Catharsis Conference, September 2025
The Strangers: Nicholas Boggs and Ekow Eshun in conversation with Claude Grunitzky (Wednesday, September 10, 2025).
@Sean Jamar
Marking the opening of The Strangers, the inaugural exhibition conceived by Catharsis Arts Foundation for Atelier Jolie, Nicholas Boggs and Ekow Eshun joined Claude Grunitzky for an evening exploring Black diasporic interiority, James Baldwin's intimate worlds, and the curatorial vision uniting Eshun's book with Boggs's acclaimed new biography Baldwin: A Love Story.
Nicholas Boggs is the author of Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), the first major biography of James Baldwin in over three decades, told through the writer's four most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships — with painter Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar, and Yoran Cazac. The book was named a Top Ten Book of 2025 by Time and The Atlantic, and recognized with the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. As an undergraduate at Yale, Boggs rediscovered Baldwin's out-of-print children's book Little Man, Little Man, which he later co-edited (Duke, 2018). A Clinical Assistant Professor of English at NYU, he holds a BA from Yale, an MFA from American University, and a PhD from Columbia, and lives in Brooklyn.
Ekow Eshun is a writer, curator, and broadcaster, and the author of The Strangers — longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize — alongside In the Black Fantastic, Africa State of Mind, and the memoir Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Hailed by The Guardian as a "cultural polymath" and by Vogue as "the most inspired — and inspiring — curator in Britain," he was the first Black editor of a major UK magazine (Arena) and the first Black director of a major British arts institution (the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London). He has curated exhibitions internationally at venues including the Hayward Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, chairs the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group overseeing Britain's foremost public art programme, and writes for The New York Times, Financial Times, and The Guardian. He lives in London.