Fred Moten

"An artist's book of acclaimed writer Renee Gladman's fantastical drawings that merge writing and architecture, with a response from Fred Moten. Since 2013, poet, novelist, essayist and artist Renee Gladman (born 1971)--author of the acclaimed Ravickians novels--has been doing a kind of asemic writing that is also at once drawing and architecture (some of this work was published as Prose Architectures in 2017). Printed in white ink on black, with a beautiful embroidered cover, One Long Black Sentence brings together these drawings with a text by New York-based theorist and poet Fred Moten (born 1962) to form a sumptuous artist's book in which drawing becomes an architecture for thought, for what writing looks like from the inside out. Fred Moten's "Anindex" pushes the index beyond its utilitarian conventions. At times riffing on the architectonics of Gladman's illustrations, Moten's associative poetic prose points toward the structuring imposition or emergence of sentences as the marks and forms of thought"--Bookseller's website.

Speech/Acts' brings together new and recent works by a generation of artists influenced by black experimental poetry. Recognizing language as a primary method of expressing and maintaining power, these artists use poetry as a tool to manipulate the conceptual and structural elements of language and the social contexts in which language is employed, appropriated and abstracted. Artists Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Martine Syms all use experimental poetry in their work as a means to interrogate the power structures of language, rendering the experience of blackness more physically and affectively exact. In this volume, their work is presented alongside their poetic forerunners (seminal texts by Fred Moten and Harryette Mullen are reprinted), newly commissioned poetry by Morgan Parker and Simone White, and a new essay by curator Meg Onli.

"The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet's mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten's verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother's Arkansas home through African American history and avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that words, sounds, and music give way to one another. The first and last poems in the collection are explicitly devoted to Moten's mother; the others relate more obliquely to her life and legacy. They invoke performers, writers, artists, and thinkers including not only James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Charlie Parker, and Cecil Taylor, but also contemporary scholars of race, affect, and queer theory. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Charles Henry Rowell, the editor of the journal Callaloo. Rowell elicits Moten's thoughts on the relation of his poetry to theory, music, and African American vernacular culture."--Publisher's website.

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, an exhibition space and research institute in San Francisco, dedicates year-long seasons of discussions and public events to a single artist. In 2016?17, the American artist David Hammons (born 1943) was "on our mind." The book begins with the previously unpublished transcript of a rare artist talk given by Hammons in 1994 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on the occasion of his exhibition there. It then introduces a series of photographs the artist sent to the Wattis Institute in 2017, interspersed with texts by the Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin and the writer and critic Fred Moten. Much like Hammons? work, this publication raises more questions than answers. Rather than functioning as a comprehensive introduction to the artist, 'David Hammons Is on Our Mind' offers visual and textual elements that relate obliquely to the enigmatic artist?s oeuvre.00Exhibition: CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, USA (09.09.2016-20.07.2017).

"As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, the co-editors of this singular book approached a dozen poets, asking them to engage with texts by their predecessors in a manner that avoids both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring texts not commonly included in its canon"--

The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls "shaped prose"--a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform.

This volume is published for a new site-specific installation that incorporates several films by Italian artist Adelita Husni Bey (born 1985), including the premiere of a major new work. 'Chiron' continues Husni Bey's explorations of the complexity of collectivity and the human and social consequences of imperialism. The introductory text to the catalog, "On exercise and outcome," by New Museum Associate Curator Helga Christoffersen, features a survey of Husni Bey's work from the past decade. Two new texts and an interview were written specifically for this catalog: "Who determines if something is habitable" by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, "Referred pain: On the work of Adelita Husni Bey" by Johanna Burton, and "There is water in among the Stones: A Conversation between Adelita Husni Bey and Hannah Black."

In Black and Blur--the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy: Consent not to be a single being--Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and Jose Esteban Munoz and musicians and artists including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

"In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons."