Virtual Reading and Conversation: Barnett Cohen & Simone Forti

October 16, 2020, 6pm PST/9pm EST

Join us online for a conversation between artists Barnett Cohen and Simone Forti as they discuss their poetry exchange, how the pandemic has shifted their practices, and the future of performance post-quarantine.

Barnett Cohen is an artist & immigration activist based in Los Angeles. Cohen originally received formal theatrical training, with an emphasis on breath and vocal work, at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He then embarked on a career as an interdisciplinary visual artist, making poems, performances, and paintings that collectively serve as meditations on the space between thought and self and between self and the body. He has exhibited work and presented performances at numerous venues including Redcat, JOAN, LAXART, Pieter, Neutra VDL House, Mast on Fig, 365 Mission, Human Resources (all in Los Angeles), JDJ (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), City Limits (Oakland), Onassis Foundation (Athens, Greece.) In 2021, he will present a new suite of paintings at JDJ. Cohen received a BA in English from Vassar College and an MFA from CalArts; he attended Skowhegan in 2013, MacDowell in 2019, and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2020.

Simone Forti is a dancer, artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Her early “Dance Constructions”, based on simple pedestrian movement such as climbing around on an inclined plane with the use of ropes, were influential in the reinventing of dance that took place in New York in the 1960s and 70s. Over the years Forti has developed work based on animals’ movements, the dynamics of circling, and the synergy between moving and speaking as in her improvisational “News Animations”.  Forti has taught internationally and performed at venues including the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also features some of her work in its permanent collection. For fourteen years Forti was an adjunct professor in the department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California at Los Angeles. Forti’s book Handbook in Motion was published in 1974 by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her book Oh, Tongue was edited and published by Fred Dewey for Beyond Baroque Books, in 2003. Her book, The Bear in The Mirror, was published jointly by Koenig Books, London & Vleeshal, Middelburg, in 2019.  Forti has received awards including a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2005, and in 2018 a University of California at Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts award for Lifetime Achievement. She is represented by The Box LA Gallery.