Steffani Jemison: Cynosure Performance at ArtLab

Steffani Jemison, Cynosure
Thursday, November 19, 2026 | 6:00 PM
Harvard ArtLab

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Harvard ArtLab are pleased to present Cynosure, a performance by Steffani Jemison, in conjunction with the Carpenter Center exhibition Constitutive Outside.

Cynosure, the word from which this work draws its title, is derived from the Greek kynosoura, literally meaning “dog’s tail,” and was an ancient name for the constellation Ursa Minor. This constellation contains the celestial North Star (Polaris), which has long served as a point of orientation for navigation. Taking orientation—our way of placing ourselves in space—as both a physical and social question, Cynosure asks how relation might open non-hierarchical and interconnected modes of perception.

Performed by Steffani Jemison, JaLeel Marques Porcha, and Andros Zins-Browne, the work uses repetition, speech, and play to map and reimagine geographies in Black life that are often disavowed by a society shaped by settler colonial conceptions of subjectivity, ultimately asking how other forms of relation can emerge. Adapting the children’s game “Marco Polo,” Cynosure transforms a familiar exchange into an extended meditation on language, listening, and movement.

Cynosure is part of Jemison’s ongoing In Succession series, a body of video and performance works that asks: How can we think of our bodies as supports—as structures, like bricks and beams? How can we learn “on the fly”? How can we imagine forms of collective life that emerge through movement, language, and shared attention?

Free and open to the public. Please RSVP for the event here. 

This event is part of ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).”

Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. In dialogue with interlocutors living and ancestral, her work connects mark-making, gesture, proposal, projection, movement, and document. Steffani Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; CAC Genève, Geneva; JOAN Los Angeles, Los Angeles; Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Bordeaux, Bordeaux; MoMA, New York; LAXART, Los Angeles, and other venues. Significant group exhibitions include New Humans, New Museum, New York; Flight Into Egypt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York; and the Whitney Biennial, New York. Steffani Jemison’s work is part of many public collections, including the MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Her novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022; she has also written for Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail.

JaLeel Marques Porcha

In their practice, JaLeel creates work that does not prioritize the written account of what we know Blackness to be as a definitive way of learning about who is around them. JaLeel uses failure and unfiltered experimentation within their making process as an image maker and performance artist in the hope of guiding the viewer to look next to them and see what knowledge their new neighbor has stored within themselves. JaLeel received their BFA in Photography & Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers' Mason Gross School of Art.

Andros Zins-Browne

Andros Zins-Browne works at the intersection of performance and dance, extending choreographic practice towards non-dancers, vocalists, objects, and text. His work Already Unmade (2016–), which "de-hearses" previous performances, was presented at the ICA, London; the Whitney Museum, New York; RAM, Shanghai; and Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris. Atlas Unlimited (2019), a cycle of collaborative exhibitions and performances, was included in PERFORMA19 and is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and Triple Canopy. His "Vocal Choreographies," which activate intimacy through dissonance, include color, a body who flees (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2022), and The Chaos Opera (Canal Projects, 2024, and Pioneer Works, 2025, New York). Performance remixes include The Tony Cokes Remixes (Berlin Biennale, 2018; Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2023) and See-Saw (MoMA, 2019). Zins-Browne is the recipient of awards from the Goethe-Institut, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community, and the New York State Council on the Arts.