Erica Vital-Lazare & Faylita Hicks discuss the joy, resilience, and infinite spaces of memory and possibility of Black women.

Confronting and correcting both hypervisibility and invisibility, Erica Vital-Lazare explores the contemporary and historical presence of Black women in Seeing/Seen, an exhibition at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art.

On December 3, Vital-Lazare will further discuss the joy, resilience, and infinite spaces of memory and possibility of Black women with artist Faylita Hicks, whose words are featured throughout the exhibition.

Faylita Hicks is the author of HoodWitch, a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, among other accolades. They are the former Editor-in-Chief of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and the 2021 Poet-in-Residence of Civil Rights Corps. Their work has been published in American Poetry Review, Longreads, Poetry, Slate, Texas Observer, Yale Review, and others. They have an MFA from Sierra Nevada University and has received fellowships and residencies from Tin House, Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, The Dots Between, and the Right of Return USA.

Erica Vital-Lazare is a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in Dystopian Literature at the College of Southern Nevada. She has received grants and awards from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Hilliard Endowment, and the Nevada Arts Council. Her work has been featured in Catalyst, Sojourner, Thrice and Callaloo II. She is co-producer of the photo-narrative installation Obsidian & Neon: Building Black Life and Identity in Las Vegas and editor of Of the Diaspora, a series revisiting classic Black works in literature with McSweeney’s Press.

This event is co-presented by the Black Mountain Institute and UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art.

All of the museum’s galleries are accessible to wheelchair users and other visitors who cannot use stairs. Services such as sign language interpretation can be arranged. Please contact the museum as soon as possible to discuss your needs: barrick.museum@unlv.edu.