A Conversation with Candace Hill-Montgomery and Fred Moten

Capacity is limited and entry is first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry. 

Join Blank Forms for a conversation between artist Candace Hill-Montgomery and writer and cultural theorist Fred Moten, discussing Hill-Montgomery’s wide-ranging career and artistic approach. The talk is presented on the occasion of Candace Hill-Montgomery: Pretty Birds Speak Sow Peculiar at Blank Forms, the artist’s first solo show in the five boroughs since the 1980s.  

Candace Hill-Montgomery (b. 1945) is a Queens-born artist now based in Bridgehampton, Long Island, whose decades-long career has spanned a wide array of media and approach: painting, photography, installation art, public interventions, video, poetry, performance, and fugitive combinations thereof. Over the last ten years, Hill-Montgomery has largely worked with weavings made on homemade looms, cunningly fusing an assemblage of techniques and materials including sheep’s wool, mohair, linen, paper yarn, and other fabrics, often augmented by found objects. The pieces are typically exquisitely layered in both composition and subject matter, bursting at the seams with color and movement, mirroring her iterative and free-associative poetry practice and variously drawing from pop-cultural and religious iconography, vernacular textile craft, art-historical and literary references, and delirious, free-wheeling wordplay.

Fred Moten teaches at New York University. His recent projects include a poetry collection, Perennial Fashion Presence Falling; musical recordings and performances with bandmates Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver; an appearance in long-time friend and collaborator Wu Tsang’s film MOBY DICK; or, The Whale; and an essay collection, All Incomplete, written with his comrade Stefano Harney. Moten lives in New York City with his partner, Laura Harris, and their children, Lorenzo and Julian.