Kevin Jerome Everson

The Stuart Weitzman School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Contemporary Art are pleased to present the first artist lecture and conversation of the season with artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. Everson’s work films are performative explorations into African American culture.

This free public lecture is part of a series that gathers distinguished artists, activists, writers, and disruptors whose work engages with the social and cultural themes of our time.

Artist/Filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson was born and raised in Mansfield Ohio He has an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Virginia. He has made over two-hundred films including Tonsler Park (2017), The Island of Saint Matthews (2013), Erie (2010), Quality Control (2011), Ten Five in the Grass (2012), Ears, Nose and Throat (2016), Spicebush (2005), Stone (2013), Pictures From Dorothy (2004), Century (2013), Fe26 (2014), Sound That (2014), Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) with Claudrena Harold, Emergency Needs (2007) and the eight-hour long film Park Lanes (2015). He also has three DVD box sets of his films How You Live Your Story: Selected Works by Kevin Jerome Everson distributed by Second Run, Broad Daylight and Other Times and I Really Hear That: Quality Control and Other Films with a catalog distributed by Video Data Bank.

Everson’s films and artwork have been widely shown at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Smithsonian Museum of African-American History in Washington D.C., The Tate Modern in London, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris.  The films were streamed on multiple platform sites including Made in America: Cinema of Kevin Jerome Everson on MUBI. The work has also been recognized through awards and fellowships such as Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert Award, a Heinz Award, a Creative Capital Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy in Rome Prize and an American Academy in Berlin Prize.

Everson is represented by Picture Palace Pictures New York and Andrew Kreps Gallery New York.

Register to attend this free event here | View this program via zoom here. 

Captioning will be available for this program via Zoom. If you require any other accessibility accommodations such as audio description or ASL interpretation, or have any questions about the program, please contact Brittany Clottey at bclottey@ica.upenn.edu.