Delali Ayivor and Paloma Martinez-Miranda, DM From a White Boy As An Entry From a Colonial Explorer’s Journal, 2022, 34 seconds, digital video
I am a poet and essayist compelled towards collaboration, especially with visual artists. I write around my fascinations. These include but are not limited to contemporary art and the inner lives of the artists producing it, the mechanisms of neoliberalism, reality television as cultural artifact and the spaghettification of Black identity via globalization and diaspora.
Publications + Exhibitions
2026 – “Time is a swinging door: diasporic disorientations and the curation of grief and memory in Zohra Opoku’s ‘We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight,’” Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, ZA
2023 – “Materialized Memory: Reference, Body and Textile in Zohra Opoku’s ‘The Myths of Eternal Life,’” Marianne Ibrahim Gallery, Paris, FR
2022 – “DM from a White Boy as an Entry from a Colonial Explorer’s Journal,” Single Channel Video Installation, Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar, SN
2022 – “She is This,” with Audrey Gair, King’s Leap Editions, New York, USA
2022 – “I, Unsubstantial” and “Feeling Pretty Successful,” Iowa Review, Iowa City, USA
2020 – “Implies, Presupposes, Begets,” CovenBerlin, Berlin, DE
2019 – “been thinking lately/of Fela”, Public Art Commission, Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, NO
2019 – “Afrofuturist Triptych for My Mother,” The Rumpus Online
2018 - “Alluminati Jaida Forever: Getting to Know The Real Artists of Get Your Life,” Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, USA
Residencies, Workshops + Awards
2024 – Writer-in-Residence, Hawthornden Foundation, Brooklyn, USA
2021 – Writer-in-Residence, Black Rock Senegal, Dakar, SN
2021 – Participant, Summer Workshop, Tin House, Online
2020 – Summer Workshop Scholar, Tin House, Online
2019 – Writer-in-Residence, STONELEAF Retreat, Kingston, USA
2019 – Participant, Winter Workshop, Tin House, Newport, USA
2018 – Artist-in-Residence, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, USA
2011 – U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts