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In Conversation: Reading Gertrude Abercrombie

Talks and Lectures Thurs., Mar. 13, 2025, 6:30 p.m.
When
Thurs., Mar. 13, 2025, 6:30–7:30 p.m.
Where
Art Theater
Tickets
Free
Register 🎟

There are so many ways to read an artwork, and Gertrude Abercrombie’s paintings welcome each of us in with the magical visual language created by her dreams, personal symbols, and the music she was surrounded by. Join us for an open-ended reading of a selection of Gertrude Abercrombie’s artworks through the perspectives and language of magical realist author Sarah Cypher, queer scholar Michael J. Morris, and jazz musician and historian Aaron Johnson.

Registration

Gertrude Abercrombie, Letter from Karl, ca. 1940, Union League Club of Chicago
Gertrude Abercrombie, Letter from Karl, ca. 1940, Union League Club of Chicago

About the Speakers

Sarah Cypher

Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine), a Stonewall Honor Book also shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Mizna, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She will be a 2025 artist-in-residence at Austin’s Wild Basin Preserve and has been a past resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center. She currently serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). She grew up in a Lebanese family near Pittsburgh and now lives in Austin, Texas, with her wife.

Aaron Johnson

Aaron Johnson is the Chair of the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. Aaron is interested in social aspects of how music is produced, organized, and presented. In particular, African American music forms frame social interactions in ways that are both consistent and at odds with societal norms. His research examines relationships of power and the efforts of musicians and music workers to counter more powerful forces. This includes considerations of how musicians attempt to use media and how they have organized their own production of music to create artistic, cultural, and financial benefits for themselves and their community.
Aaron holds a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University, a MS in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and a PHD in Music from Columbia University. For about twenty years he was involved in telecommunications research in the areas of optical fiber measurements, optical communications networks, DSL networks, and video distribution networks, all while maintaining an active career as a jazz musician in the New York, performing with the likes of Charles Tolliver, Jimmy Heath, Frank Lacy, Steve Turre, Wallace Roney, and Aretha Franklin. Aaron has recorded with Jay-Z, among many others.
Courtesy of Aaron Johnson

Michael J. Morris

Michael J. Morris is an artist, astrologer, tarot reader, writer, and educator. They hold a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, and they were a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University from 2015-2021 where they taught in Dance, Women’s and Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and Environmental Studies. They were also visiting faculty at SNDO—the School for New Dance Development—at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam from 2020-2023. Michael’s choreographic and performance work has been presented in galleries, universities, community spaces, theaters, bars and nightclubs, films, and domestic spaces. Their writing appears in Chaosmagic: The Buch, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, TDR: The Drama Review, Choreographic Practices, Dance Chronicle, and the European Journal of Ecopsychology. In 2019, Michael founded Co Witchcraft Offerings through which they offer astrology and tarot consultations, movement-based rituals, and workshops to support people in cultivating personal and collective healing and liberation. Michael is based in Columbus, Ohio—the ancestral and contemporary territories of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples.

Photo: Kate Sweeney

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