Open Tongue



Open Tongue: in collaboration with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
On the occasion of the launch of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue #77 join Venita Blackburn and Rita Bullwinkel in conversation.
Saturday, February 15, 2025, 3-5 pm
Free Admission
The public programming of Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions continues the desire towards knowledge-sharing and insists on the potential of collectivity on the local and global level. The concurrent exhibitions at KADIST San Francisco and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston and their related public programs are guided by Judith Butler’s notion of intertwinement and interdependency as ethics in order to untangle forms of oppression toward liberation.
The programs in San Francisco are titled Open Bodies and extend across the city in collaboration with local arts and cultural organizations. The series is conceived as a collective body that tends to various organs, perceptive faculties, and phenomenologies. Acting as the ears, the limbs, and the tongue to the exhibition body, Open Bodies reflects on the transformation of physical and social bodies through sound, dance/movement, and familial and collective language.
Learn more about Open Bodies
Open Tongue: in collaboration with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
A multitude of voices echo through the pages of the literary publication McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue #77, weaving together stories that explore the intimate intersections of language, memory, and community. The program will bring these themes to life, featuring a reading by the award-winning author of Dead in Long Beach, California, Venita Blackburn, who will be joined in conversation by Rita Bullwinkel, editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and author of the novel, Headshot, and Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award, that delves into the intricacies of time, ritual, and the shared practices of memory-keeping that bind communities together.
Three-time National Magazine Award-winning McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern returns, this time helmed by new Quarterly Editor Rita Bullwinkel and longtime Quarterly Art Director Sunra Thompson. With a stunningly exuberant and grandiose portfolio of paintings by former Quarterly Editor Claire Boyle, and new work by 17 writers including a story by Mieko Kawakami told entirely through the lens of overheard phone calls, a sci-fi epic by Yuri Herrera, and fresh, heartstopping, scathingly beautiful prose by Nell Zink, Venita Blackburn, Joanna Howard, and Icarus Koh, a never-before-published fiction writer, this issue vibrates with the magazine’s signature radiant, maximalist energy that stands so squarely in opposition to the literary vogue de jour of cold, minimalist austerity.
Venita Blackburn‘s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions award among others. Blackburn’s second collection of stories How to Wrestle a Girl (2021), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a New York Times editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California ( 2024) is about the mania of grief, all of human history, and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot (2024), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite reads of summer 2024. Her first book, Belly Up (2018), won the Believer Book Award. She is a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, and the Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University, Germany, where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building.