Carolee Schneemann was a writer and artist of intimacy — bloody, feline, mortal, ancient, and tender. Her understanding of intimacy or union included the weaving of written and uttered language, movement and gesture, and the visual register of images throughout her art-making practice. And it also extended to the way she lived, in close friendship with many poets, forming community with fellow writers, artists, and makers across a number of scenes, circles, disciplines, challenging and inspiring and turning on her friends and collaborators. In a 1975 letter Carolee Schneemann wrote to a male friend attempting to explain gender and art to her, “I BELONG TO NATURE NOT TO THESE ARTIFACTS YOU CHOOSE. I AM ELECTRICAL VULVIC BOLT IN TIME.” 

Her work — simultaneously provocative, unsettling, defiant, romantic, and magnetic — has often been critically understood through sensuality and the body. While this uncompromising embodiment is crucial, in her writing we find guiding notes and framing toward a more expansive engagement with her project, always moving towards the reckoning pleasure of liberation. The writing, like her work across other mediums, is always intense, precise, rigorous, with her psychic and political senses attuned through her vision to a guiltless, boundless freedom. 

Join us October 10 for a celebration of her writing! With readings by Zohra Atash, Lilah Dougherty, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Pierre Joris, Meredith Monk, Nicole Peyrafitte, George Quasha, Jerome Rothenberg, David Levi Strauss, Cecilia Vicuña, and Anne Waldman.