Jamaica Kincaid & Kara Walker with Hilton Als: An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

The renowned novelist and the revered artist discuss their new book, a unique collaboration that explores the hidden history of the plant world. Pre-order your signed copy of An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children and get your free ticket now! For event details and more, visit www.nypl.org/events/programs/...
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Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker come together to share their new book, a one-of-a-kind production entitled An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. It is an inventive and surprising survey about what our gardens reveal. Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them. Walker illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors. They speak with New Yorker staff writer and theater critic Hilton Als.
Presented as part of The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library's Treasures, which showcases some of the most extraordinary items from the 56 million in our collections. Among them is The Brownies Book, a children’s magazine published by W.E.B. Du Bois and whose primary intended audience was Black children. The event will begin with a short talk on The Brownies Book and other items reflecting stories of Black childhood by Barrye Brown, the Curator of Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont.
Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and an Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at Rutgers University since 2015. Her work can be found in museums throughout the world, including the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate Gallery. She lives in New York.
Hilton Als is an award-winning journalist, critic and curator. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1994. Prior to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (2017), Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (2016), the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism (2002-03), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000). His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His next book, White Girls, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014. His most recent book, My Pinup, was published in November 2022. In 2017, he curated the critically lauded exhibition Alice Neel, Uptown, which traveled from David Zwirner, New York, to Victoria Miro, London and Venice. In 2019, Als presented God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin at David Zwirner, New York, followed by Frank Moore at, David Zwirner, New York (2021) and Toni Morrison’s Black Book, at David Zwirner, New York (2022). He curated a series of three successive exhibitions for the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, of the work of Celia Paul (2018), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (2019), and Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2022). In 2022, he curated Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, which traveled to the Perez Art Museum Miami. He is currently a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also taught at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and the Yale School of Drama.
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