Featured Events in Clark in February 2025 (May Updated)

InnervisionsThe American conception of blackness is bound to the inherent limits of their figurative depictions. As the Civil Rights Movement emerged, Black artists began to shift to create new forms of artistic expression and visual representations of African American culture, identity, social issues and perception of reality. This process ushered in the Abstract expressionist movement, which motivated Black artists to question the quintessential Black image while creating visual commentary based on the multifaceted experiences within Black culture, furthering the development of the Black aesthetic. Abstract expressionism transitioned to non-figurative concepts while including geometric elements to create patterns or motifs, gestural brush strokes, and flattened abstract forms. These artists embraced the model that black artists could create politically charged work and art that is purely aesthetic. Infusing African art forms, influences of modern jazz through improvisational techniques, or creating work that is conceptual or minimalistic. Innervisions, refers to Black artists visual presentation of their internal perception or understanding of themselves, their own thoughts, feelings, and motivations on a metaphysical landscape. Revealing that the Black experience itself is abstract, and although these artists are working from different points of innovation their thoughts merge at similar points. This exhibition features loaned works and pieces from the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum permanent collection exploring the lineage of pioneering Black abstract expressionist artists including Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Felrath Hines, who influenced contemporary black abstract artists such as Sharon Barnes, Dante Hayes, and Nanette Carter. Innervisions iuxtaposes the past with the present and shows how Black abstraction created a space for alternative visual self-exploration. RediscoveryThe Clark Atlanta University Art Museum has been collecting African American art and artof the African Diaspora since the Atlanta University Art Annuals competition began in 1942. Since then, the collection has continued to evolve and grow, it has become a representation of a comprehensive African American art history. As the museum continues to develop exhibitions, the permanent collection will remain the priority. Rediscovery emphasizes the importance and relevance of the collection within the American art historical narrative. It also acknowledges that the permanent collection has never been seen in its entirety but will exhibit works that have remained unseen or exhibited in recent years, new acquisitions, undergone conservation, pieces that travel. This exhibition includes works by Samella Sanders Lewis, Henri Linton, Radcliffe Bailey, John Rhoden, and John Woodrow Wilson among others. Information Source: Clark Atlanta University Art Museum | eventbrite

Join us on Thursday, February 6th for an event with Nina Sudhakar, celebrating the release of Where to Carry the Sound. For this event, Nina will be joined in conversation by Ananda Lima. Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is requested. Masks are required for our in-person events. The stories in Where to Carry the Sound center on characters excavating their own lives: unearthing family secrets, exploring inherited silences, and rediscovering what might have seemed lost to them. Wherever these characters find themselves—including brewing bootleg liquor in Prohibition-era Bombay, finding remnants of a new language at an archaeological dig in Andhra Pradesh, seeking mirages above the Arctic Circle, or setting up an outpost on the moon—each seeks to reconcile a past continually bleeding into the present and to forge a path of belonging to carry them into the future. “This collection of nine magical stories (including a few actual fairy tales) enchanted me. Many of the stories are set in India, and most of the narrators are women—photographers, bootleggers, archeologists, religious pilgrims, perfumers, and one lonely lunar caretaker. The writing is both lush and lean, and the images of marigolds, haunted villages, and man-killing tigers are memorable. The ends aren’t always happily-ever-after but are always satisfying. Where to Carry the Sound is a delight to read.”—Molly Giles, judge and author of The Home for Unwed Husbands Nina Sudhakar is a writer, poet, and lawyer based in Chicago. She is the author of Where to Carry the Sound (winner of the 2024 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction) and two poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Salamander, The Rumpus, Witness, and elsewhere. She serves as Dispatches and Book Reviews Editor at The Common and on the board of the Chicago Poetry Center. For more, please see www.ninasudhakar.com. Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and was longlisted for the New American Voices Award and the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago and New York. Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com. Information Source: Women & Children First | eventbrite

Watch a film selected from VPL's digital collections at your convenience, and then join our monthly discussions to share your thoughts. Join in person or on Zoom. Register on Eventbrite. Jan 8: Brand Upon the Brain https://www.kanopy.com/en/vaughan/video/3622236 Feb 12: A Letter to Momo https://www.kanopy.com/en/vaughan/video/962554 Registration for February begins on January 22nd. Vaughan Public Libraries is committed to accessibility. Please email us here to inquire about accommodation for our programs. The personal information collected from you on this form will only be used for the purpose of Vaughan Public Libraries' program and/or event registration. Your personal information will not be shared with outside organizations, except as indicated in the Privacy Statement. Information Source: Vaughan Public Libraries | eventbrite

We are excited to host Muriel Leung, author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Diaster, on Wednesday, February 19th at 7pm CST. For this event, Muriel will be joined in conversation by Helene Achanzar. Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Masks are required at our in-person events. A dark and tender debut set against a writhing backdrop of postapocalyptic New York City. Acid rainstorms have transformed New York City into a toxic wasteland, cutting its remaining citizens off from one another. In one apartment building, an unlikely family of humans and ghosts survives. Mira reels from a devastating breakup with her partner, Mal, whose whereabouts are unknown, while her mother is plagued by furious dreams and her grandfather, Grandpa Why, stakes his claims as a rambunctious ghost. Across the hall, the cockroach Shin, also a ghost. As the world around them worsens, each character must learn to redefine what it means to live, die, and love at the end of the world. Muriel Leung (she/they) is the author of the forthcoming debut novel How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster (W.W. Norton & Company) in addition to three poetry collections that include Bone Confetti, Imagine Us, The Swarm, and Images Seen to Images Felt with Kristine Thompson. She teaches critical studies and creative writing at the California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Helene Achanzar (she/her) is a poet and editor whose writing has been published in The Georgia Review, Sixth Finch, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2022 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, she is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest and the director of programs at the Chicago Poetry Center. Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. We have dimmable, non-fluorescent lights. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com. Information Source: Women & Children First | eventbrite

Please join us for an event with Rebe Huntman celebrating the release of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle. For this event, Rebe will be joined in conversation by Jessamine Chan. Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Masks are required for our in-person events. A daughter's search for her deceased mother brings her face to face with the gods, ghosts, and saints of Cuba. My Mother in Havana lifts the veil between the living and the dead and makes believers of us all. This story of a mother's absence and a daughter's need is written with a lyricism that filled my heart with beauty while also making it ache for loved ones lost. This is a stunning debut. --Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever I closed this book believing more than ever that the people we love, including the people we've been, never really leave us. --Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful Writing with a physicality of language that moves like the body in dance, Rebe Huntman, a poet, choreographer, and dancer, embarks on a pilgrimage into the mysteries of the gods and saints of Cuba and their larger spiritual view of the Mother. Huntman offers a window into the extraordinary world of Afro-Cuban gods and ghosts and the dances and rituals that call them forth. As she explores the memory of her own mother, interlacing it with her search for the sacred feminine, Huntman leads us into a world of's ance and sacrifice, pilgrimage and sacred dance, which resurrect her mother and bring Huntman face to face with a larger version of herself. Rebe Huntman is a memoirist, essayist, dancer, teacher and poet. For over a decade she was head of the award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its dance company, One World Dance Theater. Rebe collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, has been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune and on Fox and ABC News. The recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence award, Rebe has received support for this book from the Ohio State University, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Playa, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She lives in Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Jessamine Chan is the author of The School for Good Mothers, which was a New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022. Translations in twenty languages have been published or are forthcoming. She lives in Chicago with her family. Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com. Information Source: Women & Children First | eventbrite