The Power of Public Art with Rania Mamoun & Diane Samuels

In its neighborhood, City of Asylum as has long championed the power and beauty of public art in projects like its “House Publications,” multi-lingual art on the facades of its writer residences. During the pandemic, visual artist Diane Samuels was commissioned to create a new artwork for the exterior of The Malta Foundation’s building, across the street from Alphabet City. The artwork incorporates the complete texts of Albert Camus’s The Plague, an essay from Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, and 100 poems written by Rania Mamoun as part of a pandemic collaboration with Samuels. In this program, Diane Samuels and Rania Mamoun will discuss this collaborative work, in conversation with Sylvia Rhor Samaniego.