From  Published Works, From  lost and found

“All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979): Lois Elaine Griffith

“All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979): Lois Elaine Griffith

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“All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979): Lois Elaine Griffith

“All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979) presents a selection of artifacts from Lois Elaine Griffith’s archive that explores her development as a visual artist. Especially her engagement with surrealism during the early part of her career. Surrealism offered Griffith methods to cultivate creative expression through the production of art objects charged by memories and ancestral ways of knowing and being. Surrealism also led to collaborative projects with artists of the feminist, and Black and Nuyorican arts movements; cross-cultural communions that began at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and are missing from current scholarship on the Cafe’s history. “All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979) is part of Lost & Found Series X dedicated to the work Lois Elaine Griffith and is edited by Lost & Found scholar and archival collaborator Joseph Anthony Cáceres.

See images from “All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979) below:


Lois Elaine Griffith and Joseph Anthony Cáceres Bios

Joseph Anthony Cáceres and Lois Elaine Griffith. Photo credit: John Sarsgard, 2024. 

 Lois Elaine Griffith is a visual and literary artist of West Indian descent. For 23 years she was professor of English at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. As one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, after retiring from the day-to-day business of producing at the Cafe, she established the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project dedicated to the documentation, collection and presentation of evidence of cultural expressions produced at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the latter part of the 20th century. In 2024, she was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. At present, she is working on – Come To Terms/Llegar A Un Acuerdo – a project about knowledges and naming – evidencing for archive.   

Joseph Anthony Cáceres is a queer Nuyorican writer, archivist, and scholar. His work has been published in Evergreen Review, Rican Writing, Slice magazine, CURA, and Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology. An alumnus of the Yale Writers’ Workshop, he is also the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts’ Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant for Fiction, and LAMBDA Literary Writers Residency for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Joseph holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a senior archivist for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project. He is currently working on three book projects revolving around the Cafe’s aesthetic, featuring unpublished works and other archival artifacts that record the forgotten contributions of the Cafe’s founders and affiliated artists.

Series X Publications