anaïs duplan
TRANSCRIPT
Anaïs Duplanb. 1992, Jacmel, Haiti
B.A., Bennington CollegeM.F.A., Iowa Writers’ Workshop BooksI NEED MUSIC, Action Books, 2021Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, Black Ocean, 20209 Poems/The Lovers, Belladonna*, 2018Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus, Monster House Press, 2017
Take This Stallion, Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016
Teaching ExperienceSarah Lawrence College, 2020-2021New England College, 2021The New School, 2021The City University of New York, 2021Bennington University, 2021St. Joseph’s College, 2020Columbia University, 2017-2020
University of Iowa, 2016-2017
Group Exhibitions and Screenings
We Turn: The 2021 SHIFT Residency Exhibition, EFA Project Space, 2021
Drawn Together, Cuchifritos Gallery, 2021
The Condition of Being Addressable, ICA Los Angeles, 2021
What Is Feminist Art?, Smithsonian Institution, 2021
Transcode Manifesto, New Art City, 2020
Joyous Dystopia, Daata Editions x Bass Museum, 2019
Screenshots: Video Launch with Daata Editions and DIS, NeueHouse, 2019
Radical Reading Room, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019
Give Up the Ghost, Baltic Triennial XIII, 2018
The Only Thing That’s New Is Us, Mathew Gallery, 2017
Post-Cyber Feminist International, ICA London, 2017
#WanderingWILDING: Movement as Movement, Daata Editions, 2016
Readings and Performances
Craft Lesson Lunch: Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture w/ An Duplan, The New School, 2021
Segue Reading Series: Anaïs Duplan & Legacy Russell, Artists Space, 2021
AfroFutures: An Afternoon with Anaïs Duplan, Claremont Graduate University, 2021
Anaïs Duplan & Golden, The Poetry Project, 2021
Writing Now Reading Series, CalArts, 2021
Live on Crowdcast: Anaïs Duplan, Kelly Schirmann and Stacey Tran, Skylight Books, 2021
New Writing Series, UC San Diego, 2021
Language is a Temptation: Daily Readings from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, Poet’s House, 2020
Spring Broadside Reading III: Anaïs Duplan & Zahra Patterson, Center for Book Arts, 2020
QTPOC Meditation Hour, Montez Press Radio, 2020
Black Secrets: it ain’t english words for it, Montez Press Radio, 2020
Sci-Fi Sundays: Ulises, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2020
Endgame: Black Artists on an Urgent Black Future, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2020
Dan Poppick, Mónica de la Torre, Anaïs Duplan, & Christian Schlegel, Greenlight Bookstore, 2019
Black Secrets: On Black Musics and the Occult, Montez Press Radio, 2019
A Listening Party with Sable Elyse Smith, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019
In Conversation: On Top of All This, The High Line, 2019
The Artists’ Voice: Anaïs Duplan, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019
Emerging Writers Reading Series: Anaïs Duplan, NYU, 2019
Anaïs Duplan, a Reading and Conversation, Brown University, 2019
Tuxedo Mascs: A Transmasculine Poetry Reading, Bluestockings, 2019
Anaïs Duplan and Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2019
VERSES. VOL 1 x Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, The Kitchen, 2019
unbag: Reverie Launch Party, Local Project, 2018
Anaïs Duplan, University of Notre Dame, 2018
Celebrate Winter While We Still Have Seasons, Housing Works, 2018
Brown Paper Zine and Small Press Fair, Barnard College, 2018
Belladonna* Roll Call Reading Series with Anaïs Duplan & Yumi Dineen Shiroma, Belladonna* Collaborative, 2018
jubilat/Jones Reading Series hosts Anais Duplan and Zach Savich, UMass Amherst, 2017
University of Richmond Poetry Festival: Reading with Anaïs Duplan, Tarfia Faizullah, and Peter LaBerge, University of Richmond, 2017
Monster House Presents: A reading by Anaïs Duplan, Fell Gallery, 2017
Poetry Poetry VII with Chen Chen, Anaïs Duplan, Rajiv Mohabir & Monica Sok, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2017
Anaïs Duplan & Loma (Christopher Soto), Poetry Project, 2016
