Lumiere Reading Salon Nikita Gill and Meesha Lewis

Curator and INIVA Future Collect Alumni Nikita Gill would like to invite you to the Lumiere Reading Salon at Cave Pimlico on Friday 8th October. We invite you to engage in a creative evening of reading, listening and viewing. This season’s salon will feature a presentation of the Lumiere Collection by Meesha Lewis, owner and designer of DESIRE GREEN.

The Lumiere Reading Salon is inspired by Josephine Baker, who found freedom of expression in the form of dance and performance. Artist Jade Montserrat explored baker’s creative offerings, and her advocacy for black people within a series of watercolours and also performance.

As research for her paintings Jade Montserrat photographed herself as Josephine Baker (1906 – 1975), the celebrated African-American born performer and civil rights activist. Based in France, she was famous for her semi-nude performances at the French cabaret hall the Folies Bergère. Montserrat adopts Baker’s bodily poses, interested in how she enabled control of her physical presence and persona, the representations and possible manipulations of her body and her unapologetic quest for equality and freedom.

The Lumiere Reading Salon also takes inspiration from Zora Neal Hurston and A’lelia Walker who created a literary Salon as an urban utopia for performers, dancers, creators and intellectuals to come together and connect.

About the DESIRE GREEN

DESIRE GREEN consists of modern clothing, embellished with rhinestones, glass beading and other intricate materials, it truly stands out from the rest. The brand focuses on detail, craftsmanship and exclusivity by producing limited quantities but to the highest quality. Eccentric materials and intricate designs, taking clothing to another dimension, accompany the brand’s simplistic pattern cuts. Each garment creates an extravagant but sleek aesthetic and its grandeur is made obvious by the unexpected but comfortable weight of each piece.

About Cave Pimlico

Cave comprises of a vintage shop with workshop, popup food wagon and gallery space. Cave’s objectives are to keep the interest around the space exciting with an ever changing range of things on sale with proposed and spontaneous creative happenings within the space. A space that people will want to come to just to see ‘what’s happening there today’. Cave offers their space for opportunities for artists, makers and cooks to share with the residents of Westminster.

About Nikita Gill

Nikita Gill is an Afro-Caribbean artist and curator at Manchester Art Gallery. She received her MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the University of Manchester in 2019. Her previous work includes support of the exhibition and development of Excavating the Reno, Portraits of Recovery with David Hoyle and Mark Prest, Bodies of Colour, and Joy Forever at the Whitworth Art Gallery. She has developed and supported performances for Block Universe, Jade Montserrat and Glasgow International. Nikita is interested in decolonial practices within performance and new media, centred on care within the context of art gallery collections. Currently Nikita is working on Future Collect, supporting Jade Montserrat’s commission by INIVA. Nikita is a recipient of the 2021 UK New Artists Future Producers Grant and is joint creative producer for PROFORMA Desire Lines project (2021 – 22). Nikita is a member of the Black Curators Collective.

Image: Josephine Baker and embellished embroidery by Desire Green