Curated by Juf at 99CANAL, Works Abundancies is a series of events that consider abundance – and the margins in which to find it–, poetry and works of art, as well as the staging and display elements that support, undermine and disseminate the latter.
2ND ITERATION WITH KAY GABRIEL, SAHAR KHRAIBANI, SAMIYA BASHIR, ZOË HOPKINS, CHAR JERÉ, DEVIN N. MORRIS and PAPO COLO
99 CANAL
July 2, 7:30 pm (doors open at 7:00 pm)
99 Canal Street, New York, NY 10002
"Works Abundancies II" brings together four poetic voices and three artworks for a brief duration. This is a temporary set-up for reflecting on how armoring can generate specific contexts and develop unnoticed, secretive and excessive ways of expressing and circulating information; complicating how we understand interiority, expectation or desire in the social field.
On this occasion, artist Char Jeré will show new sculptures that deal with hostile architectures and the capacity to resist them through sound, and Devin N. Morris will be presenting his toy boxes, which seem to protect —minutiae or something precious— by building an excessive armor. Additionally, the event will feature Papo Colo’s documentation of one of his lost artworks from the series “Artifacts for Keeping Secrets” (1977), in which a knife crushes and hides a poem in a piggy bank. This piece can be interpreted as signaling the relationship between language, violence and support, emphasizing how language sometimes needs to circulate openly and, at other times, requires protection and concealment to uphold its aims. In line with the latter, whispering or gossip come to mind as both intimate and extravagant ways of exchange that relate in a particular way to the political, social, linguistic, and emotional demands implied in conventional modes of communication. All of these approaches to transmission resonate with the practices of the invited poets and writers, Kay Gabriel, Sahar Khraibani, Zoë Hopkins and Samiya Bashir, who will be reading from their recent works.
ACCESS INFORMATION: 99 canal is located at 99 Canal street, floor 6, in Chinatown; between Forsyth St and Eldridge St. The closest trains are B/D (Grand St) and East Broadway (F); the closest wheelchair accessible stop is the 6 (Canal). The space, 6 floor, is wheelchair accessible via elevator. Please note that there are no grab bars close to the toilet. Service animals are welcome.
Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She's the editorial director at The Poetry Project. Her next book, Perverts, is forthcoming from Nightboat in September 2025.
Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, the Poetry Foundation, and the Poetry Project Newsletter among many others. Sahar is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, a Fellowship at The Poetry Project, a MacDowell Fellowship, and was a 2025 artist in residence at Mass MoCA and a Fellow at the Whitney ISP. Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute. "Anatomy of a Refusal" is forthcoming from 1080Press.
Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, writer, and multimedia artist whose solo and collaborative work spans four poetry collections, including Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award, and her most recent, I Hope This Helps (Nightboat Books, 2025), described by Jericho Brown as her “magnum opus.” A sought-after editor, teacher, and writing coach, Bashir brings depth, clarity, and precision to her cross-genre practice. She lives and creates in Harlem.
Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. Her words have been published in The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, ArtReview, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Gulf Coast Magazine, in addition to several exhibition catalogs. She received an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University in May and will begin a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall.
In layered installations, Char Jeré (lives and works in Brooklyn) draws on Afro-fractalist theory, her own autobiography, and a background in data analytics to examine the ways in which the built networks of our world enact a complicated relationship between race and technology. In 2025, Andrew Kreps presented Jeré solo show Remembering the Mind: A Study in Progress and in 2024 her work was included in the gallery's group show Eighteen Painters and, in the same year, in the group show Peripheral Belonging, at GhostMachine, New York. In 2023, Artists Space presented Zoo or Orchestra, Char Jeré’s first exhibition in New York. She received a MFA in Sound Art from the Computer Music Center at Columbia University in 2023. Additionally, Jeré earned an MS in Data Analytics and Visualization from Pratt Institute in 2021.
Devin N. Morris (b. 1986, Baltimore, MD; lives and works in New York) collapses memory and space to envision delicate new realms of existence. Through collage, painting, photography, physical assemblage, and video the artist considers the statement ‘use what you have to make what you need.’ Recent exhibitions include: And Ever an Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY(2023); Portrait of an Unlikely Space curated by Mickalene Thomas & Keely Orgeman, Yale Art Gallery, New Haven (2023); Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Frist Museum, Nashville, (2023) and Copy Machine Manifestos: Artist Who Make Zines, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023)
Papo Colo (1946, Puerta de Tierra, Puerto Rico) is a pioneering interdisciplinary artist whose work has shaped New York’s cultural landscape since the 1970s. Living and working between El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico and New York City, Colo is part of the generation that defined the radical artistic spirit of 1980s New York. In 1982, Colo co-founded the influential alternative art space Exit Art with Jeanette Ingberman. Colo’s contributions to performance and visual art have earned him numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. In 2016, MoMA PS1 presented a retrospective of his seminal performance works. His work has been exhibited at major institutions including The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2017); the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2015); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2013); and the Studio Museum in Harlem (2013). Colo’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; El Museo del Barrio, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; SF MoMA, CA; The Library of Congress, D.C.; and the Brooklyn Museum, NY.
