About this Event
You are invited to our next Hawthornden Brooklyn in Conversation event! Come hear artists featured in The Library of Hettie Jones exhibit at Hawthornden Brooklyn discuss their work with curator Kalia Brooks.
Hettie Jones was the visionary author of over 20 books of prose and poetry, a publisher and member of the Beat Generation, as well as an educator, editor, and speaker. The Jones family has been incredibly kind in their donation of her personal library to Hawthornden Brooklyn’s Library, and The Library of Hettie Jones show represents work by some of the many artists in her circle of friends. Artists Candida Alvarez, Winifred Bendiner-Viani, Sono Kuwayama, Accra Shepp and Paul Viani will discuss their work and their relationship with Hettie Jones with curator Kalia Brooks.
Doors open at 6:30 PM. Space is limited. Exact location will be shared via a reminder email two days before the event. You will only receive this email if you RSVP.
If you will need accessible seating, or have any other questions, please email [email protected]. You can learn more about Hawthornden Brooklyn here.
Candida Alvarez (b.1955, Brooklyn, NY) is widely recognized as one of her generation’s most highly innovative and experimental painters creating kaleidoscopic abstract paintings that spin together personal and cultural knowledge with everyday life. Her work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Denver Art Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York, Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Seattle Art Museum; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Addison Gallery of American Art, among others. Alvarez is an alum of the Yale School of Art (1993-95) and Fordham University at Lincoln Center, NY (1973-77) and Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998-2023) where she is now Professor Emeriti. In 2024 she was the Alex Katz Chair in Painting at the Cooper Union, NY. Alvarez has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1981), Studio Museum in Harlem (1985), Pilchuck Glass School (1998), and LUMA Foundation (2023), among others. Her awards include the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2025), Trellis Art Fund Award (2024), Mellon Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art (2022) The Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptors Grant (2019). Alvarez is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago and Richard Gray Gallery, NY.
Winifred Bendiner-Viani grew up in New York City but moved many times in her childhood, living across the United States and Central America. She learned to draw early. As a young girl she was taught to use a needle and thread and from then on, textiles became a vehicle for deep investigation. In her teens, she learned traditional weaving techniques in Mexico, expanding her awareness of the complexity of structures within the weaving vocabulary. Attending Cooper Union opened new pathways in her work, and later she researched the patterns of Kuba culture from central Congo, as documented in her CUNY Graduate Center masters thesis. In her life as an artist, the use of materials beyond their traditional purpose has long been an interest and a vehicle in the evolution of her work. She now prefers to use a type of wire used for electrical purposes and a tempered wire frequently used for string instruments. The making of art has been a lifetime involvement, and a daily activity for her.
Kalia Brooks is a Program Officer at The Hearthland Foundation—an organization that champions justice, equity, and connection through the power of art and storytelling. With a background spanning arts, advocacy, and nonprofit leadership, Brooks supports artists and creative organizations working at the intersection of culture and social change. She leads strategy, manages diverse grant portfolios, and cultivates relationships across the visual arts ecosystem to amplify narratives that reimagine our shared democracy. Grounded in equity and driven by curiosity, Brooks brings a curator’s eye and a strategist’s mind to her work—valuing imagination, collaboration, and creative risk. Whether developing new funding pathways or convening artists and cultural leaders, she is committed to fostering a vibrant, inclusive arts landscape where visionary ideas can thrive, and communities can connect.
Sono Kuwayama lives and works in New York City. Her works include installation, painting, sculpture, video and writing. For Kuwayama, an intimate connection to her materials is essential: “nearly everything she creates is sourced by hand. She forages berries and crushes charcoal to add pigment to milk compound paints while spinning her own yarn and going so far as to identify the sheep that it came from.” (Rebecca Kim, Hypebeast, 2020). The works and installations explore spatial relationships and are often site specific. These transformations in space, transformations of materials, and transformations in consciousness are key elements of her explorations. She is increasingly interested in interdisciplinary work and while traveling globally for her work, has looked towards “language” to inform her art. In some cases this has been an exploration of indigenous languages and their relationships to place or the language of objects in a given location, the language of the landscape as well as internal and external landscapes.
Accra Shepp is an artist and writer who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His images have been exhibited worldwide and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other institutions. He is the author of Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He is the recipient of a senior Fulbright fellowship and has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Civitella, and Light Work.
Paul Viani has lived in NYC for most of his life. He grew up in the center of Manhattan, on Thompson and Sullivan Streets with all that it had to offer. An essential part of New York is its stories, of its places and its people. Once he discovered a camera he had his own way of telling his stories. And the storytelling continues.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Hawthornden Brooklyn, Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, United States
USD 0.00
