Lives that Enter Mine: Notes and Narratives on Artists
Thursday, October 11, 7pm, Flex Space
What does an artwork reveal about an artist, but only in part? What do artists, in making a life from day to day, reveal about their art, but only in part? How do I find a way between these two mysteries, lugging, inevitably, the weighted sack of my own life?
There are varying reasons why I chose the artists in A Sum of Encounters, my yearlong project profiling Nigerian artists—their dazzling artworks, my proximity to them, our friendship, their relevance in art history, etc. I deem all those justifications as subjective, even a little simplistic. I am most interested in recording facsimiles of our encounters, paid passage to a world of greater clarity.
EMMANUEL IDUMA is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Born and raised in Nigeria, his essays and stories have appeared in a range of journals, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and artist monographs, including Aperture, Art in America, ArtNews, Guernica, Hyperallergic, British Journal of Photography, and Brooklyn Rail. He holds an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, where he is a faculty member, and received a 2017 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation grant in arts writing for his profiles of Nigerian artists. He is the author of a novel The Sound of Things to Come, and A Stranger's Pose, an innovative blend of memoir, travelogue, and photography, to be published in October 2018 by Cassava Republic Press.