IN CONVERSATION: GABRIELLE CIVIL AND AMANDA HUNT

Amanda Hunt is Director of Education and Public Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and co-curator of the 2019 Desert X Biennial in Palm Springs. Past appointments include Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Curator at LA><ART, Los Angeles, where she helped coordinate the 2012 Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival for The Getty Research Institute and Made in L.A. 2012, the Hammer Museum’s first Los Angeles biennial. At the Studio Museum, Hunt produced exhibitions including A Constellation, Black Cowboy, and in 2016 commissioned inHarlem: Kevin Beasley, Simone Leigh, Kori Newkirk, Rudy Shepherd, a public sculpture initiative in partnership with the New York City Parks Department. Hunt was also the first non-regional curator of the Portland Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2014. She obtained her master’s in curatorial practice from California College of the Arts.

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original performance artworks around the world, including a year-long investigation of practice as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and a trilogy of diaspora grief works after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Recent performances include Q&A (Eclipsing) (Chicago), a ritual of nest and flight (Toronto); and …hewn and forged…. (Salt Lake City). Since May 2014, she has been performing Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls) as an act of embodied remembering. Her art writing has appeared in The Third Rail, Art21, Small Axe, and Obsidian. Her essays and translations have appeared in Something on Paper, Aster(ix), and Two Lines. Her memoir in performance art Swallow the Fish was named by Entropy a “Best Non-Fiction Book of 2017.” Her forthcoming book Experiments in Joy engages race, performance, and collaboration. Starting in Fall 2018, she will teach MFA Creative Writing courses and BFA Critical Studies courses at CalArts.