Kenyon Adams (Exhibition Co-Curator) is a multi-disciplinary artist and artistic director. Through performance-based practices, he seeks to reclaim or expand embodied ways of knowing, towards imagining and constructing sustainable futures. His practice is concerned with notions of citizenship, locating pleasure and satisfaction within the scope of justice. For this work, the artist engages text, photography, music and performance; as well as foodways, devised liturgies, and site-specific interventions. Kenyon’s ritual cycle, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION, includes the performance work, PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE (directed by Bill T. Jones), which invites audiences to sit, kneel, and chant King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The second work in the trilogy, entitled COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration, premieres at the Fisher Center in 2023. Kenyon is a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, Artist in Residence at the University of Texas Austin (TX Performing Arts) and founder of FUTURE SOLITUDE, an art series and lifestyle brand that examines and speculates modes and sites of leisure.
Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership to Live Ideas (New York Live Arts), Yale School of Drama, the Langston Hughes Project, Louis Armstrong House Museum, YoungARTS, Grace Farms Arts, the National Arts Policy Roundtable (Americans for the Arts, Sundance Institute), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Kenyon has performed nationally as a vocalist, songwriter, and blues harmonica player, making his feature film debut as Jason in Golden Globe Award-winning director Lee Isaac Chung’s narrative feature Lucky Life, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and Moscow International Film Festival. Kenyon served as Artist in Residence at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music for the 2015-16 academic year. His multi-media performance works have addressed issues of legibility, race, and American memory.