Cave Canem at the Brooklyn Museum: The Obama Portraits Tour

Cave Canem at the Brooklyn Museum: The Obama Portraits Tour

Saturday, August 28, 2021

4-8pm ET

Brooklyn Museum (Biergarten, Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden)

Cave Canem joins Brooklyn Museum in celebration of the Obama Portraits Tour! Poets celeste doaks, Kyle Carrero Lopez, and Nkosi Nkululeko read original works in honor of the portraits’ residency at the museum. Other artists taking part in the event include the legendary Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber and DJ Niara Sterling. Throughout the day, attendees can get their photo taken as part of a community portrait project by Souls In Focus, participate in art-making with Cool Culture, and shop and snack at the Brooklyn Pop-Up Market, which will be spotlighting local Black artists and vendors for the week.

This outdoor event is free, but RSVP is required. To visit the galleries, please reserve tickets in advance. A limited number of timed tickets will be available on-site on a first-come, first-served basis.

All visitors 12 and older must show proof of vaccination and a valid I.D. If you’re entering the Museum, face masks are required regardless of vaccination status.

celeste doaks is an award-winning poet, editor, and journalist. She is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields (2015), and editor of the poetry anthology Not Without Our Laughter (2017). Her chapbook, American Herstory (2019), was the first-place winner in Backbone Press’s inaugural chapbook contest; it contains poems about Michelle Obama and the art she chose for the White House walls. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in multiple on-line and print publications including Ms. Magazine, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, The Rumpus, The Millions, Huffington Post, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Asheville Poetry Review among others. During her life, she’s worked as a drive-through maven, professor, restaurant hostess, gaffer, camerawoman and information architect. Gray Matter, her new poetry manuscript, is currently in-progress. In her very spare time, she tends to her husband and budding plant collection. You can find her on IG and Twitter @thedoaksgirl.

Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of the chapbook MUSCLE MEMORY, winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists, and has published poems in The Nation, TriQuarterly, and The Atlantic.

Nkosi Nkululeko, a 2017 Poets House and 2018 Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts Fellow, is the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets 2018. His work is published and/or forthcoming in journals like Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Callaloo, The Offing, Ploughshares, and is anthologized in The Best American Poetry and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Nkosi Nkululeko is a poetry, chess, and music instructor from HARLEM.