This Friday night at NOMA, we’re celebrating the opening of Tim Youd: 100 Novels. From 6-8 p.m., Youd will begin typing the entirety of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. To learn more about Youd’s project and to view his performance schedule, click here.

• 5-8 pm: Art on the Spot
• 5:30-8:30 pm: Music by The Roamin’ Jasmine
• 6 pm: Lecture in the Stern Auditorium: “Slavery in the Parlor” with Dr. Mary Niall Mitchell, Midlo Chair for New Orleans Studies, University of New Orleans
• 6–8 pm: Tim Youd: A Confederacy of Dunces
  

About Tim Youd: 100 Novels

Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Tim Youd will visit NOMA to perform the latest installment of his 100 Novels Project. At the heart of this endeavor is an extended and idiosyncratic literary pilgrimage. Youd journeys across the world to retype 100 works of literature—some canonical, others obscure—in locations germane to each novel. In these charged locations, he uses the original make and model of typewriter employed by the book’s the author to retype each novel in its entirety.

While in Louisiana, Youd will be performing live in NOMA’s galleries and in locations throughout the state, retyping a series of novels set in Louisiana that will include everything from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. During his multi-week performances, Youd retypes each novel onto a single sheet of paper, backed by a second sheet. He runs the doubled paper through the typewriter repeatedly, until every word of the novel has been retyped. Upon completion, the two pages—a positive and a negative image—are mounted as a diptych, representing two pages of a book. These resulting frayed and tattered pages reflect on our relationship to history, memory and creativity, and ask what the practice of novel writing—and reading—might teach us today.

About The Roamin’ Jasmine

Forged out of the lively street music scene in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the members of the Roamin’ Jasmine found one another busking under the swampy Louisiana sun, along the banks of the Mississippi, or after hours in storefronts on Royal, Frenchmen and Decatur Streets. The Roamin’ Jasmine repertoire explores 1920’s era speakeasy blues, vintage Calypso from Trinidad, seminal 1950’s New Orleans Rhythm & Blues, and original compositions, all set to traditional jazz instrumentation with original arrangements. Through polyphonic collective improvisation inherent in their new homeland of New Orleans, the Roamin’ Jasmine hold true to a great New Orleans jazz tradition while participating in its evolution with undertones of different eras and places.

About Dr. Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell is Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History, Ethel & Herman Midlo Chair in New Orleans Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of New Orleans. She is the author of Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (NYU Press, 2008). Her latest book project, The Slave Girl in the Archive, is a study of race, photography, slavery and memory in the nineteenth century. She has written most recently about the Civil War for the New York Times Disunion blog and Common-place.org. Professor Mitchell has received fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and J. William Fulbright Foundation.