In Renee Gladman’s writing and visual art, city is an elastic term encompassing both the urban built environment as well as the shape and energy of sentences and paragraphs. Writing is a way of navigating the imaginative terrain between being in space and writing space. Drawing is a way of unveiling linguistic, mathematical, and other-dimensional presences within the page. Cities of the Future is a multi-media, multi-dimensional project that is foremost concerned with the blurring of lines and logics between fiction and life, using architecture, language, and line-making as its material components. This evening’s presentation will focus on three aspects of the future: its weather, color, and invisibility.
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of twelve published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—Calamities, a collection of linked auto-essays on the intersections of writing, drawing, and community, which won the 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and Prose Architectures (2017), a monograph of drawings. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB magazine, and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, among others. For 2019, she is Writer-in-Residence at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
