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.
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.
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.
Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She is the editorial director at The Poetry Project. Her next book, Perverts, is forthcoming from Nightboat in September 2025.
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.
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.
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.
