About

Kenyon Adams (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist and artistic director. He previously served as the founding director of the Arts Initiative at Grace Farms Foundation, an arts and cultural center in New Canaan, Connecticut, and currently is the Director of Public Programs at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX. Adams studied religion and literature at Yale Divinity School and theology of contemporary performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where he won the Director’s Prize for his presentation of the blues aesthetic as an American lament. He also spent a year as artist in residence at the Institute.

Kenyon’s practice is concerned with notions of citizenship and belonging. His work examines joy, solitude, respite, and repose, locating pleasure and satisfaction within the scope of justice. For this work, the artist engages text, photography, music and performance, as well as foodways, devised liturgies, and site-specific interventions. Kenyon’s ritual cycle, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION, includes the performance work PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE: a rite of responsibility, directed by Bill T. Jones, which was presented at the Fisher Center by New York Live Arts. PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE invites audiences to sit, kneel, and chant the text of Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The second work in the trilogy, entitled COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration, premieres at the Fisher Center in 2023 as a part of COMMON GROUND: an international festival on the politics of land and food. Kenyon is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center and an Artist in Residence at the University of Texas Austin (Texas Performing Arts) where he is developing COMPLINE NOIR, the final work in the WATCHNIGHT trilogy. Kenyon is the founding principal at FUTURE SOLITUDE, an art series and lifestyle brand that examines and speculates modes and sites of leisure.

COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration

Kenyon Adams + Collaborators | Live Arts Bard Commission | World Premiere

Kenyon Adams will present COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration, the second installment of his ritual trilogy, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION. Conceived as a “blues Eucharist,” COMMUNION seeks to construct new spaces and traditions of testimony and witness. In COMMUNION, the artist seeks to recognize and integrate the profundity of Protestant black Eucharist traditions from his own experience growing up in the Southeast region of the United States. The artist and creative team developed the ritual by corresponding around some foundational questions: in what ways does a meal distinctly allow commemoration, and also provide nourishment? In what ways might the blues aesthetic shape or inform the notion of a Eucharist meal, which is inevitably a meal about death? The ritual applies the distinct paradox which imbues a Eucharistic meal: the partaking of which is simultaneously a commemoration of unjust death as well as a claim of unity with that which cannot die or be extinguished. This work is part of the artist’s own reckoning with death in the pandemic and the ways it has disproportionately affected BIPOC communities, as well as the ongoing violence against black bodies that is firmly established and upheld within American society. This commemoration is expressed through a shared meal created by artist, chef, and poet Omar Tate (Honeysuckle Provisions), utilizing local ingredients from the Bard Farm amidst poems, prayers, movement, and music. Other key collaborators include author, critic, and essayist Osayi Endolyn, who will contribute text to the printed program, serving as a kind of hymnal or menu. Visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray will create a chandelier-like sculpture for the meal using metal and textiles, inspired by the use of tapestry in southern black funeral traditions.

Collaborators

Omar Tate, chef
Osayi Endolyn, food and culture writer, @osayiendolyn
- of Black Power Kitchen, NYT, & Blue Note Jazz
Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, designer/sculptor