Join us for a very special evening featuring the US premiere of writer and artist Robin Coste Lewis’s moving-image work Intimacy, which combines selections from her grandmother’s photo archive—a collection of images of African Americans that spans over a century—with Lewis’s writing. This film offers a first look at her just-published text and image photobook To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, from which the film was made. Artist Julie Mehretu will join Lewis in conversation. Longtime friends Lewis and Mehretu will share some of the themes that have animated their conversations and work over many years. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, will introduce the evening. Book signing to follow.
Robin Coste Lewis is a Ford Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), which won the National Book Award, the first poetry debut by an African American to do so in the prize’s history. The former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, she is also the author of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022).
Julie Mehretu is an artist and MacArthur prizewinner who is represented in MoMA’s collection.