Lecture

Anna Martine Whitehead: Still in the Waiting Room

Oct 23, 2024

7:00–8:30pm ET

Starr Foundation Hall, University Center
The New School, 63 Fifth Avenue

Spanning installation, collage, socially-engaged performance, and opera, Anna Martine Whitehead‘s work circles around questions of containment and liberation. How do bodies express livingness when penned in? What is the relationship between architecture and the voice? What does somatic solidarity with people in prison feel like? Ahead of the presentation of Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts at the Chocolate Factory in November, this performative talk explores the past decade of Whitehead’s practice, focusing especially on the Black femme waiting room.

The New York City presentation of FORCE! an opera in three acts is co-commissioned by Chocolate Factory and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, where Whitehead is a 2022–2024 VLC Fellow. This Parsons Visiting Artist Lecture is part of the public programming for the commission and co-organized by Parsons Fine Arts and the Vera List Center.

The Fall 2024 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, individual donors as well as the following institutional funders:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation/The Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation
Mellon Foundation
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts
New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
Terra Foundation for American Art
and The New School