In the finale of Huffman's  "_____________" MEANS "I LOVE YOU" IN ITALICS, a multi-venue evolving project presented as part of the Art on the Move series of art in public spaces, the two artists will present work connected to a recent performance and accompanying music video they recently performed at the inaugural Freize LA.

This new performance will utilize the same promotional video installed on advertising trucks that Huffman used in December during Art Week Miami in the Design District, Wynwood and on Miami Beach, along with other tropes of hip-hop music videos. The performance will begin in the streets around Locust Projects (with live video/sound being projected in the project space at Locust) and conclude in the project space/parking lot, with the truck itself serving as a now-stationary light source for the performance and screen projecting video that corresponds with projections already occurring, temporarily at the space.

Thematically, this work continues Huffman's ongoing delving into Black ego, mental health, reconciling being a feminist with listening to certain contemporary hip-hop, police brutality, and representation. 

Join Locust Projects and Oolite Arts for a conversation with Naomi Beckwith, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and former senior curator at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art and Studio Museum in Harlem.

Beckwith's numerous exhibitions include, ”The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now” and ”30 Seconds off an Inch,” both considering the resonance of black culture across contemporary art internationally, and she has championed rising artists like Rashid Johnson, Keren Cytter, The Propeller Group and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

She has contributed to publications including Artforum International, Frieze, The New York Times and W Magazine—and served on the jury of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. She holds an M.A. with Distinction from Courtauld Institute of Art and was a Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum. A multiple grantee, and now trustee, of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Beckwith is a recipient of the New Leadership award for ArtTable where she is a trustee.

Parking is available at the cultural center, but limited. We encourage you to use a ride share service.

Rickey Laurentiis (b. 1989, February 7) was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. Their poetry has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017),  Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded him a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, they traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. Laurentiis received a MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow, and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where they read literature and queer theory.

They are the author of Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. Boy with Thorn was also named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry books by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions