Artist Ja’Tovia Gary joins qigong practitioner and healer Baba Kevin Greene to activate the intentions for care and healing embedded within Gary’s installation THE GIVERNY SUITE. This event, which centers on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women, begins with an introduction by Gary, followed by a one-hour experience led by Greene. Comfortable clothing is recommended. A reception follows.
Facilitators
Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. The artist is deeply concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her work. She seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving-image works. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black spiritual technologies, ancestral legacies, and the interiority of Black life often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works. The artist has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Locarno Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, among other spaces. She has received generous support from the Ford Foundation, Cinereach, Sundance Documentary Institute, and Field of Vision. Gary has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Creative Capital, and Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
Kevin Greene has been a priest of Obatala in the Lukumi-Yoruba tradition for 26 Years and a certified massage therapist for 35 years. He is a spiritualist, diviner, lay teacher of qigong, facilitator, and healthcare activist. In 1996 he created the Alternative and Complimentary Therapies Program at Action AIDS, a nonprofit organization that served people living with AIDS and HIV+ clients in Philadelphia. He is the founder of the L.T.H.L. Ministry. Greene has been a student of qigong and tai chi since 1996. By cultivating a daily practice of qigong, he has been able to share his personal experience in surviving “life threatening illnesses,” by including qigong practice into a holistic health care program.
Accessibility
This program will use two-way assisted listening devices equipped with an induction loop that transmits directly to hearing aids with T-coils.
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and live captioning is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these accommodations.
For more information on accessibility at MoMA please visit moma.org/visit/accessibility
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Access and Community Programs are supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
Major funding is provided by Volkswagen of America, the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art Endowment for Educational Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.