Virtual Cocktail and Conversation with Poet Nikky Finney and Artist Annette Lawrence

Virtual Cocktail and Conversation with Poet Nikky Finney and Artist Annette Lawrence

Immediately following their Tuesday Evening Lecture

Space is limited to ensure the best experience for all participants. Advance registration is required. This special event is open to all Modern members. 

If you would like to register or want more information about this program or membership, please email the Membership Department here.

Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, The World Is Round, and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her acceptance speech for this award has become a thing of legend, described by the ceremony's host John Lithgow as "the best acceptance speech ever–for anything." Finney's work, in book form and video, including her now legendary acceptance speech, is on display in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was published in April 2020 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Over the last 30 years, each Nikky Finney book has been wonderfully different, but this long-awaited minglement of word and image crafts a new kind of American poesy. 

Annette Lawrence’s art transforms raw data into drawings, objects, and installations. The data accounts for and measures everyday life. Her subjects of inquiry range from body cycles to ancestor portraits, music lessons, unsolicited mail, and journal-keeping. Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in museums and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Dallas Museum of Art; Rachofsky Collection; ArtPace, San Antonio; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; American Airlines; and the art collection of the Dallas Cowboys. She received a 2018 MacDowell Fellowship, the 2015 Moss/Chumley Award from the Meadows Museum, and the 2009 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work was included in the 1997 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Originally from New York, Lawrence lives and works in Denton and recently retired from her post as a Professor of Studio Art in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.