“She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: “It shines like a little diamond”,
“What does?”
“This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.”
-Jean Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason
Life is a series of moments, many of which we never notice as they pass us by. When asked what we did over a weekend or on a previous evening, often we struggle to recall. While there is much to be said for being mindful in a given moment, there is also beauty in the loss of self within each little fragment of time, abandonment of the burden to remember. Letting go of the responsibility to make memories and to rather just be.
Kemi Adeyemi is finishing the first draft of her first book which is a an ethnography of black queer women’s social dance practices in Chicago. For the book, she interviewed women going to clubs to dance as well as the people who run the clubs. The book is set against the backdrop of Chicago’s corrupt political landscape and examines a tangible politics that plays out on the dance floor. Adeyemi also runs a critical arts writing residency called The Black Embodiment Studio based out of the University of Washington. The goals are to bridge a gap in arts writing due to lack of funding in Seattle while training graduate students in the skills they need to be arts writers. At the same time a big goal is to ensure that those trained in graduate programs have fluid, flexible, accessible writing. To hear more from Kemi Adeyemi, listen to the complete interview.
Scott Dolan lives and works in Brooklyn where is is currently working on paintings and drawings which he considers to be most of his artwork. Recently he has been doing paper gouache paintings of a pile of various kinds of pencils he received from a designer who passed away. These paintings represent a change for Dolan who has worked mostly in watercolor. Now working with gouache, he has tightened his style to capture the subject matter. Since 1992, Dolan has been creating Slight Headache Comics which are small scale comics with non-linear subject matter. To hear more about Scott Dolan’s work, including Slight Headache and some of the details of the pencils he’s painting, listen to the complete interview.
A Few Words to Keep in your Pocket:
Feel no need to grab every moment, let some trickle through your fingers like sand and be gone.
Interviews are available on iTunes as podcasts, and for Android please click here. All weekly essay pieces in a shareable format are here. The full archive of interviews here.
Books to Read
What are you reading? Add your titles to our reading list here. Kemi Adeyemi is reading 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Scott Dolan recently read Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen by Mary Norris.The Joan Van Eyck Academie invites artists of a disciplines to apply for a 12-month post academic residency commencing in either April or November of 2020. Up to 35 spots are available. Artists receive a stipend plus a small yearly budget during residency. For full details and to apply, visit the website. Deadline for submissions is October 1.
Deadlines
Weekly Edited Grant and Residency Deadlines – review the list here.
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Brainard Carey is an author, artist and educator. He is the director of Praxis Center for Aesthetics. He has written six books for artists; Making it in the Art World, New Markets for Artists, The Art World Demystified, Fund Your Dreams Like a Creative Genius, Sell Online Like a Creative Genius and Succeed with Social Media Like a Creative Genius.