New York, NY | Gallery Tuesdays | Tour of “Robin Coste Lewis: Intimacy”

Join ArtTable at the Marian Goodman Gallery for a bespoke viewing of Intimacy, a moving-image and sound film by Robin Coste Lewis. We’ll meet Marian Goodman Gallery Managing Partner Emily-Jane Kirwan at 5:30 pm for a talk—and enjoy a glass of wine, courtesy of the gallery—and start the film at 6 pm.

A single-channel video projection with sound, the installation features projected images from a selection of 66 photographs representing a modern 20th-Century photographic archive depicting the Lewis family and their friends. The trove of portraits, discovered by Lewis approximately 25 years ago in the home of her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Mary Coste Thomas Brooks, are sepia, tintypes, color and black-and-white pictures that recount the history of the Lewis family and circle.

The Lewis family, along with millions of other Americans, fled the Southern States of America in the 20th Century as part of the Great Migration west, in search of a place devoid of racism, injustice, and white terrorism.  With the upheaval of forced migration, and concomitant scattering of a family unit and dispersal of possessions, the existence of this deep collection of photographic images represents a distinctive vernacular collection, especially notable for its volume, rarity and joyful, private sentiment.

Admission:

• ArtTable Members $10
• ArtTable Member Guests – $20
• Public – $25

Not a member? Join today!

Please note that all income from program fees goes towards program expenses and ArtTable’s internal costs for organizing programs.

This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

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Image: Still from Robin Coste Lewis: Intimacy.

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Robin Coste Lewis (b. 1964, Compton, California) is the former poet laureate for the city of Los Angeles, where she now lives and works. In 2015, her first book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus, which examined the fraught history of art, gender, and race, won The National Book Award in poetry, marking the first time a debut by an African American had ever won the prize in the Foundation’s history, and the first time a debut collection of poetry had won the award since 1974. The images in Intimacy also appear in her new book of poetry, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022), published by Knopf, which recently won an NAACP Award in Poetry and PEN Award in poetry.

Lewis received her Bachelor of Art from Hampshire College in creative writing and comparative literature; a Master of Theological Studies degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University; a Master of Fine Art in poetry at New York University; and a PhD from the University of Southern Creative Writing and Literature Program. Lewis, who has taught at Hampshire College, Hunter College, Wheaton College, and the NYU MFA in Paris, is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. In 2021, she was the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and is currently a Ford Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art.