Segue Reading Series: Anaïs Duplan & Marie Buck, Zinc Bar, 2016
Workshops and Talks
Queer Artist Fellowship Program Panel Facilitator, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, 2021
The Future of Contracts, Art World Conference, 2021
Poem-a-Day Guest Editor, Academy of American Poets, 2021
Black Reconstructions: Collective Visioning Workshop, MoMA, 2021
Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space Roundtable, Brooklyn Museum, 2021
Studio LIVE | Anaïs Duplan x Legacy Russell, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2020
Black Curators’ Roundtable, Iowa City Public Library, 2019
Outside the Box: Anaïs Duplan on Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath, New Museum, 2019
From Score to Speculative Lit with Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Writer Anaïs Duplan, Brooklyn Public Library, 2019
Visiting Curator Lecture, Williams College Graduate School of Art, 2018
Meet Over Lunch: Anaïs Duplan presents the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Residency Unlimited, 2018
Poetics of Emotional Research, Poet’s House, 2018
Residencies and Fellowships
Curatorial Research Fellowship, Independent Curators International, 2021
Curator-in-residence, The Luminary, 2021
EMPAC Residency, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2021
SHIFT Residency, EFA Project Space, 2020-2021
New York Foundation for the Arts Emerging Leaders Bootcamp, 2020
Public Programs Fellow, The Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA, 2017-2019
Plughaupt Fellow, Iowa Writers Workshop, 2017
Curator-in-residence, Residency Unlimited, 2016
Writer-in-residence, Ashbery Home School, 2015
Curator-in-residence, HEIMA, 2015
Poetry Fellow, Bennington College, 2014
Stadler Center Fellow, Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, 2013
Selection Committees
The Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, 2021
National Endowment for the Arts Panelist, 2021
Creative Capital Awards, 2021
Gener8tor Art Fellowship, 2021
A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship, 2021
Cogswell College Poetry Contest, 2020
Brooklyn Art Council Community Art Grant, 2019
Selected Bibliography
2021 Indie Lit Fair, Vol. II: Truth And Courage, Pen America, 2021
Blackspace: Reviewed by Dr. John Murillo III, MAKE Literary Productions, 2021
“Change of Perspective: A Conversation with Anaïs Duplan,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, 2021
“Queer Art Workers Reflect: Anaïs Duplan On “Becoming a Better Lover”—Not Just in a Romantic Sense,” Hyperallergic, 2020
“The Bigger Picture: Recess,” Gagosian Quarterly, 2020
“Anaïs Duplan: An Interview by Madison McCartha,” Action Books, 2020
“Why We Should Read Poetry,” BOMB Magazine, 2020
“In the Flesh: Body Modification as Art,” Studio Magazine, 2019
“Silence in Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus and Take This Stallion,” Ploughshares, 2019
“Black curators discuss ‘insiders and outsiders’ in the art world,” The Daily Iowan, 2019
“Going Into My Depths,” Mask Magazine, 2018
“THE TOXIC AND THE LYRIC IV: ON ANAÏS DUPLAN: RADICAL INTIMACY AS NEW HISTORY POEM; AS WOUND AND AS
CO-BODY; THE SHAKING APART OF ROBERT LOWELL; STRANGE FRUIT AS IED,” Fanzine, 2017
“Poet delves into a Civil War spy’s hidden history,” PBS News Hour, 2016
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of forthcoming book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays on black digital media artists, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and two poetry chapbooks, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017) and 9 Poems/The Lovers (Belladonna*, 2018). His writing has been published by Hy-perallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry Society of America. He has taught poetry as an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College, amongst others.
Duplan’s video and performance work has been exhibited at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021.
Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), a residency program for artists of color. The CAS is based in Iowa City, where Du-plan received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2017. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Photo credit: Ally Caple
We Turn
In three projects across media, Duplan presses against language’s limitations while presenting expanded possibilities of form. Duplan presents The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch in two channels, which borrows language from Julianne Huxtable’s Mucus in My Pineal Gland (2017) and considers video as ambient. Also shown are excerpts from Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2019) snippets of text interlaced with images printed on circular metal, recalling the shape of vinyl records. Throughout the space and in conversation with the cohort’s are stanzas from the manuscript I NEED MU-SIC (Action Books, 2021), which too contemplate upon images (“as page,” or otherwise) and future (“cancelled / due to a thunderstorm”).
The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch, 2021, video. (60 minutes) Excerpts from I Need Music, forthcoming from Action Books, 2021, Wall vinyl texts and metal prints, dimensions variable.
Excerpts from I Need Music, forthcoming from Action Books, 2021, Wall vinyl texts and metal prints, dimensions variable.
Excerpts from I Need Music, forthcoming from Action Books, 2021, Wall vinyl texts and metal prints, dimensions variable.
Full show can be accessed at EFA Project Space
Black Secrets: On Black Musics and the Occult Black Secrets: it ain’t english words for it
Black Secrets
A radio segment produced for Montez Press Radio, Black Secrets brings together poets Anaïs Duplan & Benjamin Krusling, who share music, conversation, and poetry on blackness as a kind of occultism that enables black peoples to protect what is real and alive inside themselves. Listen to both episodes here.
Why Does It Feel Natural to Want to Be Stable for the Lady in the Mirror?, HD video, 2:51
A POEM BY ANAÏS DUPLAN is a set of three video-poems created for Daata Editions. An experiment in melding the video screen with the page-of-text, the vid-eos feature a line-by-line feed of three of Duplan’s po-ems: I Think That I Can Love It, about the freedom or lack thereof the Black female body; Why Does It Feel Natural to Want to Be Stable for the Lady in the Mirror?, a poem on gender instability in the age of social technology; and finally, The War of Parasites, a meditation on war, anima-lia, and sex.
Each video-poem is set across found footage from ar-chival and/or educational films, often featuring black-and-white images of white people in idyllic situations, volcanic eruptions, physical conflict, running in fear, running with semi-joy, and abstractions of light. The set of video-poems, A POEM BY ANAÏS DUPLAN at-tempts to synthesize this particular range of audiovisu-al and phenomenological experience with the intimacy and habitual quiet of the poem-page.
All videos can be accessed via Daata Editions.
A Poem by Anaïs Duplan
I Think That I Can Love It, HD video, 2:24The War of Parasites, HD video, 3:08
All videos can be accessed via Daata Editions.
Paradigms for Liberation I-III
We turn to history for stories that inform our present moment. After all, they say that history repeats itself. Similarly, our memories form the basis of the stories we tell about ourselves in the present. Paradigms for Liberation I-III is interested the role of narrative construction in the formation of discrete personal identities. It draws from a shared archive, YouTube, to investigate the stories we tell about ourselves and our relationships––and celebrates the redundancies, repetitions, circularities, ambiguities, and breakdowns in those stories.
This video can be accessed via Daata Editions.
Paradigms for Liberation I-III, HD video, 5:23
The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch
The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch is video-poem borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Juliana Huxtable. The se-quence is constructed from found footage, largely sourced from music videos and art documentaries that focus on a be-loved public figure. The video attempts to excavate moments of intimacy and shared attention from mass-produced digital artifacts.
The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch, installation shots, Prelude to the 13th Baltic Triennial, HD video, 3 hours
Watch a trailer or watch the first hour. (Full video available upon request)
Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware
In Robert Colescott’s 1975 painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American His-tory Textbook, the famed American inventor is depicted standing at the bow of a rowboat making its way across an intrepid Delaware River. Carver is accompanied by a band of Sambo-esque figures, including one Revolution-ary War army general who hugs the American flag with a kind of serenity about his expression. The painting is a response to—or a refusal of—an earlier painting by a German American artist, completed in 1851, showing George Washington and his all-white cadre in the same scene.
