Members Only: Love & Fury & Poetry & Prose

Please note: Attendees of this event must enter the museum via the 24th Street Entrance. The 23d street entrance will be closed for a private event. 

In honor of National Poetry Month and the exhibition Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS, Poster House members are invited to a special evening hosted by artists Eleanor Kipping and C. (Constantine Jones) of the cultural collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD?).  

Eleanor and C. will lead a workshop in which participants will consider poetry, visual language, and politics within the context of the Love & Fury exhibition. Attendees will be invited to engage in a variety of ways, including discussion, writing, and observation. This special event will be part exhibition tour and part creative exercise, encouraging a serious exploration of the current of lived human experiences that drove the grassroots response to AIDS from 1979 to 2003. 

Eleanor Kipping is a Brooklyn-based Artist, Educator and Arts Administrator, originally from Maine. Her multidisciplinary practice lies at the intersection of performance, installation and lens-based media and image making. Her work explores the othering of viruses at the intersection of race, gender, class and place. Through the examination and deconstruction of historical and contemporary narratives, she is interested in the public, private, and civic negotiations of race, gender, in addition to the effect and practice of violence and surveillance. She has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, School of Visual Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and her work has been exhibited at Portland Museum of Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Yellow Fish Durational Performance Festival, and more.

C. (Constantine Jones) is an interdisciplinary Greek-American “thingmaker” raised in Tennessee and now housed in Brooklyn. Their practice is collaborative in nature and rooted at the intersections of HIV/AIDS futurity, communal mythmaking as cultural archive, and poetry as catalyst for social instigation. They lead courses in composition, poetry, and hybrid writing modalities at the City College of New York (CUNY), and facilitate workshops at Brooklyn Poets, Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), Housing Works, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. A lifelong independent student of myth and epic poetry, C. is currently at work on writing and performing an epic of their own. Their work has been performed or exhibited at various venues across New York City and Tennessee.

WWHIVDD? is a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis. We understand a doula as someone who holds space during times of transition. We understand HIV as a series of transitions that begin long before a person is tested and that continue after treatment and beyond. We know that since no one gets HIV alone, no one should have to live with HIV alone. We doula ourselves, each other, institutions, and culture. Asking questions is foundational to our process.

This program is suitable for attendees above the age of 15.

Accessibility Note: Masks and clear masks are available free of charge at the museum. Assistive listening devices and stools are available. ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) is also available upon request. Please contact access@posterhouse.org or (914) 295-2387 to request interpretation services and to address any other accessibility needs. For other event-related questions, please contact info@posterhouse.org.