Book Release, Concert & Conversation:
Sam Gould with Marlon James
Music by peepers (Tianna Kennedy & Benedict Kupstas)
Friday, November 17, 2023
6 PM – 11PM
SUNVIEW
We are so excited to have Minneapolis-based Confluence Studio Director and Co-Founder and early Sunview-er Sam Gould join us this week for a conversation with Marlon James on occasion of the release of a new collection of essays by Gould titled America Composes Itself, published by Publication Studio / Hudson. Books will be available for purchase. Music by peepers to follow. BYOB.
Written, roughy, between 2014 - 2018 Gould’s essays sketch out a shifting American consciousness on the brink of destruction—or, maybe, radical transformation. Many of these essays began to take shape in Beyond Repair’s old space, Transmission, in South Minneapolis’ Midtown Global Market. At the time author Marlon James was often sitting across from Sam Gould at work on his novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf.
Here’s what the publisher has to say about the event:
Upstate cider will be drunk, glowing conversation will be had, music by Tianna Kennedy, Benedict Kupstas (peepers) and friends will be enjoyed, and rats avoided (as space and rats allow). Freshly bound books will be available for sale. We will read together and also listen to the author’s debut performance of “Imagine, Mr. Speaker, a World without Balloons!!” Intrigued? Of course you are! You are an American, meddlesome and impious. ~PS HUDSON
About
An artist, writer, and editor / organizer, Sam Gould co-founded the cultural collaborative Red76 (2000 - 2015), an artistic and social configuration on the forefront of the burgeoning movement that became known as Social Practice. Focused on ideas around publication as an act of public making, his work often centers aspects of sociality, education, and encountering the political within daily life. In 2015 he established Beyond Repair, an “expanded publication,” functioning as a long now site of questioning and social collaboration with the aim to move past the rhetoric of “people and places that need fixing,” and towards a space of reflective self-determination and collaborative creation among his neighbors in Minneapolis’ 9th Ward. In the orbit of Beyond Repair he is the director and co-founder of Confluence: An East Lake Studio for Community Design along with longtime collaborator Duaba Unenra. An incubator for Social Craft, Confluence Studio believes “neighbors make neighborhoods, people make place.” Gould was a founding faculty member within the graduate department for Social Practice at the California College of the Arts, the first such department to be established in the United States, as well as a full-time visiting professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was a recipient of a 2014 McKnight Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship and a 2017 McKnight Foundation Mid-Career grant. He has lectured extensively within the United States and abroad at institutions such as Harvard University, the New Museum, and SF MoMA; held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Luminary, Villa Montalvo, and elsewhere; and has had projects commissioned by institutions such as Creative Time, the Walker Arts Center, Printed Matter, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and many others. The complete issues of Journal of Radical Shimming, the publication that he edited and designed for Red76, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. A collection of essays and conversations, America Composes Itself, is set to be published in the spring of 2023 through Publication Studio.
Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. He is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2019. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James divides his time between Minnesota and New York.
