Cameron Granger and Hanif Abdurraqib on Art and Grace

In Conversation: Cameron Granger and Hanif Abdurraqib on Art and Grace
September 26, 2020 at 6:00 PM
Via Zoom

In association with the Columbus Museum of Art’s acquisition of Cameron Granger’s moving video This Must Be the Place, join us for a free online conversation via Zoom between the artist and poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib, both of them Columbus-based.

On the evening of June 17, 2015, a white supremacist gunman opened fire on a group of black congregants at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people, including the church’s pastor and South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney. Eight days later, President Barack Obama delivered a eulogy to Pinckney from the pulpit of Emanuel AME, urging listeners—and the American public—toward moral self-examination.

Granger’s video This Must Be the Place offers a poignant meditation on the themes of Obama’s eulogy, drawing from the audio recording of his speech, and centering on the keyword “grace.” Combining live action scenes with found footage, the work invites us to discover the meaning of grace on our own terms. Join Granger and Abdurraqib for a conversation exploring this work and the significance of art and grace now.

Watch This Must Be the Place from Cameron Granger on Vimeo

This Must Be The Place from Cameron A Granger on Vimeo.

Cameron A. Granger

Cameron A. Granger
Cameron A. Granger came up in Cleveland, Ohio alongside his mother, Sandra, inheriting both her love of soul music and habit of apologizing too much. A 2017 alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, he uses his work to reconcile his place in and role as a product of American history and its media. His recent projects include: The Get Free Telethon, a 24 hour livestream community fundraiser sponsored by Red Bull Arts; Pearl, a body of collaborative works with his mother at Ctrl+Shft in Oakland; and A library, for you,a traveling community library most recently housed at ikattha project space in Bombay, India.

Read more about Granger in this Columbus Alive profile by Hanif Abdurraqib: The fearlessness of rising filmmaker, artist, and cultural critic Cameron Granger.

Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, who has been published in the New York Times, New Yorker, FADER, and Pitchfork. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much(Button Poetry, 2016) was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017) was named a book of the year by Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, Los Angeles Review, and the Chicago Tribune, among others. His critically acclaimed Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas, 2019) is a New York Times Bestseller. His next book is A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, scheduled to be released March 2021.

This program is sponsored by CMA’s Contemporaries Group.