In conjunction with The Living Temple, the ongoing exhibition celebrating the life and work of Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry, Ars Nova Workshop presents a special conversation and listening session with Angel Bat-Dawid and Naima Nefertari, at the Fabric Workshop & Museum on Sunday, March 8.

For this very special event, the duo will explore selections from the pioneering catalog of Don & Moki Cherry, as well as selections from their own album Journey to Nabta Playa, in conversation with journalist Marcus J. Moore. A powerful meditation on memory, mythology, and ancestral science, Dawid and Nefertari’s collaboration draws deep inspiration from the ancient astrological stone circle of Nabta Playa, nestled in the remote deserts of Nubia. Their music blends spiritual jazz, celestial electronics, ancestral instrumentation, and storytelling to imagine futures grounded in ancient knowing.

Naima Nefertari – daughter of vocalist Neneh Cherry and granddaughter of artistic visionaries Don and Moki Cherry – is a multi-disciplinary artist and musician based in London. Her practice interweaves sonic and visual forms led by interests in repetition, improvisation, and the abstract relationships between language, symbol, image, and sound. Nefertari is part of the duo Exotic Sin with Kenichi Iwasa, and she is an archivist and coordinator for the Estate of Moki Cherry and Cherry Archive.

For this special conversation, she’ll be joined by the composer, clarinetist, singer & spiritual jazz soothsayer Angel Bat Dawid. The potency, prowess, spirit and charisma of Dawid’s cosmic musical proselytizing has taken her from relatively unknown improviser to borderline ubiquitous performer in Chicago’s avant-garde in a relatively short span of time.

Marcus J. Moore is an esteemed music journalist, event curator, professor, and author of two critically-acclaimed books: The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America (2020), and High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul (2024). He has been a contributing writer with The Nation and a senior editor with Bandcamp Daily, a platform he helped launch. He co-leads the popular jazz-focused “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love…” series at The New York Times. Elsewhere, his music coverage can be found at NPR, Pitchfork, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic, among other outlets.