1ST ITERATION WITH COCO CLOCKNER, ESTHER KONDO HELLER, LOIS ELAINE GRIFFITH, KAUR ALIA AHMED and ANDRÉ MAGAÑA
99 CANAL
April 9, 7pm (doors open at 6:30 pm)
99 Canal Street, New York, NY 10002
"Works Abundancies" brings together four poetic voices and a proto-artwork for a brief duration. Positioned somewhere between the eventness of stages and exhibition displays, a microphone and a plinth, this is a temporary set-up for the reflections on documenting, capturing, and the re-intensification of overlooked actions that are present in the works of the participants.
Poet, artist and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café Lois Elaine Griffith, writer and visual artist Coco Klockner, poet and experimental filmmaker Esther Kondo Heller and poet and visual artist Kaur Alia Ahmed will read in the company of a new work by André Magaña. Untitled (2025) couples two objects: a black stage light, and a desert-colored pan-tilt that assists the movement of surveillance cameras in the southern border and the US occupation projects of the Middle East. Their original functions are the production of utility, illusion and information. Magaña’s gesture of coupling puts together a columnar arrangement that critically echoes the form of plinths and any other support that elevates artifacts from the ground, inducing a new relation to the surroundings.
ACCESS INFORMATION: 99 CANAL is located at 99 Canal street, floor 6, in Chinatown; between Forsyth St and Eldridge St. The closest trains are B/D (Grand St) and East Broadway (F); the closest wheelchair accessible stop is the 6 (Canal). The space, 6 floor, is wheelchair accesible via elevator. Service animals are welcome.
Lois Elaine Griffith is an artist/writer/teacher who is one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. She was a 2024 Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, where she began work on her multi-layered project - Come To Terms/Llegar A Un Acuerdo. Most recently Granary Books has published her picture-poems - You See What You See.
André Magaña is an artist living and working in New York City. He is interested in the technical, utilitarian, and operational aspects of production as corollaries for the relationships between people and labor, access, and movement. Andre Magaña’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Veronica, Seattle, WA; Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick, Bern, Switzerland; King’s Leap, New York. Recent group exhibitions at guadalajara90210, Mexico City, MX; foreign & domestic, New York, NY; PUBLIC Gallery, London, UK; in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; Magenta Plains, New York, NY; SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; His work has been featured and reviewed in Art In America, ArtForum, New York Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and CULTURED Magazine. He is represented by Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick, Bern, Switzerland.
Esther K. Heller is a poet, literary critic, and experimental sound- and filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, a Ledbury Critic, and an Image Text Ithaca Junior Fellow. Kondo is the author of Ar:range:ments (Fonograf Editions, 2025), her writing has appeared in the Georgia Review, BOMB , Modern Poetry in Translation, and, the Guardian. Their films and performances have been screened and performed amongst other places at the Berlinale Expanded Forum, Alchemy Moving Image Festival, ICA London and Ballhaus Naunynstrasse (Berlin).
Coco Klockner is an artist and writer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of K-Y (Genderfail Press, 2019), and her writing has appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, Spike Art Magazine, The Whitney Review, Real Life Mag, and elsewhere. Klockner has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; stop-gap projects, Columbia, MO; The Anderson Gallery, Richmond, VA; Vent Space, Baltimore, MD; and her work has been included in group exhibitions at Skol Arts Actuels, Montreal, QC, CA; White Columns, New York; Lubov, New York; Gaudalajara 90210, CDMX, MX; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA; MoMA PS1, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; and Musik Installationen Nürnberg, DE. Klockner is director of the project space hatred 2 in Brooklyn, and her upcoming solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York, opens October 2025.
Kaur Alia Ahmed is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. They make glass, video, poems, plays, and tattoos, and are a recent graduate of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Their work has been presented at Entrance Gallery, LTK Enterprises, Alyssa Davis Gallery, Interstate Projects, and Rhizome. You can find their poems published in Baest Journal, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and BOMB Magazine. Cursive Paradise, their forthcoming book of poetry, will be published by Wendy's Subway in 2025).
