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Join us as we kick off our second annual collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program with an evening of celebration and conversation about art, creativity, and representation.

For nearly 50 years, the Museum’s program has supported and nurtured more than 100 emerging artists of African descent. Tonight, we celebrate the work of the current group of young artists: Jordan Casteel, EJ Hill and Jibade-Khalil Huffman. They’ll be joined in conversation with program alumni Kevin Beasley, Kerry James Marshall and Dave McKenzie.

Hosted by Q2 Music’s Helga Davis, they’ll discuss the unique history of the program that gives the Museum it’s name and the creativity and passion that drives their work.

→ Video Webcast

You can also watch our video stream beginning 7pm ET

About the 2015-16 Artists in Residence: 

Jordan Casteel is a figurative painter whose recent work uses bold color and thick, gestural paint to explore the theme of black masculinity in a domestic environment. She received her BA in studio art in 2011 from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA, and her MFA in painting and printmaking in 2014 from Yale University in New Haven, CT. She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY (2015) and at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space on Governors Island, NY (2015). Her work was selected for inclusion in New American Paintings Northeast Issue #116 in 2015.

EJ Hill currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Concentrating on an endurance-based performance practice, he uses his body as the literal and symbolic site for examining the many ways in which physical and ideological bodies may transcend their afflictions. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Buenos Aires and Berlin. He received a BFA in 2011 from Columbia College in Chicago and an MFA in 2013 from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is the author of three books of poems: “19 Names For Our Band” (2008), “James Brown Is Dead” (2011) and “Sleeper Hold” (2015). His projects fuse the visual arts and writing, combing poetic/essayistic texts with video installation, photography and performance, and have been presented at P.S.1/MoMA in New York, the Hammer in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Southern Exposure in San Francisco, among others. He received a BA in photography in 2003 from Bard College, an MFA in literary arts in 2005 from Brown University and an MFA in studio art in 2013 from the University of Southern California.

About the Artist in Residence Alumni: 

Kerry James Marshall was born in Alabama in 1955, and grew up in Watts, Los Angeles. He is a 1978 graduate of the Otis College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in Chicago. A major survey, Kerry James Marshall: MASTRY is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through September 25, 2016; and travels to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 12–July 2, 2017. His work is part of numerous public collections across the nation.  Other recent solo exhibitions include Kerry James Marshall: In the Tower at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2013) and Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, organized by the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium (2013). He is the recipient of several awards, grants and fellowships including the MacArthur genius grant in 1997. 

Kevin Beasley lives and works in New York. Beasley’s work has recently been included in exhibitions at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2016), The Hammer Museum at Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2016), White Columns, New York (2016), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015) and MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2015), among many more. This September the artist presented a three-part performance on the High Line in New York titled “Untitled Stanzas: Staff/Un/Site,” and has performed at galleries and museums across the U.S. His work is held in the collections of The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Studio Museum Harlem, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.

Dave McKenzie uses video performance and text to explore how and why subjects engage-with and become-with one another. McKenzie was born in Kingston, Jamaica and received a BFA in printmaking from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine in 2000. Recent performances include Darker Than the Moon, Smaller Than the Sun, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2014) and All the King’s Horses…None of His Men, Third Streaming (2013). Recent exhibitions include Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2015),  Pants Full of Hope, Pockets Full of Adventure, or…Don‘t Call Me Cheesuz, Galerie Wien Lukatsch, Berlin (2015) and Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.