Ode to the Happy Negro exists both as a video and a poem. Both explore black selfhood and sexuality against the backdrop of Colescott’s satire.
Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott’s George Wash-ington Carver Crossing the Delaware, HD video, 3:22
Watch the video or read the poem.
9 Poems/The Lovers
Published by the Belladonna* Series, 9 Poems/ The Lovers is a book of nine poems and screenshots. The poems are a series of ekphrastic responses to works by video artists and exper-imental filmmakers of color, including Martine Syms, Mona Hatoum, Tony Cokes, and Kevin Jerome Everson. The poems are accompanied by screenshots from The Lovers Are the Audi-ence Who Watch.
Available online and upon request.
Private Party
Conceived as a performance piece for a photographer, two models, and a director, Private Party was an opportunity to wit-ness oneself performing in the public gaze. Live video footage and sound, sourced from YouTube and Taos radio formed the backdrop against which performers of color worked through a series of meditations intended to explore personality, am-bition, the experience of being seen as a brown body, and love. As a durational, live experiment lasting four hours, Private Party explored the friction between technology and intimacy, framing and knowing, seeing and being.
Read the performance score.
A public program hosted at Friends and Lovers, INNTERDIS-CPLINE celebrated QTPOC artists who use performance and new media to work towards liberation. The night featured work by Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Paula Pinho Martins Nacif, Yves B. Golden, Precious Okoyomon, Ray Ferreira, Keijaun Thomas, Sean D. Henry Smith, and Jayson P. Smith. Presented in partner-ship with Final Fantasy Reading Series and Roshan Abraham, IN-NTERDISCIPLINE combined live performance with video, music, poetry, and sound art.
INNTERDISCIPLINE
Keijuan Thomas
The Center for Afrofuturist Studies
The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS) is an initiative to reimagine the futures of marginalized peoples by gen-erating dynamic working spaces for artists of color. Since 2016, the CAS has hosted fully-funded residencies for artists of color whose work investigates black futurity. In conjucntion with artists-in-residence, CAS produces lec-tures, workshops, public forums, and exhibitions on the intersections of race, technology, and the diaspora.
Past CAS artists-in-residence are Tiona McClodden, Louis Chude-Sokei, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Alexandria Ereg-bu, Krista Franklin, Devin Cain, Terence Nance, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Jade Ariana Fair, Celia Peters, and Justin Allen.
Krista Franklin, ...to take root among the stars, exhibition detail, 2016
Anonymous Donor
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Anonymous donations are given either voluntarily or invol-untarily. At one end of the spectrum, an anonymous dona-tion represents the self-effacing gesture of a philanthropist. On the other end of the spectrum is the systemic erasure of the work of dehumanized laborers.
As an exhibition, Anonymous Donor considers the hidden contributions that have helped shape our contemporary moment.
Inspired by ere ibeji figures––Yoruba sculptures created to honor the spirit of a deceased twin––the exhibition features works by Kara Walker, Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Jordan Weber, American Artist, and the Yoruba peoples. All of the artwork collected in the exhibition sheds light on the path we have taken to get to the present moment and sug-gests, at each turn, a parallel (or twin) story to the widely accepted narrative.
A newly commissioned work by American Artist re-imag-ines contemporary technology with black consumers in mind, while Alma Thomas’ work reminds us of black wom-en’s participation in abstract art movements. The works by Kara Walker and Elizabeth Catlett illuminate lineages of in-visible caretaking and emphasize interdependence over in-dependence, while Jordan Weber’s meditation cushions cre-ate a reflective moment in which to contemplate the role of air pollutants in our nation’s history. Finally, the two pairs of Yoruba ere ibeji sculptures suggest that the living and the dead may be more intertwined than meets the eye.
Figge Art Museum, June 29 – October 21, 2019
