Byron Kim & Carl Phillips in Conversation

Byron Kim & Carl Phillips in Conversation 
October 31, 6:30PM,  Simmons Auditorium A, Tepper, CMU
Co-sponsored with Miller ICA, CMU

Additional co-sponsor University of Pittsburgh Center for African American Poetry and Poetics

Byron Kim & Carl Phillips extend a conversation that began in 2017 when the Pulitzer Arts Foundation brought the pair together to discuss Phillips’s poems and Kim’s paintings. Kim’s recent series of bruise paintings, on view as part of the exhibition This Skin of Ours at the Miller ICA, were inspired by Phillips’s poem “Alba: Innocence.”

This Skin of Ours is on view October 12 – November 17, 2019 at the Miller ICA. Curated by Liz Park, the exhibition features: Kader Attia, Matty Davis & Ben Gould, Victoria Fu & Matt Rich, Byron Kim, Kiki Kogelnik, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, and Wilmer Wilson IV.

Byron Kim is an artist whose work sits at the threshold between abstraction and representation, between conceptualism and pure painting. He received a BA from Yale University in 1983 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1986. Among Kim’s numerous awards are the Louise Nevelson Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY (1993), the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1994), the National Endowment of the Arts Award (1995), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997), and the Alpert Award in the Arts (2008). His works are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Norton Family Collection, Santa Monica, CA; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

Carl Phillips is the author of 14 books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called it “haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named.” His selected poems, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, was published by FSG in 2007. Other books include The Tether (FSG, 2002), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Double Shadow (FSG, 2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Silverchest (FSG, 2014), a finalist for the Griffin Prize. A four time finalist for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, his other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012.