UPCOMING CONVERSATION
White paper full of white writing¹: On art and text with Jasmin Benward, Lily Jue Sheng, Nat Pyper, and Allie Tsubota
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UPCOMING CONVERSATION
White paper full of white writing¹: On art and text with Jasmin Benward, Lily Jue Sheng, Nat Pyper, and Allie Tsubota
Join us on Saturday, October 17 from 2–4pm for a reading and conversation with artists Jasmin Benward, Lily Jue Sheng, Nat Pyper, and Allie Tsubota. With practices spanning photography, film, music, and performance, each of the artists turns to writing as a central component of their work, and as a means of storytelling, speculation, seduction, revelation, disclosure, political insurgency, and all actions in between. Background by Tsubota’s exhibition Milk Teeth, on view at BAXTER ST, the artists will share excerpts from recent and ongoing works before collectively discussing the relationship between writing and artmaking in their practices. The conversation will draw on the ethos of the at Louis Place Artist Publishing Cohort—a fellowship in which the artists all took part between 2025-2026—to center thinking and writing in community as a liberatory practice that activates networks across traditional creative and intellectual silos.
This conversation is being held on the occasion of Allie Tsubota’s solo exhibition, Milk Teeth, currently on view at BAXTER ST.
- From Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (First Archipelago Books, 2011), 90.
Jasmin Benward (she/they) is a Black, queer writer, musician, and founder of Create the Room, based in New York City. They are the author of the debut poetry collection Crying in LA: Sapphic Longing in Tongues and Tears (Tehom Center Publishing, June 2025), a body of work that explores sapphic desire, grief, and becoming through lyric intimacy and emotional excavation. Jasmin’s creative practice spans poetry, personal essay, screenwriting, speculative fiction, sound, and performance, often blurring the lines between page and voice. They are a current NYC Cave Canem Regional Workshop Poet. Their personal essays have appeared in Healthline Magazine, Refinery29, and other publications, where they write candidly about identity, care, and embodiment. Rooted in a southern femme sensibility, Jasmin’s work engages lineage, softness, and survival, centering Black queer interiority as resistance. Across mediums, they are committed to storytelling that holds intersectionality, vulnerability, and radical love.
Lily Jue Sheng is an artist-filmmaker and cinema worker working across the moving image, collage, and poetry. They have screened or read at Anthology Film Archives, articule, The Cinematheque, the Emily Harvey Foundation, Mono No Aware, Topos Too, and The Poetry Project. Recent film festival presentations include Light Field Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, True/False Film Fest, and Kabayitos Microcinema. They have received awards from Creatives Rebuild NY, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Anderson Center at Tower View, and various local arts councils. Their work develops from places and paradigms relative to being a neuro-atypical minority settler (b. Shanghai, China) in labor struggles on unceded Lenape lands where they grew up and are based (New Jersey and New York).
Nat Pyper is an alphabet artist. Their practice of fonts, video, performance, and writing extends from ongoing research on queer publishing histories. They’ve performed at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, Cooper Cole in Toronto, and PAGEANT in Brooklyn; exhibited at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, Culture Station in Seoul, and Printed Matter in New York City; and published with Are.na, Draw Down Books, GenderFail, Inga Books, Source Type, and the Walker Art Center. They are a recipient of an Independent Project Grant from NYSCA + Architectural League of New York and a Research Fellowship from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. They are based in Brooklyn, NY.
Allie Tsubota (she/her) is an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her work joins photography, video, photographic and cinematic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and historical time. Tsubota has received recognitions from Aperture and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others, and has been an artist-in-residence with Headlands Center for the Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Visual Studies Workshop, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and ARCUS Project. Her works have been exhibited across the United States and Japan, including in a present solo exhibition at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club in New York. Her first book, Dead Letter Room, was published by The Eriskay Connection in 2026. Tsubota holds an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design and teaches photography at Parsons School of Design.