Join the Hyde Park Art Center for a unique “performance-dialogue” that weaves together the two art forms of sculpture and spoken word.

Theater Gates connects Black history and the subject of masculinity through the character, Dave, the enslaved potter of North Carolina. Poet Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai traces Asian American ancestry through the experiences of gender, displacement, and immigration through her poetry. In their performance, Theaster and Kelly blend the richness of their two cultural traditions into a larger ritual of re-membering and transforming word through contemporary performance.

Urban planner, sculptor and singer, Gates moves between performance and making to convey the complexity of otherness. Theaster “sings” from his pottery wheel stories of the early Black American “maker,” but his artistic voice also speaks of contemporary urban folklore.

Tsai is a Chinese/Taiwanese American spoken word artist, essayist, and playwright who has been featured at venues like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo Theater, and two seasons of “HBO Def Poetry.” Her full-length play, “Murder the Machine,” was excerpted at Chicago’s first Hip Hop Theater Festival.