Carolyn Lazard + Amber Rose Johnson
2020-2021
Invited Guest - Public ProgrammingAs part of their Artist + Writer Initiative engagement, artist Carolyn Lazard and writer/performer Amber Rose Johnson collaborated to produce Notes from the Panorama.
Notes from the Panorama combines archival images of Black rest and leisure with an accompanying performance score. While the video portion of the project moves through silent footage of playgrounds, picnics, and Black people in repose, the score guides listeners through a series of gestures that deepen your attention to the relationship between self, body, and environment. These haptic modalities emphasize the experience and memory of physical sensation.Notes from the Panorama aims to slow time and support embodied awareness during major transitions in the pandemic, which has only intensified the need for rest in Black and Brown communities, in particular.
The Black Embodiments Studio produced a limited run edition of the project: 150 people received a physical copy of the score, along with a link to the video work, which has now been made publicly available.
About the ProgramAbout Amber Rose Johnson
Amber Rose Johnson is a writer and performer from Providence, RI, and based in Philadelphia. Across her interdisciplinary practice, she explores experimental poetics as a critical method for reconfiguring the world as it’s been imagined. Grounded in Black Diasporic critical thinking, her inquiries into the mechanisms of Relation are anchored in close attention to language and embodiment. Johnson is the curator of the conversation and workshop series Mess + Process, and the coordinator of the Black Cultural Studies Collective. She is the co-editor of Colored People Time, a book about the exhibition of the same name at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and her writing has been featured in BOMB Magazine, Bookforum, and Jacket2. Johnson is a PhD Candidate in English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
About Carolyn Lazard
Carolyn Lazard is a multidisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia and New York. Lazard has participated in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass., Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; The Whitney Museum of American Art and The New Museum in New York City, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. Lazard is a 2020 Disability Futures fellow and a 2021 United States Artists fellow. They hold an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Film and Anthropology from Bard College.
BiographyPast Programs