The Power of Public Art with Rania Mamoun & Diane Samuels

In its neighborhood, the City of Asylum has long championed the power and beauty of public art in projects like its “House Publications,” which feature multilingual 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.

About the Speakers:

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese activist and bestselling writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She completed Something Evergreen Called Life, a poetry manuscript written during the COVID-19 quarantine, translated into English by Yasmine Seale, and published by Action Books in 2023. Rania has published two novels to great international acclaim, Green Flash and Son of the Sun, and Thirteen Months of Sunrise, a short story collection that was shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Rania continues to organize for democracy in Sudan. Her writing has appeared in English, Korean, French, and Spanish translation. She has been a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum since 2019.

Diane Samuels is a visual artist with studio and public art practices. She is also co-founder with Henry Reese of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. Diane has received a Rockefeller Bellagio Residency and an American Academy in Jerusalem Fellowship. Her permanent site-specific artworks include Luminous Manuscript (Center for Jewish History, New York), Lines of Sight (Brown University), and The Alphabet Garden (Grafeneck, Germany). Her exhibitions include Harvard University (Arnold Arboretum), Les Franciscaines (Deauville, France), Haus der Geschichte (Stuttgart, Germany), Jerusalem Biennale, the San José ICA, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Mattress Factory Museum, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Center for Book Arts, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati, the Municipal Museum of Art (Gyor, Hungary), the Synagogue Center (Trnava, Slovakia), the Bernheimer Realschule (Buttenhausen, Germany), and the Czech Museum of Fine Arts.

About the Moderator:

Sylvia Rhor Samaniego is the Director and Curator of the University Art Gallery (UAG) at the University of Pittsburgh. Additionally, she serves as Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. In her role as UAG Director, Sylvia designs a long-term vision for curation, education, public programs, and collections for the gallery. She creates interdisciplinary academic programming and organizes exhibitions that connect the gallery with university curriculum and critical social issues. Before joining the UAG, Sylvia was a Professor of Art History at Carlow University. At Carlow, Sylvia was the founding director of the university’s first academic art gallery. She brings a commitment to inclusive programming, management, and curation to her current work at the University Art Gallery (UAG). Sylvia earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from New York University, where she was a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Minority Scholar. Her research interests include 20th-century mural painting in the United States, political cartoons and comics, and the intersection of modern art and politics. She has also curated exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum and the August Wilson Center of African American Culture, and she has created educational resources for cultural organizations including The Mattress Factory Museum, The Frick Art and Historical Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Office of Public Art, Pittsburgh. She served on Pittsburgh’s Art Commission from 2010 to 2015.