Contextual Statement

Lucy at Nick Cave's Until is a  “review” of Cave's installation Until at Mass MoCA (October 15, 2016–September 4, 2017) by way of a video/ performance essay.  The review features the art critic Lucy C. Wilson and Ronaldo V. Wilson, moving through the exhibit, recounting the effects of seeing Cave’s show, the New York Times describes as, “a paradisiacal landscape where [black-faced lawn] jockey’s appear…on a raised platform accessible via four ladders…” Lucy as Ronaldo as Lucy as Ronaldo walks into the space, climbs the ladders, reading, filming, dancing, free-styling, staging, and looking. Though Lucy nor Ronaldo have sought permission or rights to use images from the Cave exhibit, they did ask the security if it was okay to shoot video, and they said, yes, that Cave wanted the work to be disseminated via social media platforms, but before this: One security talked B-boying with Ronaldo, and how he, and the rest of the staff before anything, wanted to make sure that Lucy, nor Ronaldo, with their masks and their bodies were some active shooter, real talk. 

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer, and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Dixon Place, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Lousiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at UC Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-directing the Creative Writing Program.