Accidental Athlete

Kevin Jerome Everson (b.1965, Mansfield, Ohio) Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Everson is the recipient of the Guggenheim; Berlin Prize; Heinz Award in Art and Humanities; Alpert Award for Film/Video and the Rome Prize. His art practice encompasses printmaking, photography, sculpture and film – 12 features and over 200 shorts to date – including 11 Black Fire collaborations with UVA colleague Claudrena N. Harold. His work has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives and solo exhibitions at Tate Modern/Film, Halle fur Kunst Steiermark, Harvard Film Archive, Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul and featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial and the 2018 Carnegie International.

Claudrena N. Harold is Professor of African American and African Studies and History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (University of Illinois Press, 2020); New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2016); The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942 (2007). Her collaboration with UVA colleague Kevin Jerome Everson on a series of Black Fire films includes 11 shorts that reflect a “deep interest in the interiority of Black life, particularly those formal and informal spaces where African Americans communed, hobnobbed, prayed, loved, quarreled, reconciled, and moved on.”