The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture and Glucksman Ireland House NYU presents a rare U.S. screening of I Could Read the Sky (dir. Nichola Bruce, 1999). A conversation with author Timothy O'Grady will follow.

Film description: An old man lies alone and sleepless in London. Before dawn, he is taken by an image from his childhood in the West of Ireland and begins to remember a migrant's life. Haunted by the faces and the land he left behind, he calls forth the bars and boxing booths of England, the potato fields and building sites, the music he played, and the woman he loved.

I Could Read The Sky, a collaboration between writer Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke, was hailed as a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1997. It is a text-image hybrid in the tradition of John Berger's A Seventh Man and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. A work of almost fathomless keening. "One of the great books of memory as a site of almost unbearably heartfelt be/longing," declared Gareth Evans. Recently, in the Irish Times, Joseph O'Connor wrote, "Every great artwork acquires new meanings and resonances, and every historical story worth anything is about now. In the quarter century since this book reinvented the Irish emigrant narrative mode, the world has turned, and the Ireland once fled by multitudes has become a place to which immigrants and refugees go to seek protection."

Date: December 2, 2023

Time: 2:30-4:30pm

Where: 1 Washington Mews

Who: Glucksman Ireland House

Mildred Beltré tells the story of gathering black walnuts from Prospect Park near her Brooklyn home to make ink for her art. In her work, the gathering of disparate materials functions within an Afro-diasporic ecology, rooted in her experience as the daughter of Dominican migrants to New York City and in broader histories of mothers and daughters across the African diaspora creating and sharing knowledges.

In the spirit of Arturo Schomburg, Beltré’s work functions as a New York-based yet borderless counter-archive of Black knowledges and forms. Its eccentric world-making is informed by radically imaginative African American, Caribbean, and Latin American writers and thinkers, including Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and the late María Lugones, for whose classic Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes Beltré provided art and served as interlocutor. Gathering their texts and others, Beltré crafts speculative text-works that interrogate legibility and our practices of reading and viewing, while exploring, as she puts it “the power and limits of language.”

Date: Through December 7, 2023

Where: 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Who: The Latinx Project 

The African American Irish Diaspora Network, in partnership with New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House, the Office of Global Inclusion, and the John Brademas Center, along with NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, announces its December 12, 2023, public interview with renowned American historian, Leslie M. Harris. 

Leslie M. Harris is Professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A specialist in Pre-Civil War African American history, she is the author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and the editor of four books on the history of slavery. In this program, she will discuss the flight of African Americans from New York City, especially in the aftermath of the violence of 1863.  

Black, Brown and Green Voices is a documentation strategy and public humanities initiative founded by Miriam Nyhan Grey. Grey is a founding board member of the African American Irish Diaspora Network.

NYU’s Kimberly DaCosta, author of Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford University Press, 2007), will introduce the program.

Date: December 12, 2023

Time: 12:30-2:00pm

Where: Zoom

Who: Glucksman Ireland House 

Register to learn more about this talk.

In October 2023, NYU Africa House/Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED) facilitated a transformative cultural exchange, bringing together African American artists from Chester, PA, and artists in Kumawu, Ghana, to foster a deep heritage connection and cultivate an art-based relationship. The purpose of the trip was to foster a heritage connection and an art economy between these artists from Africa and the Diaspora. The Chester artists were in residence at CTED and the Tweneboa Kodua Senior High School (TKSHS), where they collaborated with educators and students, resulting in a rich tapestry of art that will be exhibited at various venues. 

Join us on December 14 for a conversation moderated by Professor Yaw Nyarko with Chester, PA artists Kenneth Hunt, Hayes McLeod, and Devon Walls, as they share how the trip has inspired their artistic direction specifically in line with developing an African American-owned arts district in Chester, PA.

The exchange will continue with Kumawu artists visiting Chester, promising ongoing cultural and economic collaboration that benefits both communities and the broader NYU community.

Date: December 14, 2023

Time: 6:00-7:30pm

Where: 14A Washington Mews

Who: NYU Africa House

Register to learn more about this talk.