Steffani jemison promise machine excerpt
Steffani Jemison is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been shown at Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, and other US and international venues.
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In conversation steffani jemison jamilah lemieux alexander provan and michael c vazquez
Personal life
Jemison was born in Berkeley, California. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). She was a Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awardee (2013) and Art Matters Awardee (2014). She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and the Art Institute of Chicago.
As a child, she attended summer camp at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Her favorite class was one in which she was asked to write a story about one of the works in the collection.
Works
Major works include Prime (2016), Promise Machine (2015), Projections (2014), Stroke (2013) You Completes Me (2013), Personal (2014), Escaped Lunatic (2010–11), Maniac Chase (2008-9), and Same Time.
Promise Machine combined a reading group with performance. Participants formed a "Utopia Club," based on the Utopia Neighborhood Club, and including artists, activists, writers, and book club members. Jemison created a musical performance incorporating text generated in the reading group. Jemison was partially inspired by the shared reading experiences that a church creates. Promise Machine attempts to create a similar experience in a secular space. Prime references texts from key historical and cultural moments to explore the relationship between privacy and revolution.
You Completes Me is a performance installation that a live reading of excerpts from urban fiction while the 1927 film The Scar of Shame plays, putting historical moments in conversation with contemporary ones.
Jemison's films Manic Chase and Escaped Lunatic are both inspired by early twentieth-century films. They focus on the actors' movements; she is particularly interested in the political implications of movement.
As an agent in the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Jemison collaborated with Liz Deschenes, Laura Wexler, and Dan Leers to create a platform demonstrating the relationship between photography and Pittsburgh. Their work emphasized the physical conditions that make photography possible.
Future Plan and Program
Jemison's project Future Plan and Program commissions and publishes literary works by artists of color. This continues her artistic interest in reading while aiming to make books that are available to a wide community. It has published works by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Harold Mendez, and Jina Valentine, among others.