The Department of Fine and Performing Arts Fine Arts Program at Loyola University Chicago is pleased to announce Jessica Lanay as its Artist-in-Residence for academic year 2024-2025.

 

Black feminist interdisciplinary writer, poet, and art journalist Jessica Lanay (She/They) will be engaging the Fine Arts Program community in various ways throughout the academic year. In the Fall, Lanay will organize both a colloquium and an exhibition in the Ralph Arnold Gallery. The colloquium will be an evening event where experimental performance artists Jefferson Pinder and Ayana Evans. Lanay will also curate solo exhibition of works by New York City artist Denae Howard in the Ralph Arnold. An interdisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, assemblage, and painting, Howard’s practice focuses on showing physical, communal, and family networks as the groundwork of human identity formation.

During the Spring semester, Lanay will teach a course on African Art. In an effort to work with Chicago-based artistic communities and to provide a campus wide example of contemporary African Diasporan art as a tie into the course, Lanay will work with the organization A Long Walk Home to bring their installation Black Girl Altar to the Ralph Arnold Gallery. Black Girl Altar is an assemblage installation featuring the intimate materials that contribute to an aesthetics and consideration of Black girlhood. During the African Art course, students will be asked to compare the aesthetics and artistic methodologies they learned about with the installation. The exhibition will be organized in collaboration with A Long Walk Home, Ayana Evans, and art objects from the May Weber African Art Collection.

Jessica Lanay is an interdisciplinary and experimental writer whose work spans libretto, poetry, concrete poetry, essay, and art journalism. Her work was published by or performed at such organizations as the Brooklyn Museum, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and The Andy Warhol Museum. Originally from Key West, Florida, with a long familial history on the island, Lanay is influenced by multicultural interconnectivity, histories of south-bound Black migration, and the literary history of the island. Her practice is grounded in research on West and Central African aesthetic and spiritual practices, their mosaic modes of survival in diaspora, and how they challenge Western social and cultural ideas of what it means to be human. Lanay has a Bachelor of Arts in Art History, a Master of Arts in Latin American and Caribbean Studies with a focus on the African Diaspora, and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at Indiana University-Bloomington; she is writing her dissertation on radical Black feminist performance art throughout the African diaspora. Like her interdisciplinary creative work and writing, the dissertation mines the influence of the aesthetics of radicality and how they are tied to social and cultural preservation and transformation.

Between 2017 and 2020, Lanay presented papers focused on epistemologies of Black aesthetics at the Kristeva Circle Conference and the Northeastern Modern Language Association conference. At the University of Pittsburgh, she curated an experimental exhibition entitled Alt(e)ar. With collaboration on installation from Okinawan and Puerto Rican artist Aya Izumi-Rodriguez and experimental artist Kiyan Williams, the two-night event focused on William’s ability to embody a Black queer archive. During this period, she also lectured at the Carnegie Museum of Art for their 20/20 exhibition focusing on contemporary Black arts. In both 2020 and 2021, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra commissioned Lanay to write a cento (2020) and a screenplay for the short film As I Please (2021). The film was based on a Heinz Endowment grant funded oral history project compiling the history of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright August Wilson’s neighborhood, The Hill District, through the life accounts of African American women over the age of seventy.

Since 2020, Lanay’s manuscript of conceptual and concrete poetry, am•phib•ian, won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize from Broadside Lotus Press. Lanay has also contributed to museum catalogs and moderated presentations with contemporary leading scholars and artists. She wrote essays analyzing the art oeuvres of artists in the Andy Warhol Museum exhibition Fantasy America, a contemporary response to Warhol’s photobook America. She then engaged in a conversation about Warhol’s life and work with fellow contributor—poet, scholar, and Afro-Indigenous activist—Alan Pelaez. She also produced a critical essay in photographer Nona Faustine’s monograph White Shoes about Faustine’s photo series of the same name. The publication was followed by a conversation at the Brooklyn Museum moderated by Lanay. Additional contributions include a concrete essay in the catalog for the Washington Project for the Arts exhibition Black Women as/and the Living Archive and a critical essay about experimental digital artist Deborah Jack’s solo exhibition, Deborah Jack: 20 Years at the New York art gallery Pen & Brush. In 2023, poetry from Lanay’s manuscript-in-progress and translations of poetry from Spanish to English were included in the Arizona University Press anthology, When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent. She continues to contribute to magazines such as BOMB Magazine and ArtReview, to date she has covered artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Howardena Pindell, Shikeith, Vanessa German, and many other illustrious creators.   

Visit Jessica Lanay's website to learn more.