Lecture & Performance

Still Candy: Visions, Alters with Ronaldo V. Wilson

Fri, Dec 12, 2025

5:30 PM–6:30 PM

Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all. Registration required.

Images from the video series: Candy’s Visions: Stills, 2025.

Join us for Still Candy: Visions, Alters, a durational performance lecture inspired by memory through meditations on performance persona “Candy” invented by poet Ronaldo V. Wilson. “Candy” first debuted in Sacramento, CA, circa 1982, yet “Candy” still lingers, often flourishing in Wilson’s poetry, fiction, and hybrid works, recently enacted in improvised dialogues, drawings and site-specific urban and land art performance videos. How might Still Candy… expose intersections between poetry, poetics, performance and visual art around lived realities of space, identity, tenderness, and desire? Still Candy… fluidly embodies form and place through language, dance, song, and video. This work and play ignites questions of racialized in/visibility, exilic loss and psychic agency, bound by ecstasy/fun/fear/love—Candy’s and Wilson’s own seeing and moving between. This event will be introduced by poet, critic, artist, and filmmaker Wayne Koestenbaum, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

This event is free and open to all and will be followed by reception. Register to attend here.

About the Artist

Ronaldo V. Wilson is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, academic, and the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. He is the editor of three special issues of hybrid and experimental work in Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He has shown work and performed most recently at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, where he directs the Creative Writing Program, and serves on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).

Ronaldo V. Wilson in the studio at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Ronaldo V. Wilson, Robert Rauschenberg Residency Image, Captiva Island, FL., 2025

View a gallery of Ronaldo V. Wilson’s photographs, stills from his video work, and works in progress below:

drawings: Family Portrait Series, 2020; video: Candy’s Visions Series, 2025; live performance: Hanes Gallery, Wake Forest University, 2023; works in progress: Robert Rauschenberg Studios, 2025

Preceding this event on Thu, Dec 11th at 2:00 PM, Ronaldo will led a free creative student workshop Instant/ce Installations.

After this event and the reception on Fri, Dec 12th starting at 7:30 PM, Ronaldo will screen a new short film and be in discussion with other filmmakers as part of a related public event “Graduate Center Shorts: An Evening of Films and Discussion.

This performance lecture and the related creative workshop are presented by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center and co-sponsored by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.