Chloë Bass and James Hannaham In Conversation

April 7, 2026 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

Dock 72, Brooklyn Navy Yard. 1 Dock 72 Wy, Brooklyn, NY 11205

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At top left, a headshot of Chloe Bass wearing a orange and white striped shirt, leaning against a wood tabletop, in a brightly light room with light walls behind her. At bottom left, Pratt Fine Arts official logo. At top right, the event name in wide, bold, dark blue font, with date, time, and location details below in smaller, thinner text. At bottom right, a headshot of James Hannaham wearing a grey quarter-zip sweater, black glasses, in a room with grey-toned walls. The background is a wavy teal-indigo-white gradient, over which there is a light blue grid.

Pratt Fine Arts and the Writing Department are delighted to welcome Chloë Bass to our MFA studios at Dock 72 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a conversation with James Hannaham.

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023–ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent projects with Creative Time, the Buffalo AKG, Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, The Kitchen, and elsewhere.

James Hannaham is a writer, a visual artist, or both. His novel Delicious Foods won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has shown text-based work at The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Open Source Gallery, and won Best in Show at Main Street Arts’ 2020 exhibit Biblio Spectaculum. In 2021 he released Pilot Impostor, a multigenre book inspired by an anthology of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry. His third novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, won the Ferro-Grumley Award from the Publishing Triangle, a second Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2022, an LA Times Book Prize Finalist, and another New York Times Notable Book. He co-founded the performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them until 2002. His arts criticism once appeared regularly in the Village Voice, and still does occasionally in 4Columns. He holds a BA in Art from Yale and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. He recently won a Guggenheim fellowship.

This event is open to the public.