Gabrielle Civil activates her latest performance memoir, In & Out of Place, highlighting her experience making Black feminist performance art in Mexico. Featuring live reading, art gestures, images, and short videos, she will recall swimming in Elizabeth Catlett's pool in Cuernevaca, singing Nina Simone with mariachis in Mexico City, becoming a live Mexican mammy doll, and more. She will address artistic process, border crossing, memory, and the vitality of Black life. In & Out of Place will be available through the BAMPFA bookstore and Civil will be signing books at the event.

Gabrielle Civil is a Black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, Michigan. Her recent performances include My San Francisco (2024) and Black Weirdo School (Pop Up Critique) (2023). Her series of performance memoirs, a chronicle of performance body, includes Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), the déjà vu (2022), and In & Out of Place (2024). This last volume recounts her experience living and making art as a Fulbright fellow in Mexico. Civil’s writing also appears in New Daughters of Africa, Teaching Black, Kitchen Table Translation, and A Mouth Holds Many Things. Foundress of the Black Weirdo School, she earned her PhD at New York University and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.