2024-2025 VISITING FELLOWS
Jennifer Harge
Jennifer Harge is an artist and educator rooted in the legacies and futures of Black experimental performance and Black spiritual traditions. Using movement as an organizing principle, she spills across choreography, installation, film, and language—collapsing form and gifting herself the freedom to play, wander, and be with multiplicity.
Black Detroit has been a partner and teacher in Harge’s work. Through her movement collective, Harge Dance Stories, she created a choreographic platform to articulate the interior worlds of Black life and living through meditations on mourning, protest, femme and queer pleasure practices, and embodied liberation.
In 2023 she was the Alma Hawkins Visiting Memorial Chair in Dance at UCLA and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania where she taught courses on Black Feminist Thought and Performance Composition. She has been commissioned to present work at The Saint Louis Black Repertory Company, Wexner Center for Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Cranbrook Museum of Art, and several other organizations and universities across the country. Her work has also been supported in the form of arts fellowships and grant awards including a 2023 Dance/USA Archiving and Preservation Fellowship; 2022 Flourish Fund award by Culture Source; 2021 Wexner Center Artist in Residence; the inaugural 2018 Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women+ Dance Artists by Queer| Art; and a 2017 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship.
"The Modern Ancient Brown Visiting Fellowship will provide me with dedicated time and space to continue working on an archival manuscript. I am excited to have research time in Detroit as the project highlights creative strategies I've developed over the last 10 years as an independent artist in the city."
Zoë Hopkins
Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. She holds a BA in art history and African American studies from Harvard University, and is currently working on her MA in modern and contemporary art at Columbia University, where she researches conceptual art of the Black diaspora. Her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Artforum, Jupiter Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtReview, Bomb Magazine, and Hyperallergic. She has also published essays in catalogs for Gordon Robichaux Gallery, the CUE Art Foundation, Tephra ICA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem (forthcoming). She has been the recipient of awards including the Gordon Parks Foundation Prize and the Hayden Lisson Fellowship.
"I am thrilled to be a visiting fellow in residence at the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation this summer! During my time at MABF, I will be working on an experimental essay-based project concerning the entanglements between Black visual abstraction, poetry, and the metaphysics of improvisation. It feels so right for this project to be nurtured in and through Detroit, a place that has given birth to much of the art and music that has taught me about disobedient modalities of Black aesthetics."
Gervais Marsh
Dr. Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar from Kingston, Jamaica, whose work is deeply invested in concepts of relationality and intimacy, interwoven into the complexities of Black life. They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Their work is rooted in Transnational Black feminisms, with recent curatorial projects including Contours of the Interior at VisArts Center and To be pained is to have lived through feeling with Canada NYC. Their writing has been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Financial Times, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. They have taught courses in Black Feminist theory, praxis, and performance and received fellowships from the Jamaica Art Society, Terra Foundation for American Art, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and Northwestern University.
"The Modern Ancient Brown Foundation Fellowship will provide a generous space to continue developing an essay and exhibition project, and an intentional opportunity to learn with the complex creative community in Detroit. The projects think through the limits of reconciliation and relationality within a world structured by anti-Black logics. Alongside these realities, I consider the generative possibilities of difficult intimacies and reflect on sustained re-orientations towards the interior self."
Esther Kondo Heller
Esther Kondo Heller is a poet. They approach the filmmaking process as a poet. In their films, they layer and unfurl to articulate memory, resonance, and language. They are particularly interested in Static as a portal of recollection, communion, and archive. Their most recent film MU/T/T/ER was selected and screened at the Berlinale Expanded Forum Programme 2022. They are a first-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where they are working on transnational Black poetics and translating the poetry of Black German poet Raja Lubinetzki.
"I am immensely honoured and delighted to have been selected as a Modern Ancient Brown Visiting Fellow. The fellowship will support me in thinking with other incredible thinkers and artists and in composing materials for an experimental film on Black poetics as a technology and sound that makes, Denise Ferreira da Silva's arrangements of difference without separability possible."
Photo Credit: Crystal Lamar
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THE FELLOWSHIP
