Exhibit

Leslie Cuyjet
For All Your Life

For All Your Life returns at
Center for Performance Research, January 2025.

Venue

CPR - Center for Performance Research
361 Manhattan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY


Dates

January 11 - 12, 2025

Co-presented with New York Live Arts upcoming performances will take place at ◼ CPR in Brooklyn, NY on January 11 at 6:30pm, and January 12 at 1pm and 5pm.

For All Your Life ◼ is a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death ◼This project scrutinizes the mechanism of life insurance and how it commodifies life and death, through the prism of the underwriting process.

Centered around an ambitious seriocomical short film, For All Your Life is staged as a performance seminar which offers a primer on the life insurance industry and its direct connection to slavery; unpacking the ways in which human beings grapple with the inevitable prospect of death and, more importantly, the ways in which lives—especially those of people of color—are monetized.

The piece rewrites the performative narrative tradition, where performer acts in service for the spectator; inviting the audience to confront its own value systems as they relate to black life and black death while navigating questions of reality, authenticity, accountability, and monetary value.

Creation and performance by Leslie Cuyjet ◼ Dramaturgy and Co-Direction by Sean Donovan ◼ Set design by Neal Wilkinson ◼ Lighting Design by Amanda K. Ringger ◼ Film Direction by Daniele Sarti ◼ Co-produced by Jennifer Castro Song and Sweat Variant

Archive

Previous exhibitions of this ongoing project

  • For All Your Life’s world premiere at The Chocolate Factory Theater ◼ April 2024. Read the review here.

  • Survival For All Your Life ◼A solo performance for E-Moves Festival at Harlem Stage, featuring “Dee,” a power blazer-toting insurance saleswoman whose own performance is that of a legible black woman in white spaces.

  • For All Your Life ◼ A pair of essays published in MN Artists, Walker Museum, musing on an ancestor’s freedom to move across the oceans as a sailor and an aural meditation on being in water.

  • For All Your Life Studies ◼ A two-channel video installation, included in SculptureCenter’s In Practice exhibition. The projections manipulate personal home videos to address a thorny relationship to the artist’s past; one that includes expressions of privilege, access, leisure, as well as survival. Curated by Katherine Reynolds.