For the first in an ongoing series, Remote Intimacies, we are pleased to present a performance by Brontez Purnell. Graduation is a live action bedroom performance with text, moving portrait, and live feed installation art. Click HERE to register.
About Remote Intimacies
How can we sustain the intimacy we crave in these highly mediated times? What are our opportunities for communion across temporal and geographic distances? As we are asked to continually negotiate the screen as part of a new normal, artists are thinking through the specificity of these media. Remote Intimacies, a series of performances and encounters commissioned by Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and ONE Archives at USC LIbraries, takes its title from Karen Tongson’s theory on the powerful resonance of shared consumption and their capacity to “bring people, things, and concepts together, even if space and time dictates their dispersal and isolation." This series is organized and introduced by Stamatina Gregory, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Leslie Lohman Museum, Alexis Bard Johnson, Curator and Jeanne Vaccaro, postdoctoral fellow at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.
About Brontez Purnell
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. Recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for Fiction, he was named one of the 32 Black Male Writers for Our Time by T: New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, the co-founder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and, most recently, the documentary Unstoppable Feat: Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for over 18 years.
