The Loft Hour: Solmaz Sharif + Darian Longmire

Solmaz Sharif, born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley. https://www.solmazsharif.com/.

Darian Longmire is a mixed media artist from Chicago IL. After moving from the Midwest to the Northeast, Darian began to combine his print based work, which explored physics, philosophy and outer space with wider ideas about time and space. Eventually discovering the close connection to sci-fi and techno-culture, his research and ideas from the past have naturally developed into a larger artistic framework. His recent explorations in the studio have been impacted by what he describes as living through a time distortion. Darian has successfully exhibited works in a number of shows including “Yelling at the sky”, curated by La Keisha Leek at The Gaylord & Donnelley Foundation in Chicago IL. (2016), “Time Camp”, curated by Black Quantum Futurism at Icebox Projects in Philadelphia PA. (2017), as well as “What is leaping in your chest?” curated by Alexandra Foradas (Mass MOCA) at Collar Works gallery in Troy, NY. (2017). https://dlongmire.com/.

Anneka Lenssen, Associate Professor of Global Modern Art, specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, non-alignment, and Third World humanism. Lenssen is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria, which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Assn Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize. She is also co-editor, with colleagues Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers, of a volume of art writing from the Arab world in translation: Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute; the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley; and the Hellman Family Foundation. Over the period 2020-2022, she is a contributor to a collaborative Connecting Art Histories initiative between the Getty Foundation and the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. Read more on Anneka here.