Poets House to Host Exhibition by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
American Stanzas: 2006–2016, Rachel Eliza Griffiths's new exhibition at Poets House, is a collection of photographs featuring portraits of many Cave Canem fellows, addressing the "nuances of poetics, language, and imagery in relationship to black identity." Co-sponsored by Poets House and Cave Canem, the exhibit runs from October 28, 2016 to February 18, 2017. From Poets House's press release:
American Stanzas: 2006 – 2016 presents selected portraits, mixed media, and archival snapshots of the Cave Canem fellowship over the last decade including prize-winning poets such as Lucille Clifton, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, T oi Derricotte, Elizabeth Alexander, Carl Phillips, Y usef Komunyakaa, Nikky Finney, Tracy K. Smith, Gregory Pardlo, Patricia Smith, Willie Perdomo, Mahogany Browne, Morgan Parker, Terrance Hayes, and many others.
Griffiths’ photography marries lyrical and visual cartographies in which race, gender, sexuality, imagination, history, and language orbit each other. Griffiths, in her articulation of and insistence upon beauty and resistance, offers a three-dimensional seeing of Black lives and agency in the landscape of American letters and beyond. Griffiths’s art acknowledges and celebrates the spaces in which black bodies survive and exist with dignity, intelligence, joy, truth, strength, and flaws, while manifesting a humanity that is complicated, rather than oppressive, reductive, or exoticized. Griffiths’s work offers an inquisitive and investigative look at personal and national identity against the landscape of American history and its many narratives.
Griffiths mixed media work explores the ways in which her identity is grounded in both visual arts and language. Works on paper, lyrical videos, and other mixed mediums contain texts by Black poets and expand to national conversations about race, violence, language, history, culture, and art.
Don't miss the opening reception on October 28 at 6 pm. Learn more about the exhibit at Poets House.