NEW ORLEANS, LA-Poet and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis will present a reading and lecture in conjunction with NOMA’s exhibition Visions of US: American Art at NOMA Friday, January 8 from 6:30-7:30 p.m. in NOMA’s Stern Auditorium. The talk is included with general admission, and a book signing in the Museum Shop from 7:30-8:00 p.m. will immediately follow.
Lewis’s poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015) was just awarded a 2015 National Book Award. Her book is a poetic meditation on the cultural depiction of the black female figure throughout history. Juxtaposing autobiography with art-historical constructs of racial identity, Lewis’s lyric poems consider the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The title poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” is a riveting narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis’s autobiographical poems, “Voyage” is a tender and shocking study of the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype. Offering a new understanding of biography and the self, Lewis’s thrilling poems are an aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race in Western culture.
At NOMA, Lewis will present a reading from her book, and lead a discussion about her research regarding Western art’s use of the black female throughout history. Lewis will put her work into dialogue with NOMA’s major fall exhibition Visions of US: American Art at NOMA, discussing the role race plays in our perception of American cultural identity, and the museum’s role in fostering dialogue and debate. Lewis will also discuss her family’s deep connection to New Orleans, and the city’s impact on her research and thinking.
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS BIO
Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at the University of Southern California. Lewis is also a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from NYU, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University. A finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, she has published her work in various journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review, among others. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.
VISIONS OF US: AMERICAN ART AT NOMA
Visions of US: American Art at NOMA is not only the first exhibition in the museum’s history to highlight the full breadth of its extraordinary American Art collection, but it explores evolving ideas about American cultural identity from the eighteenth through the twentieth century to tell a rich and inclusive story about how we imagine and represent the United States.
“For the last two centuries,” said Katie Pfohl, NOMA’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, “American artists have captured many different conceptions of the country and its people, from colonial American portraits that showcase the country’s early diversity, to the broad range of materials and forms to be found in 20th century American art. This exhibition celebrates the multitude of people and perspectives that make up our vision of the United States.”
About NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden
The New Orleans Museum of Art, founded in 1910 by Isaac Delgado, houses nearly 40,000 art objects encompassing 5,000 years of world art. Works from the permanent collection, along with continuously changing special exhibitions, are on view in the museum’s 46 galleries Fridays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The adjoining Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden features work by over 60 artists, including several of the 20th century’s master sculptors. The Sculpture Garden is open seven days a week: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden are fully accessible to handicapped visitors and wheelchairs are available from the front desk. For more information about NOMA, call (504) 658-4100 or visit www.noma.org. Wednesdays are free admission days for Louisiana residents, courtesy of The Helis Foundation. (May not include special exhibitions.) Teenagers (ages 13-19) receive free admission every day through the end of 2015, courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
###