Dancing on My Own: Artist Lecture by Simon Wu and Conversation with Merray Michael Mina

In celebration of Simon Wu's debut book Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy, the independent art publication Momus will host an artist lecture by Wu at CARA. Reflecting on the reciprocal relationship of artmaking to writing, and on collaborative art-making with his mother, Wu’s lecture will be followed by a conversation with Merray Michael Mina, Associate Editor of Momus, who worked with Wu on texts that later became material for his book.

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Simon Wu (pictured above; photo by Jarod Lew) is a curator and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. He has organized exhibitions and programs at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, MoMA, and David Zwirner, among other venues. In 2021 he was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and was featured in Cultured Magazine's Young Curators series. He is a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute, was a 2018 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and is currently in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale University. He has two brothers, Nick and Duke, and loves the ocean.

Merray Michael Mina (pictured above; formerly Merray Gerges; photo by Celia Perrin Sidarous) is an Egyptian essayist, editor, and writing teacher based in New York. While studying art history at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, she co-founded and edited CRIT, a free biannual print-only criticism publication. She was the inaugural editorial fellow at C Magazine, where she conceptualized and edited three themed print issues addressing facets of systemic change in the art world. During her MFA in narrative nonfiction at New York University, she began working on a series of longform essays about family inheritance through self and body. Mina is an Associate Editor at Momus.

Momus is an online platform for art writing and criticism, spanning publishing, a podcast, residencies and mentorship programs. Committed to a model of discourse that is plural and rigorous, Momus works with the conviction that art writing is integral to our cultural ecosystem, valuing criticism as essential, imaginative, and a craft in itself.