Jerron Herman & Kit Edwards in Conversation

Join us Tuesday, August 29 at 1:30 pm ET for a Contributor Conversation on Instagram Live. Jerron Herman and Kit Edwards will discuss their contributions to ART PAPERS Summer 2023 issue. In response to the issue’s theme of “Refusal, Renewal” Herman’s Glossary text on the term Athleticism proposes an “Athleticism of Rest” and posits: “The real labor I’d done preceded my entry into the “performance” space.”

Edwards’ review of Carolyn Lazard’s solo exhibition Long Take at Nottingham Contemporary explores Lazard’s refusal of visual representation of the dancing body, arguing that, “Rather than ascribing the artwork to a discrete body, the work becomes dispersed across a web of interpretive space, denying the capitalist demand for an object with marketable value. The diffusion of this value is a strategy of refusal, one aimed at the extraction and denigration of Black artistry widely practiced within modern and contemporary dance.”

Kit Edwards is a curator and writer based in the UK. Led by crip and queer thinkers, they focus their work on the aesthetic and transformative possibilities of access, embodied knowledge, and time-based practices. They have previously worked as assistant curator at Artes Mundi, and at Metroland Cultures, where they curated the artist development program Metroland Cohort: Peer-to-Peer. In 2021 they completed the MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. Edwards’ writing has been published in Flash Art International and other publications.

Jerron Herman is a disabled dancer and writer who creates works to facilitate welcoming. He has premiered pieces at Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, The Kennedy Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Herman regularly writes about art and culture, and currently serves on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA. His awards include a 2020 Disability Futures Fellowship by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation. In 2021 he received the Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. His play, 3 Bodies, was published in Theater journal (May/June 2022).