Talks | Literary | Visual Art
Deana Lawson
- 7:30PM
Single Tickets
In conversation with Torkwase Dyson
Launch of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
Co-presented by BAM and Greenlight Bookstore
Photographer Deana Lawson comes to BAM to celebrate the launch of her first book. Lawson is joined by artist Torkwase Dyson to discuss Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (published by Aperture), which features 40 beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the novelist Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation with the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa.
Lawson is one of the most compelling photographers of her generation. Over the last 10 years, she has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the US and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. Throughout her work, which invites comparison to the photography of Diane Arbus, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful.
Book signing to follow.
Torkwase Dyson is a painter who works with multiple mediums. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Drawing Center, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. In 2016 Dyson was elected to the board of the Architecture League of New York as Vice President of Visual Arts. She is based in Jersey City and is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and Davidson Contemporary in New York.