Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni's Room

Please note that this is a masked event.

Joining the growing Black creative movement currently refashioning horses and cowboy imagery, a thoughtful, probing exploration of the shared history of Blackness and horses which reveals what its image can teach us about nationhood, race, and culture.

Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life.

In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines. Alternatively playful and critical, meditative and biting, these essays navigate time and place--from the shadows of racetracks where jockey culture and the ubiquity of "equestrian chic" was born, to the reclamation--or, in Lil Nas X's word, yeehawification--of the image of the cowboy, to the fraught connections of equestrian sport to slavery, US militarization, and European colonial domination. At heart, Kalli probes a central question: What does it mean for Black people to ride and tend horses in the context of a culture that has also used horses against them?

Throughout these essays, Kalli reflects on the experience of being the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, and how the aesthetics, ethos, and practice of horse stewardship contributed to their understanding of gender, sexuality, and radical community building. Mounted moves beyond the reductive stereotypes that dominate our perceptions of "horse people"--the swaggering masculinity, snooty elitism, and assumed whiteness--to reveal how Black people relate to the image and physical presence of the horse in nature and culture, considering violence, sexualization, power, migration, and more through its image.

Bitter Kalli is a writer and land worker originally from Brooklyn, NY. Through their work, Bitter seeks to create opportunities for liberatory storytelling, land stewardship, and collective food sovereignty.

Bitter’s writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Guernica Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Arts.Black, and Architectural Digest, among others. They have received support from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Schuylkill Environmental Center, the Philadelphia Food Justice Initiative, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Columbia University.

As a teaching artist, Bitter has worked with students at organizations including the School for Poetic Computation, the Painted Bride Arts Center, and the Rolling Library, as well as through independently produced events and workshops. Bitter is also the founder of Star Apple Farm and Nursery, a project focused on increasing access to Caribbean and Southeast Asian heritage crops.

Khaliah D. Pitts is a Philly-born and raised writer, cultural memory worker, and multidisciplinary creative who’s deeply passionate about the stories that hold, heal and connect us. Her writing explores identity, liberation, and the power of remembering—and has appeared in places like Chronicling Resistance, Vagabond City Lit, APIARY, and Mad Poets Society.
Khaliah is the author of we / sun people / mypeople and co-founder of Our Mothers’ Kitchens, a project honor Black cultural memory and storytelling through writing, food and land-based rituals.
For over 10 years, Khaliah has hosted The Writers’ Circle, a beloved home for Black and brown writers and artists to gather, share work, and build community. A 2020 Leeway Foundation awardee and seasoned facilitator, she leads healing-centered workshops that blend storytelling, ritual, and social justice.