“Meet the Artist”
Kearra Amaya Gopee and S*an D. Henry-Smith
*Wednesday* October 25, 2023
Doors at 5:30 pm. Talk at 6 pm.
474 Broadway, Kingston, NY
On Wednesday, October 25, we welcome CPW’s current Woodstock AIRs, Kearra Amaya Gopee and S*an D. Henry-Smith to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Gopee will be presenting a new video alongside an outline of the work they intend to develop during their residency at CPW. Henry-Smith will present their own work, as well as some photographs that have influenced them, tracing their relationship to the practice of making pictures. This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube Page at 6 pm.
Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.
Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY).
Using video, sculpture, sound, writing and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and atemporal–leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present and possible afterlives. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid’s book of the same name.
They hold a MFA from University of California, Los Angeles; BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University, and are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have recently held fellowships from Queer|Art and MacDowell, and they are currently an Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.
S*an D. Henry-Smith is a collaborative practitioner engaging Black experimentalisms in and across poetry, photography, sound, and performance. Recent solo exhibitions include “tremor low” at ROZENSTRAAT in Amsterdam (2023) and “in awe of geometry & mornings” at White Columns in New York (2021). Their book Wild Peach (2020), was published by Futurepoem, and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and they are the author of two chapbooks: Body Text (2016) and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System (2019). They have received awards and fellowships from Amsterdam Fonds voor de kunst (2023), the Fulbright Program (2020), The Poetry Project (2019), and Poets House (2017), among others. They have read and performed previously at 47 Canal, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Shed, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, The Poetry Project, and Triple Canopy, among others. Henry-Smith regularly collaborates in sound, poetry, and performance with Dweller Electronics, Imani Elizabeth Jackson as Mouthfeel, Justin Allen, Taja Cheek, Yulan Grant, Ryan C. Clarke, Danny Sadiel Peña, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Alec Mateo, and Derica Shields, among others.
Banner image © Kearra Amaya Gopee (left), © S*an D. Henry-Smith (right).