Join The Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series for a conversation between artist Richard Kraft and poet Mónica de la Torre about Kraft’s forthcoming project “It Is What It Is”: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017 – January 2021 and wider questions about the relationship between art and politics, various forms of resistance and the role of creativity in it. This will be a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation! The program concludes with a poetry reading by Peter Gizzi.

Missed the event? You can watch here.

RICHARD KRAFT is an artist whose multidisciplinary works often use public spaces as well as converse with the literary. Many of his works use language, book pages, and appropriated narratives as material. He has had numerous group and solo gallery shows, including at Charlie James Gallery, LA Louver, and Rosamund Felsen, the Portland Art Museum, the Laguna Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Printed Matter, among others. 100 Walkers, West Hollywood, commissioned by The City of West Hollywood for its thirtieth year celebrations, won a Year in Review Award from Americans for the Arts/Public Art Network. Kraft was born and raised in London and now lives in Los Angeles and New York.

MÓNICA DE LA TORRE is the author of six books of poetry of which the most recent is Repetition Nineteen, published by Nightboat Books in the spring of 2020. Others include The Happy End/All Welcome—a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika— as well as Public Domain. Born and raised in Mexico City, she has lived in NYC since mid-’90s and has published several books in Spanish, including Taller de Taquimecanografía, written jointly with the eponymous women’s collective she formed with Gabriela Jauregui, Laureana Toledo, and the late Aura Estrada. She teaches poetry at Brooklyn College and in the Bard MFA program. Recent work appears in Granta 151: Membranes and The Believer. The anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979, co-edited with Alex Balgiu, is just out from Primary Information.

PETER GIZZI is the author of nine books of poetry, including most recently Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011 (Wesleyan, 2014), in addition to several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Among his many editing projects are o·blēk: a journal of language arts (1987–1993) and My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer with Kevin Killian. He has been honored with numerous awards including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at University of Massachusetts-Amherst.