Saturday, June 22, 2024
Pamela Sneed
A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton
Pamela Sneed is a poet, performer, and visual artist who has created a musical with text honoring legend Big Mama Thornton. With a world-class band, including Viva De Concini, Sneed covers Thornton's greatest hits and gives tribute to the unsung blues singer who helped found the genre known as Rock and Roll.
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and Funeral Diva, published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Artnet, and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award and was recommended by The New York Times alongside Barack Obama's memoir. Additionally, in 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery's "More Life" exhibit and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, NYU's Center For Humanities. Pamela Sneed has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets, The Brooklyn Rail, THEM, BOMB, and Poetry Magazine. She has appeared in Nikki Giovanni's "The 100 Best African American Poets.
Her visual work has been exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, The Ford Foundation, Kates-Ferris, and currently at The Lumber Room in Portland. In 2022, she had a solo show at Laurel Gitlen Gallery. She won the 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award. She participated as a reader in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and was a narrator for Coco Fusco's film, also in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. She has given keynote speeches at Yale University, Georgetown University, and SAIC. She won a BOFFO residency on Fire Island in August 2022. In March 2023, she premiered A Tribute To Big Mama Thornton, which broke a record at the Armory for the earliest performance ever sold out.