Fire | A Saturday Convening

The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant unfolds as four Saturday convenings, featuring invited artists whose practices engage Glissant’s thinking, their collaborators and communities, and special musical guests. These gatherings respond to earth, fire, water, and winds through dialogue, shared poetics, and polyvocality.

We continue with fire on Saturday, March 28 at 6pm, considering change, fuel, reaction, risk, revolution. A member of CARA’s curatorial team opens the evening with a reading from Édouard Glissant’s work.

Christian Nyampeta, joined by fields harrington, Mai’yah Kau, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Amina Ross, invites “performance as ritual.” Through readings, movement, and voice, the artists linger alongside fragments of fire from Black and African cinema.

Christian Nyampeta is an artist living in New York from where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta is the convener of Boda Boda Lounge 2022-2024, a trans-African film and video art festival. In New York, Nyampeta convenes the African Film Institute at e-flux in Brooklyn.

fields harrington (b. 1986) is a Brooklyn-based artist working in sculpture, photography, and writing. His work explores how knowledge, technology, and infrastructure—often seen as neutral—are influenced by ideas about race, value, and power. harrington earned a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He also studied at San Antonio Community College and joined the Whitney Independent Study Program. His solo exhibitions include David Salkin Gallery, KAJE, Petrine, and Y2K Group. His work has also appeared in group shows at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Parsons School of Design, and Automat Gallery. He was a researcher-in-residence at The Kitchen with The School for Poetic Computation and participated in the Site to be Seen residency at RAIR.

Mai’yah Kau aka Maima, The Water Spirit, is a queer Liberian diasporic artist raised in Park Hill, Staten Island, New York. Their practice weaves identity, heritage, and spirituality, drawing from traditional West African rooted dance forms and contemporary queer performance to create ceremonial movement and embodied storytelling. Grounded in ritual, improvisation, and collective participation, Kau’s work offers audiences space to breathe and echoes the importance of call and response. Mai’yah moves fluidly across genres, honoring the body as a vessel of transformation and a moving altar.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has published widely on African-American history, politics and culture. Her book Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America was a New York Times Notable Book, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and cited by Bookforum as the “Best New York Book” written in the twenty years since the magazine’s founding. Rhodes-Pitts is an associate professor of writing at Pratt Institute, currently serves as curator-in-residence at Weeksville Heritage Center, and organizes collaborative public projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau.

Amina Ross is an artist, filmmaker, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice spans video, sound, sculpture, installation, and collective inquiry. Their work centers the body, feeling, and the subtle architectures shaping perception and behavior. Ross approaches materials and technologies as relational, experimental sites rather than fixed categories. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at MoMA PS1, the Hessel Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Tate London. They teach at Parsons School of Design and hold degrees from SAIC and Yale School of Art.