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When: Friday February 17, 2023; 5:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Cost: Free | Seating is limited. Call 843-379-7025 to reserve in advance
Location: Beaufort Arts Council, (921 Ribaut Road, Beaufort)
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center and Beaufort Arts Council will host art historian Midori Yamamura, speaking on Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail (1966) and poet Luis H. Francia, reading from his newest collection Thorn Grass (2021).
Free and open to the public, this partnership program will be held on Friday, February 17, from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. at the Beaufort Arts Council, 921 Ribaut Road, Beaufort. Seating is limited; please call the Conroy Center in advance at 843-379-7025 to reserve your spot.
Books will be available for sale and signing. There will be a brief intermission between the two presentations.
Painting to Hammer a Nail is one of Yoko Ono’s most celebrated pieces, exhibited at Indica Gallery in London in 1966. The participatory art marked her encounter with the British pop culture icon and her future husband, John Lennon. Before this piece, Painting to Hammer a Nail existed in four forms of texts (1961-62), and later, it became a sculpture (1967). This talk examines the transformations of Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail In (1961-62/66/67) in relation to her gender in Tokyo, New York, and London. It discusses how Ono envisioned forming society using art.
Website: Facebook Event Page
About our presenters:
Midori Yamamura, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History at the CUNY Kingsborough Community College and the 2022-23 Alcaly/Bodian Distinguished Scholar at The Advanced Research Collaborative, the CUNY Graduate Center, specializes in global contemporary art history focusing on Asia and its diaspora.
The author of Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (MIT Press: 2015) and a co-editor of Visual Representation and the Cold War: Art and Postcolonial Struggles in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2021), as a feminist art historian of color, her interest is in exploring the ideas that emerge in marginal space in society. In Spring 2022, Yamamura co-organized a community-based pedagogical exhibition, UnHomeless NYC (March-April, 2022), with a multi-disciplinary group of scholars and housing activists. Her new book, Japanese Contemporary Art Since 1989: Emergence of the Local in the Age of Globalization, examines the impact of technocracy on art in neoliberal society and the new ideas that emerged in the spaces devastated by the globally homogenous value system.
Luis H. Francia is a poet, playwright, nonfiction writer, and occasional filmmaker. He is an adjunct professor at New York University, where he teaches Filipino Language and Culture.
His latest poetry collection is Thorn Grass (University of the Philippines Press, 2021). Previous collections include Tattered Boat, The Beauty of Ghosts, Museum of Absences, and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems. Included in many anthologies, he has been a first-prize winner in the Philippines’ most prestigious literary competition, the Palanca Literary Awards, and honored by the Union of Philippine Writers in 2014. His works have been translated into Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, French, and German. He has read at numerous literary festivals in Australia, Canada, China, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, and in various US cities, such as New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Chicago.
His nonfiction works include the memoir Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, winner of both the 2002 PEN Open Book Award and the 2002 Asian American Writers award, and Memories of Overdevelopment: Reviews and Essays of Two Decades. His A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos was published in 2010, with a revised edition in 2014. He is in the Library of America’s Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. His latest collection of nonfiction, RE: Reflections, Reviews, and Recollections, was released in 2015.
His first full-length play The Strange Case of Citizen de la Cruz, was given its world premiere by Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco in 2012, and restaged in 2022 by New York’s Atlantic Pacific Theater . Another play, Black Henry, on Magellan’s 1521 landfall in the Philippines, was virtually staged by New York University ’s King Juan Carlos Center and Sulo: Philippine Studies Initiative, in late April of 2021, the quincentennial of that historic voyage.
He has taught poetry, nonfiction writing, and playwriting at, among other places, Yale, the Iowa Writers Program, the City University of Hong Kong, Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, China, and St. Benilde College and Ateneo de Manila University in Manila.
Husband and wife, Francia and Yamamura live in Jackson Heights, Queens.
