AFTERWORDS: entanglement - Tavia Nyong’o and Raja Feather Kelly

Tuesday, October 14, 2025 at 4:30pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

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Free and open to the public. Register to attend on Zoom.

The second event in the AFTERWORDS: entanglement series of public programs will feature Tavia Nyong’o in-person and Raja Feather Kelly online. 

This event will explore Black aesthetics, speculative futures, and the question: in what ways can contemporary performance and art-making provide havens of radical connectivity and social life in an age of social media? How is the future entangled with the past, and what forms of relation does art make possible that elude capture or containment in today’s terminally online culture?

In his most recent book, Black Apocalypse, Tavia Nyong’o argues that Black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next, rearranging the seeming impasse between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism, and introducing readers to the entwined relation between Blackness and speculative futures. In his recent performance The Absolute Future, Raja Feather Kelly and his ensemble extended their Warholian investigation of today’s media-satured age—pulling from documentary, film, television, and social 
media—to create a black comedy of “people being people” dealing with death, fear, and loneliness in the world that has realized Andy Warhol’s prediction that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” In their own ways, and across many years of entwined conversations about performance making and theory, Nyong’o and Kelly have developed practices that might beckon the end of the world as the premise for imagining what other kinds of worlds can be forged.

“Entanglement” is a keyword for studying how human existence is bound up with the more-than-human world, and a call to imagine the web of relations that bind us to each other and the world across space and time. To recognize one’s entanglement complicates one’s sense of agency; to embrace one’s entanglement is to resist the notion of critical distance or objectivity. How do artists and curators navigate their own entanglements? How have they developed practices out of entanglement’s creative possibilities, and in the process transformed traditional ideas of authorship and agency? What work can art do to attune audiences to both the painful and pleasurable ways we are all entangled with each other and the worlds that exist around, before, and after us?

AFTERWORDS: entanglement is a series of public programs sponsored by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). Guest speakers include artists and curators reflecting on their own practice, process, or method while also attending to a shared keyword. All events are hybrid, featuring speakers both in-person and online.

Curated by CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy '06 and ICPP Director Noémie Solomon.

Tavia Nyong’o, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of acclaimed books including The Amalgamation Waltz, Afro-Fabulations, and Black Apocalypse (2025). His work explores history, imagination, and Black aesthetics through performance. Nyong’o’s writings have appeared in Vogue, The Nation, n+1, Artforum, NPR, and more. He has received fellowships from the Ford and Alexander von Humboldt Foundations. He co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press and curates public programs at the Park Avenue Armory while researching digital culture and racial/sexual dissidence in the arts.

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T). Over the past decade, he has created 19 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim, most recently The Absolute Future, which premiered April 2024 at the NYU Skirball Center. TF3T’s forthcoming work, BUNNY BUNNY, will premiere in 2025 at the Invisible Dog Arts Center, followed by A Body of Dangerous Ideas in 2026. Kelly made his playwriting debut at SoHo Rep with The Fires (2024), which earned him a 2025 Obie Award for Creation and Direction. Kelly choreographed the Tony Award-winning A Strange Loop and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA), both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His many honors include the 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2023–25), Creative Capital Award (2019), Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019–21), and a Bessie Award (2009).

About ICPP
The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance fosters the collective study of art and its histories with a focus on developing new critical methods for curating time-based art. Rather than narrowing in on a single authoritative definition of performance curation, ICPP’s aim has been to create a pluralistic conversation specifically around contemporary performance, providing fundamental tools with which artists and curators can develop their own approaches to the work. ICPP was created in 2011 by Sam Miller ’75, P’09 and Pamela Tatge ’84, MALS ’10, P’16 at Wesleyan University.