Thursday, March 27, 2025
Doors at 5:30 pm. Artist talk at 6 pm.
25 Dederick Street, Kingston, NY
On Thursday, March 27, we welcome Tina Campt and Keisha Scarville to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. The two will be in conversation to discuss Scarville’s work and current exhibition at CPW entitled Recess. This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube page at 6pm.
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 25 Dederick Street 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.
About Tina Campt:
Tina M. Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project, as well as a founding scholar of Black European Studies. Campt has published five books including A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021); Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); and Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). She received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020) and the 2024 Photographic Studies Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for distinguished contributions to the study of anthropology and photography.
About Keisha Scarville:
Keisha Scarville (b. 1975) explores diaspora, loss, and the unfixing of identity and body in her work. Born in Brooklyn, New York to Guyanese immigrant parents, Scarville identifies with an innate sense of in-betweenness—a feeling of displacement that weaves throughout her projects. In her series Mama’s Clothes, begun in 2015, clothing and patterned textiles belonging to Scarville’s late mother both conjure her presence and create a visual, photographic space in which body, memory, and abstraction coexist. Scarville was a 2003 CPW Artist-in-Residence. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, ICA Philadelphia, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions, and is represented in permanent collections including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Her first monograph, lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound (MACK, 2023), was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award for First PhotoBook.
About the exhibition:
Recess features the work of 2024 Saltzman Prize winner Keisha Scarville (American, born 1975). Scarville makes photographs that consider her personal experience of in-betweenness, exploring notions of diaspora, transformation, belonging, and loss. In her photographs, she creates spaces, stages, and still lives, often using clothing and textiles belonging to her late mother. When Scarville invokes her mother’s presence in her works, she creates alternate, liminal places that engage both memory and the possibilities of abstraction.
In Recess, Scarville refers both to the hollow space beneath a flat plane and to any temporary pause or suspension. In this way, Scarville continues her exploration of thresholds. Neither here nor there, thresholds are spaces of becoming; they mark moments of “passing through,” suspended instants that are full of potential and prospects of the unknown. For Scarville, shadows function as these types of spaces. They are not only dark shapes that lack light and clarity, but also deep, productive zones where alternative temporalities and in-between narratives reside. In her photographs and installations, Scarville activates the shadow as a form in ways that require closer looking, deeper feeling, and the active negotiation of being.
Recess is accompanied by a limited edition artist’s book by Keisha Scarville (published by CPW in collaboration with 1080PRESS).
Images © Keisha Scarville.