively at the multiple intersections between experimental and dance floor sounds. Rayna’s creative arc began when she was still in high school - DJing dance parties and distributing home-produced drone and noise tapes - and has carried her through a long-standing relationship with New York’s DFA Records, critically acclaimed releases for LIES, Nation, Curle, LuxRec and Ecstatic Recordings as well as the founding of her own label Voluminous Arts.

Gavilán Rayna Russom

 (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and coeditor of 

 (Feminist Press, 2021). Their work appears in 

, and elsewhere. Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago.

Kemi Alabi

 is a sound healing practitioner, meditation teacher, musician, and artist. She has hosted workshops and performed at numerous museums and artistic institutes including MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, and The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, providing educational and meditative listening experiences. She is the author of 

Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives 

(Anthology Editions, 2020). Lavender performs and releases music under the name C. Lavender.

Lavender Suarez

aka Les Talusan is a DJ, photographer, curator, teaching artist and organizer whose practice immerses people in the joy of discovery, empowerment, and community. This approach is informed by Les’ own story of resilience, liberation and courage as an immigrant, mother and v/s. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, Les fell in love with music at a young age, DJing at local clubs and playing in bands. Les has lived in Washington, DC for over 20 years and continues to expand their talents, performing behind the decks in the U.S. and abroad.

Les The DJ

 (she/her) is a Toronto based artist and transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. She is the Inaugural ArtworxTO Artist in Residency with the City of Toronto, Parks and Recreation, and a Mellon Fellow, Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University, USA, 2022. She has exhibited extensively including: the Heard Museum, Phoenix; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; the Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian, New York; amongst others. She is an Assistant Professor and Canadian Research Chair, Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto. Hupfield is martin clan and off-rez member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada.

Maria Hupfield

 (she/they) first chapbook, WAASAMOWIN, was published by IMP in 2019. They were the June/July 2020 poetry micro-resident at Running Dog and a 2019 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. Nicole is of mixed settler/European ancestry and is a patrilineal descendent of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe). They currently live and make work on Canarsee and Lenape territory (Brooklyn, NY) where they are Managing Director of The Poetry Project.

Nicole Wallace

 is a sound artist, musician & composer based in Tulsa, OK  and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. His practice focuses on acoustic geographies, installation and experimental music.

Robbie Wing

 is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn. She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into writing her own music and making performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano.

Sugar Vendil

 Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer, concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice.

Suzanne Kite

who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of 

 (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in 

, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

Wo Chan

Conjuring #3

7:00 pm	Doors Open
7:45 pm	Opening Remarks by Manuela Moscoso
8:00 pm

	Humeysha with Mimi Bai, Sam B. Jones, Don Christian, and Special Guest: 

Apparitions, Ancestors, and the Diasporic Imagining

Program

Current and upcoming