1-844-NOT-Z00M archives


 

Vol. 1

 

 

Kevin Simmonds is a writer, musician, and filmmaker. Poetry collections include Mad for Meat, Bend to it, The Monster I am Today (forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books), and The System Must Be Tried. Some published essays include On Fire: Five Meditations on Opera, Open to interpretation: fifteen notes on form and failure, On the Genesis of Poetry & the New Black Masculinity, and Seven for Kwame. Simmonds edited Collective Brightness and Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof. Simmonds is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and based in San Francisco, California.

 

Professor Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa is a Zimbabwean scholar, composer, singer, and healer based in Philadelphia. Working in classical Southern African and classical Western vocal traditions, Prof. Tawengwa’s storytelling serves to bridge Zimbabwe’s past and present, in order to inform a self-crafted future. Prof. Tawengwa is the inaugural Creative in Residence at Castle of Our Skins, and a doctoral candidate in Voice Performance at the University of Kentucky.

 

Angelica Garcia is a Salvadorian-Mexican-American singer-songwriter. Her music merges ancestral Latinx and pop sounds. Garcia has released two full-length albums Cha Cha Palace (2020) and Medicine for Birds (2016). Singles include “Karma the Knife” (2018),  “Jicama” (2019), and “Agua de Rosa” (2020). Garcia also wrote music for the television series “Vida.” Garcia is based in Richmond, Virginia.

 

Vol. 2

 

 

Annie Bielski’s paintings, sculpture, and video have been exhibited at NADA (New York), Art Rio (Rio de Janeiro), Burning in Water (NYC), SEPTEMBER (Hudson), Paris London Hong Kong (Chicago), High Tide (Philadelphia), Lodos Gallery (Mexico City), and The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland). Bielski has performed at SEPTEMBER, Basilica Hudson, The Museum of Modern Art, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and CANADA. She has collaborated with musician Jenny Hval and performed across the US and Europe. Bielski lives and works between New York and New Mexico.

Kenneka Cook is a Richmond native who’s been described as “a new vision in cosmic jazz.” Her work combines soul-inflected vocals with electronic loops and spacey improvisational elements. Her debut album “Moonchild” premiered on Afropunk in 2018 and she has performed extensively in Richmond and along the East Coast.

Taylor Simone is a graphic artist and writer. Simone’s work explores the triumph and discovery of self that sits within the nexus of destruction and creation. By leaning into fragmentation, she unpacks death’s beauty as a constant within rebirth. She received her MFA in Visual Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently teaching at Bowling Green State University. Simone currently lives and works in Toledo, Ohio.


 

Vol. 3

 

 

Shanekia McIntosh is a writer, poet, and performer McIntosh has read and shown her work at The New Museum Second Ward Foundation, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Hudson Hall, NY Live Arts, September Gallery, and more, with recent work being published in Hand Mirror, Chronogram, Apogee Journal, and The TENTH Magazine.

Kiko Soirée is a drag queen performing all over Manhattan and Brooklyn at venues like Joe’s Pub, Club Cumming, The Bell House, Ars Nova, Caroline’s, Union Hall, MoCA, Housing Works, and Caveat. Their work and quality has been described as sensual, sincere, and stupid. They’ve been named by Time Out Magazine and Paper Magazine as a rising queer performer and features in Gregory Kramer’s DOWNTOWN, a portrait documentation of downtown life in New York City. Kiko loves noodle soups, lasagna, the ocean, and cornbread.

Working across myriad disciplines, Detroit-based artist, performer, filmmaker and harpist, Ahya Simones practice is bound by an exploration of Black identity, aesthetics, and vulnerability. Ahya’s versatile approach to harp and vocal artistry includes classical, jazz, and soul and creates an almost mesmerizing on-stage moment. As an emerging filmmaker, Simone developed “Femme Queen Chronicles,” a web-series sponsored by the Trans Sistas of Color Project and the Detroit Narrative Agency 2.0.


 

Vol. 4

 

 

Jenny Hval is a Norwegian artist and writer. Her work, spanning seven solo albums, three books, and numerous other projects, brings together musical, literary, visual, and performative modes of expression. Her latest album is The Practice of Love (2019), and her latest book, Å hate Gud (2018) was published in English in 2020 as Girls Against God.

Tennishu is a lyricist, multi-instrumentalist, and music producer from Richmond, VA. He is a member of the fusion group and Concord Records Recording Artist Butcher Brown and he is also the President and founder of James Infinite Music.

Ephraim Asili
is an artist, filmmaker, and professor in the Film Department at Bard College whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force.

 


Vol. 5:

 

Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist and designer interested in how migration affects ways of being & belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Currently Cruz is a fellow and resident at A.I.R. Gallery (2020-2021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), and Center for Books Arts (2020-2021).

Obituaries of The American Dream invites participants locally and globally, non-im/migrants and im/migrants to share when and how the American Dream died for them. These obituaries will be published daily on the site and in a publicly distributed newspaper in New York City next year for El Museo del Barrio ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 curated by Rodrigo Moura, Susanna Temkin, and Elia Alba. Share your story at www.obituariesoftheamericandream.com

 

Ahomari Turner is a queer black disabled artist from the south exploring themself and others through music since it’s cheaper than therapy.

Their Girl Kiss II EP was released in 2020 via Quiet Year Records.

 

L’Rain is the mononym of Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Taja Cheek. Her songs reference R&B, jazz, noise, and pop, at once visceral, spiritual, ethereal, and urgent. She explores the nuances of Black grief and Black joy, using voice memos and manipulated samples as inspiration and source material.

L’Rain’s sophomore album Fatigue is out June 25 via Mexican Summer.

“Untitled” is a loose improvisation between L’Rain and bandmate Ben Chapoteau-Katz.

 

Vol. 6:

In a mashup of two separate Public Study strands, Doing Language: Word Work artists will take over volumes 6 and 7 of 1-844-NOT-Z00M.

Malcolm Peacock is an artist who is interested in the intersection between bodily movement and traditions of Black radical ideologies. Peacock’s practice of reciting Black radical texts is an exercise in language embodiment, expanding upon emotional and psychic spaces inhabited by Black subjects.

 

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. 

 

Joselia Rebekah Hughes is a Black disabled writer and allo-practice artist. She works to untangle the language(s) of liminality; instruments abstractions on the conditions of Blackness; interrogates reclamation and refusal through play; and reappraises societal perceptions of ability, chronic illness and disability to imagine and concretize alternative passages of survival and living. Her book, Blackable: a Nopem, is forthcoming from Inpatient Press.