Join us for a live panel discussion between two curators and an artist on the artists and the concepts behind our current group exhibition Reconfigured, now on display at Timothy Taylor New York until 12 June. Artist Kaveri Raina will be joined by curator Rachel Adams and curator-educator Niama Safia Sandy, where they will discuss dreaming and fantasy, the fusion of abstraction and figuration, gender fluidity, and notions of identity and selfhood as seen in the works in the exhibition. 

How do artist negotiate ‘the body politic' versus ‘body politics' through their approaches to figuration and identity? ‘The body politic’ of statehood will be traced in relation to UK and US identities, exploring how subversive references to the body politic have emerged in visual languages from each country.

This event is moderated by art consultant Kristen Becker.

Rachel Adams is the Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Past curatorial appointments include Senior Curator at UB Art Galleries, Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center and Associate Curator at Arthouse at the Jones Center (now The Contemporary Austin). Adams holds an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from SFAI and a BFA from SAIC. Select exhibitions include Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Drop Scene, Claudia Wieser: Generations (co-curated), Alison O’Daniel; Heavy Air, Jillian Mayer; TIMESHARE, The Language of Objects; Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017 and Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective (co-curated). Forthcoming projects include exhibitions with Maya Dunietz and the group exhibition All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy, which offers reflection and insight as the nation embarks on the next presidential term in the United States.

Her writing has been included in Afterimage, artforum.com, Art Papers, Art Practical, Modern Painters, and Texas Architect. She is an alumnus of the 2016 ICI Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans and the 2016 Artis Curatorial Research Trip to Israel. She has lectured at the University at Buffalo, MOCAD, The Rose Art Museum, Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art, PNCA, FIT, the University of Nebraska Omaha, Texas State University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kristen Becker is the Founder of KB Art Strategies, a consultancy providing concrete support to a global network of artists, galleries, non-profits, and arts organizations looking to expand the visibility of their projects and connect with their community. Prior to starting her own business, Kristen served as the Director of Museum Engagement for Marianne Boesky Gallery and was a Director at Luhring Augustine. She has also held positions at L&M Arts, SLP Art Culture Commerce, and Gorney Bravin + Lee.

Kristen received her master’s degree in Museum Studies from George Washington University in Washington, DC and she holds a BA in Anthropology from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Kaveri Raina received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011, her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 2017. Raina has received various awards and fellowships including the James Nelson Raymond fellowship and the Fred and Joanna Lazarus Scholarship, and she was recently nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant. Raina’s work has been exhibited in the US, India and Europe. She had her first international solo exhibition in March 2019 at Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy, and had a solo show at Assembly Room, New York, NY Spring 2019. Summer 2019 she exhibited at Luhring Augustine, in New York. She opened a solo exhibition at Patron Gallery, March 2020 and recently had a solo exhibition at M+B gallery in LA 2021. Raina lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based cultural anthropologist, curator, producer and multidisciplinary artist. Niama’s creative practice delves into the human story - through the application and critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race and ritual. She sees her role as that of an agitator - one who endeavors to simultaneously call into question and make sense of the seemingly arbitrary nature of modern life and to celebrate our shared humanity in the process. Sandy is fascinated by the ways in which history, economics, migration and other social forces and constructs have shaped culture and identity. Her aim is to leverage history, the visual, written and performative arts, chiefly those of the Global Black Diaspora, to tell stories we know in ways we have not yet thought to tell them and to lift us all to a higher state of historical, ontological and spiritual wholeness in the process.

Sandy is a co-founder of The Blacksmiths, a coalition forging support for Black liberation against anti-Black racism and its manifestations in the academy and at cultural institutions on the global stage. Niama is a member of the Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of women and non-binary identifying musicians bringing song to life in the spirit of activism, collective joy and resistance. She is also an active member of the Wide Awakes, an international open-source network of artists and creatives radically reimagining the future through creative collaboration.

She has presented work and spoken at art institutions around the world. Niama and her work have been featured in The New York Times, Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, OkayAfrica, and more. She has written for outlets including Artsy, Active Cultures LA, and NAD NOW. Niama is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, School of Art and Curator-in-Residence at Fridman Gallery.