Critical Grooves Book Lab, V

Plains Art Museum’s Voices of Creative Change Initiative | Fugitive Laboratory for Ideas—Creativity (VCCI-FLIC) announces its fifth iteration of its community-based book forum, Critical Grooves Book Lab.

For our fifth session (Winter – Spring ’24), we will read four writers who are very familiar to the literary landscape. In fact, these writers and their novels embed themes that converge with the themed-exhibition, This is Not Black & White. We extend the Book Lab’s discursive platform by linking up featured artists and their works with each of the novels.

For example, Alfred Conteh’s Malik and Marquis (2020) dialogues with Ralph Ellison’s monumental classic, Invisible Man in nuanced ways that point up the tragic dimensions of American democracy. Too, Pearl Cleage’s Things I Should Have Told My Daughter grapples with feminism and humanism, from within the tragic dimensions of Ellison's portrait of American democracy. Cleage interrogates our capacity to be human; and, in so doing, never forgets that these crucial questions often require a gracefulness and wisdom that escape the purview of war and violence—also the concerns of artists Glenn Ligon, Henry Moore, and Harmony Hammond, for example.

If placed in dialog with artists Kerry James Marshall, Marty Two Bulls, Jr. Ed Moses, and Andy Warhol, Ann Petry’s The Street exposes the forgeries of cultural difference that so many of us depend upon when thinking about how we are humanly constituted in both American and global contexts. Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café asks us to consider narrative patterns, voice, and perspective: Who tells whose story, within what conditions, and how? Further, in the same way that Jennifer Onofrio deals with the spectral traces of human consciousness and reality, Bailey's Cafe constructs mythical dimensions that absorb the realities with which its characters struggle.

All four novels call attention to a peculiar progress narrative that is supposed to render all endings neat, clean, digestible, and “happy.” Similarly, the artists featured inThis is Not Black and White expose the instabilities of language, narrative, identity, and progress.

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If this assemblage of exciting yet complex voices along with the prospect of reading (and re-reading) the exhibition, This is Not Black and White, sounds compelling, please join us at Plains Art Museum on the select dates below. Light refreshments and beverages will be provided. Feel free to bring your own beverages/snacks, as well.

Projected Winter-Spring Schedule (2024)

February 22: The Street by Ann Petry

Mar. 28: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Apr. 25: Bailey's Cafe by Gloria Naylor

May 23: Things I Should Have Told My Daughter by Pearl Cleage

To encourage broad participation, you may acquire the selected texts through convenient means, as per your situation. Also note: Critical Grooves Book Lab selections will also be available for purchase from The Store at Plains Art Museum • 704 1st Ave. N • Fargo, ND 58102.

Ages 16+ are welcomed.

Host or Publisher VCCI-FLIC c/o Plains Art Museum