Sacred and Profane: An Artist Talk with Pamela SneedAbout this Event
The Department of Performance Studies is delighted to welcome multidisciplinary artist, Pamela Sneed, to the 6th floor for an artist talk this semester. Pamela currently has a show open at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, Sacred and Profane, running until April 12th. During the talk Pamela will reflect on the show at Leslie Lohman as well as her visual and performance work, speak about her multi-disciplinary practice, and give a poetry reading from a new manuscript titled 9:29 for George Floyd: poetry, criticism, protest and mourning.The talk will be followed by a Q/A moderated by Professor Fred Moten.BIO:
BIO:
Pamela Sneed is an award winning multi-disciplinary artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery published by Henry Holt in 1998, and republished by Fordham University Press in 2023. She is the author of KONG and Other Works by Vintage Entity Press, and Sweet Dreams by Belladona. She has authored numerous chaplets and chapbooks. Her most recent full-length book, Funeral Diva, was published by City Lights in Oct 2020 and was featured in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net, and others. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award and was recommended by the New York Times alongside Barack Obama’s memoir.
Pamela Sneed has appeared on panels for the David Zwirner Gallery and has spoken at the Bard Center for Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, the New School, the New York Public Library, SVA, Performa, the Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, NYU’s Center for Humanities, and the Whitney Museum. She has publishedwork in the Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, theAcademy of American Poets, Brooklyn Rail, 4Columns, THEM, CULTURED, BOMB Magazine and Poetry Magazine. Her poetry has appeared in Nikki Giovanni’s 100 Best African American Poems. In April 2025, She was guest critic for the Brooklyn Rail. In 2023, Sneed wrote the introduction to Sacred Spells: Collected Works of Assotto Saint by Nightboat.
Her visual work has appeared at Leslie Lohman Museum, the Ford Foundation, Kates-Ferris, and at the Lumber Room in Portland. In 2022, she had a solo show at Laurel Gitlen Gallery. She participated as a reader in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and was a narrator for Coco Fusco’s film, [name], also in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. She has had keynotes at Yale University, Georgetown University, SAIC, and Cornell. In March 2023, she premiered a solo performance, “A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton” at Park Avenue Armory and again at Joe's Pub in March 2024 and in February 2025. She has performed and presented across America and in South Africa and Europe. She won a Creative Capital Award in Literature in 2023 for an upcoming book of epics, America Aint Ready. She also won a 2024 NYSCA grant for poetry. She teaches across disciplines in Columbia’s MFA in Visual Arts. She is visiting faculty at the Whitney ISP and was a Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell University Fall 2024.
Event Venue
721 Broadway, Richard Schechner Studio, Room 612, 721 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 0.00
