Performance: Under Siege
10:00–11:00 am

Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau have brought together Black women and Black femme-identifying dramatists together to create a monumental work of art—a piece of theater, a collective gesture, built in the style of an exquisite corpse, where each writer responds to a single question from the writer before them.

RSVP Required



A Lexicon for Artists at Work, The Stoop
5:00–8:00 pm

Join us for a conversation bridging two exciting projects. Celebrating the publication of Thinking from Black: A Lexicon by the Practicing Refusal Collective, the Studio Museum in Harlem will host a sonic activation reflecting on the expansive collection of words, terms, concepts, and ideas that takes the multiplicity of Black life as its point of departure in Thinking from Black: A Lexicon by the Practicing Refusal Collective. A Lexicon for Artists at Work features jazz saxophonist, Immanuel Wilkins and multimedia artist and composer, Will Johnson, and book contributors Phoebe Boswell (on gesture), Tina Campt (on frequency), Saidiya Hartman (on anarchy), and Deborah Thomas (on myal). This program invites visitors to experience what it sounds and feels like to “think from Black.”

The program will be followed by a conversation on what it means for artists to go to work right now and to create conditions that support their artistic practices. The panel features Terri Lyne Carrington, Staceyann Chin, Emil Kang, Esperanza Spalding, and Deborah Willis, and is moderated by Avery Willis Hoffman (Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre at University of Chicago and Artistic Advisor of the Toni Morrison Foundation). This conversation is curated in collaboration with Princeton Atelier and the Toni Morrison Foundation.

RSVP Required

Phoebe Boswell, born in Nairobi, Kenya, lives and works in London. She is
a British/Kenyan multidisciplinary artist moving between drawing, painting, film, installation, sound, and writing, with a commitment to the drawn body, the decolonial body, the intimate and the collective body, and how it is seen, felt, loved, and cared for. She received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, and was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer in residence. Her work is held and exhibited in public institutions globally.

Tina Campt is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and director of the Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; Norton, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019. She is University Professor at Columbia University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the Royal Society of Literature.

Savannah Shange is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her book Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke UP, 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery. She currently works in collaboration with organizers to document and amplify the practice of abolition in everyday life.

Deborah A. Thomas is the author of Exorbitance (2025), Political Life in the
Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence (2019), and Modern Blackness
(2004), and co-editor of the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days
in May. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with
the New York–based Urban Bush Women.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcolm S. Forbes Professor in the
Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Arts Institute
at Brown University. They are the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic
Afro-Modernity; Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human; and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology.

Immanuel Wilkins is an award-winning alto saxophonist and composer
who has toured extensively throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. His
albums include Omega (Blue Note, 2020) and The 7th Hand (Blue Note,
2022). His creative projects span both within and outside the world of
jazz, including collaborations with visual artists and filmmakers such as
Ja’Tovia Gary, Leslie Hewitt, and Theaster Gates.

William Johnson is a multimedia artist/composer from the Bronx, New
York City. Themes from his work include black digital memory, phantom
archives, and the latent poetics of audio engineer speak. He is the recipient
of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Sound Art/Composition and the
McKnight Foundation’s Fellowship for Musicians.