Alt(e)ar is a performace and art installation created by interdisciplinary performance artist and writer Kiki Williams, and installation artist Aya Rodriguez-Izumi. This multimedia event uses art and performance to interrogate the spaces between audience and viewer, between cultures, and between genders with the ultimate goal of opening a liminal space of experience. In partnership with the Theatre Department at the University of Pittsburgh, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics presents a performance that is representative of the poetics in architectural space and physical performance. Curated by the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Graduate Student Assistant and MFA candidate in poetry Jessica Lanay Moore.
Kiyan Williams is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who explores Black queer subjectivity. They create performances, texts, objects, videos, sounds, and installations informed by autoethnography, archival research, and social practice.
Kiyan was born in Newark, NJ and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. They have performed/exhibited work across the country and internationally at venues including: Stanford University, Dixon Place (NYC), JACK Theater (NYC), La Mama Experimental Theater Club (NYC), SOMArts (SF), SFMOMA (SF), Bing Concert Hall (Stanford), Orpheum Theater (Graz, Austria) and more. Follow their work at kiyanwilliams.com or on Instagram @lifeisakiki.
Aya Rodriguez-Izumi's art takes on various forms and expressions of ritual. She is interested in how communication and cultural melding inform enculturation and how common day activities can transform into ritualistic actions. She approachs this theme by calling on both personal experiences from her Japanese and Puerto Rican/Cuban heritage and from social stereotypes. These themes are addressed through a range of medium - most recently the work has primarily been explored through installation and performance, however sculpture, painting, video and sound are also utilized depending on the projects needs. Through physically utilizing various media and conceptually pushing together disparate themes, she investigates the diversity of cultural expression along multiple levels: mainstream, sub-cultural and pop cultural. iamaya.com
Image from Mask project. Courtesy of artist's website.
Location and Address
University of Pittsburgh
Cathedral of Learning
Studio Theatre (Basement)
1617 Cathedral of Learning
4200 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260