As part of our public programming for No Bios, Pamela Sneed and Tivali Thomas joined us for a wonderful evening of poetry reading. Sneed's watercolor paintings are featured in No Bios, our summer exhibition curated by Isis Awad.

This event also served as the launch of the No Bios exhibition booklet, which features Sneed's poem "Black Star Square," a text by Stevie Cisneros Hanley, and a statement by the curator. Copies of the booklet are available at the gallery.

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer, and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther; Funeral Diva (City Lights, 2020), winner of the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award; and the chapbook If the Capitol Rioters Had Been Black (F magazine and Motherbox Gallery, 2021). Her poetry appeared in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poems, and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in poetry.

Her visual work has been exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, the Ford Foundation, and Laurel Gitlen in New York City.

She is online faculty in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) low-res MFA program teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has been a visiting artist at SAIC in the program for six years. She also teaches poetry and art across disciplines at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Sneed has won a 2023 Creative Capital Grant in Literature, a 2022 BOFFO residency on Fire Island, a 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award, and was a finalist for the New York Theater Workshop’s 2021 Golden Harris Award.

She has performed and spoken at the Whitney Museum for American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the High Line, the New Museum, MoMA, the Broad Museum, the Toronto Biennale, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Bard Center for Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, the New School, the New York Public Library, and NYU’s Center for Humanities. She has published in the Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Paris Review, Frieze, Harper's Bazaar, Academy of American Poets, and New York Times, and been featured in New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and on the cover of New York Magazine.

Tivali Thomas

Tivali Thomas aka DOLLNXTDOOR is an internationally recognized poet, performer and DJ, creating music, literature and art that celebrates and interrogates the Black Trans experience.

Her goal is to use sound, performance and literature to create a vacuum of love and immersion. She uses her DJ sets as a medium to communicate her deep love and appreciation for black queer influence on art and music.

She has had the honor of playing at The Schomburg Center in Harlem New York, The Leslie Lohman Queer Museum, and has shared the stage with queer icons such as Kevin Aviance, Sinia Braxton and Byrell The Great.

She has performed at the Kennedy Center, The White House, The Stage Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa and has lead workshops at Harvard's Alumni of Color Conference, performed for TED and has been a panelist for the Laramie Project, The Angelito Collective, and several other queer organizations.