Two Evenings in Honor of N.H. Pritchard

Please join us for two evenings in celebration of N.H. Pritchard: Boom!  Both events bring together recent scholarship and dynamic performance in honor of Pritchard’s innovative approach to poetry, sound, and visual art. 
 

Tuesday, 22 July, 6–8pm

A conversation with scholars Anthony Reed and Paul Stephens discussing Pritchard’s work within the context of the visual art, poetry, and jazz scene in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, with a listening session and short screening of the artist’s recorded verbal performances. Following the discussion, contrabassist Brandon Lopez will improvise a jazz composition in response to the exhibition. A brief Q&A will follow the performance.

Tuesday, 29 July, 6–8pm

Performances by artists JJJJJerome Ellis, Arnold Kemp, and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. Ellis will perform an interdisciplinary piece inspired by Pritchard’s work using saxophone, vocals, and a hammered dulcimer. Kemp will reprise a 2023 lecture he developed based on his first encounter with Pritchard’s poems in the Johnson Publishing Library, Chicago. Lowe will create a real-time sound composition that draws from the works within the gallery. 

Both events are free and open to the public. RSVP encouraged (rsvp@peterfreemaninc.com).

Special thanks to Jupiter Sound for their production support.

Anthony Reed is the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke University Press) and Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Dr. Paul Stephens is a graduate professor and founding editor of the critical journal Convolution. He is the author of Absence of Clutter: Minimal Writing as Art and Literature (MIT Press) and The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (University of Minnesota Press), and editor of N.H. Pritchard's The Mundus: A Novel in Voices (Primary Information).

Brandon Lopez is a contrabassist and composer. Lopez was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic for the 2019 premier of Ashley Fure’s Filament, conducted by Jaap Van Zweden. His solo work has been featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in a live collaboration with silent films by directors Stan Brakhage and Germaine Dulac. He is currently an instructor of improvisation and double bass at the New School for Jazz.

JJJJJerome Ellis is an artist and person who stutters. JJJJJerome has the great privilege of being married to poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. They live in a monastery on a creek in traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA.

Arnold J. Kemp is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose practice explores how identity is formed and ways it can slip out of place. His work often extends beyond the studio and formal gallery system by taking the form of talks, performances, limited-edition artist’s books, collaborations, and art objects.

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe is an artist, curator, and composer exploring voice and modular synthesizers as sound works in the realm of spontaneous music. He also has an A/V practice that focuses on live performance and installation/exhibition. He recently began composing scores for many films, including Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021).