Independent study student and recent CUNY BA program graduate Lauren Capellan details her experience working with the Laundromat Project's Kelly Street Initiative, while reflecting on the vital work supported by NEA funding; the work of artist Walter Cruz, who was Kelly Street's first artist-in-residence; and the food justice work of the Kelly Street Garden.
Scholar and VHS Archives working group founder Alexandra Juhasz recaps the manifold activities of the VHS Archives working group over the last year including the development of a digital platform prototype for ethical research of small collections of video, the concerns and ideas raised in meetings and writing by the working group members around everything from when to keep a public video private to how to work with archives that don't exist, except in memory. She also provides a preview of the group's activities for the 2018-2019 school year.
In this post, Teaching Fellow Daisy Atterbury unpacks how notions of "right thinking" and practices of correction are deployed in teaching writing and literature. By thinking through the work of David Antin, Reggie Watts, Renee Gladman, Donte Collins, Nicole B. Wallack, Amy Wan, Toni Jensen, and Camonghne Felix, she proposes poetry as a means of teaching writing otherwise, while considering how the concept of literacy creates and denies access, produces and withholds citizenship, and authorizes or negates. And how teaching writing means rethinking (and feeling for) "presence."
Lost & Found Managing Editor Stephon Lawrence and Academy of Young Writers high school student Gyjah Powers reflect on poet Adjua Greaves' Writers Lab Workshop on topics including delivery and performance of written poetry, the constructed nature of time, and the classification of the human.
Poet Najee Omar and Academy for Young Writers high school student Sabine Francis share reflections on Omar's Writers Lab Workshops including questions of legacy and Sankofa, telling one's own story, and performing poetry.
Digital Publics Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan shares thoughts from two meetings of the VHS Archives working group, framing questions of access to archival material, its often simultaneously private and public meanings, and how it is situated within the lives and communities it springs from. He also discusses the lack of available material he encountered in his research project on Assotto Saint, the need for equity in terms of whose lives and stories are preserved through archives, the notion of "degralescence" and the dilemma posed by the wealth of material captured on VHS in need of preservation, as well as how archives can be reanimated in contemporary contexts.
GC PhD student Shemon Salam reflects on the "Insurgent Solidarities: histories, formations, futures" conference, focusing on the "Economies and Solidarities" panel, which included presentations on Honduran women farm worker organizing, community kitchen programs in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and food cooperatives in Brooklyn as a means of countering gentrification.
Graduate Center PhD student Tie Jojima provides an overview of the "Art and Literature in Contemporary Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas" conference on questions including how to represent Dominican and Haitian identities in their commonalities and differences, how everyday objects might provide an alternative lens for perceiving national identities and lived realities, how borders are constructed, and how to curate work across the shared and divergent experiences of Haiti's and DR's diasporas.
GC PhD student and Mellon Seminar Teaching Fellow Karen Okigbo shares the inspiration for and her approach to her project "Professional Development Pipeline," which seeks to offer undergraduate students role models for how to translate classroom learning into long-term career trajectories.
As part of a research project supported by the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, Graduate Center PhD candidate Angelika Winner outlines the thinking and methods behind her ethnographic study of food provisioning practices in Newark, NJ. Taking a critical approach to the dominant narrative that links the notion of food deserts with obesity rates, Winner seeks to develop an intersectional and dynamic understanding of food environments, eating habits, access, and their entanglements with food inequities.
“So how does the South Asian community participate in Reparations?” Theater maker, producer, and organizer Meropi Peponides takes on the subject of reparations, often discussed in black and white terms, from a South Asian positionality, recounting personal and collective histories along the way, from her own start working with the Watts Village Theatre Company to the racialized effects of immigration politicies like the 1965 Hart Celler Act. She offers concrete steps towards building South Asian-Black solidarities. This piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their series Reparations365, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan.
Poet, writer, and performer Pamela Sneed shares thoughts on her experience visiting Daisy Atterbury's writing class at Queens College as part of AiR Project: Artists in Residence, Artists in Resistance. In this post, she touches on Annie Lennox and Grace Jones, her own recent memoir Sweet Dreams, identifying with characters in popular films, and finding self-esteem as a Black lesbian.
In this post, artist Jimena Lucero discusses the legacies of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the ongoing urgency of trans POC liberation, and the process of portraying Rivera in a staged reading of Casey Llewellyn's play O, Earth!
In this third report-back on the VHS Archives Working Group, Rhea Tepp, a Queens College graduate student in Media Studies, zinemaker/organizer, and performer, narrates her entry into the VHS Archives Working Group as a person in precarious relationship to both academia and institutional archives. By turns narrating family history, synthesizing presentations made by Helena Shaskevich and Kat Roberts, and commenting on the format of the working group, Repp ultimately considers the value in coming together to exchange personal archives.
Gillian Sneed reflects on the event "Inside the Box: A Conversation on Research in Exhibition-Making Institutions," in which Penelope Curtis, Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, and Keith Wilson, Director of the Center for the Humanities, took part in conversation on Curtis's approach to curating at various institutions including the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Tate Britain, and the Henry Moore Institute.
E. Ethelbert Miller shares his thoughts on June Jordan's 1981 essay "For the Sake of People’s Poetry Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us"--reflecting on literary families, what it is to be a "New World poet," and how to turn the face of history. This talk was delivered at the panel "For the Sake of People’s Poetry: A Discussion of Jordan’s Essay about Inclusivity and Accessibility" as part of the conference A Tribute to June Jordan.
Grisel Y. Acosta gives an account of the process of working together with a group of CUNY faculty to write and stage short plays about their experiences as caregivers as part of a collaboration between Working Theater's TheaterWorks! program and The Labor of Care Archive Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
This two-part piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their series Reparations365, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan, who served as the editor. Benedict Nguyen introduces their piece as follows: I try to write about a lot of things: gentrification and space, the power and capacity to choose where to be (in dance and in the world), reparations and who’s owed what, and how to reorganize institutions and non-profit boards, workers cooperatives, and more. In Part I, I start by throwing myself under the bus to connect the evolving gentrification in the South Bronx and dialogues on equity and changing institutions in dance. In Part II, I try to imagine some specific-ish solutions to these questions to reconsider institutional structures more democratically. There are specific examples and ideas and some pop culture references and more. Thanks for reading this super-maximalist thought experiment.
On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this second part of a two-part blog post, two of the conference organizers Sarah Lucie, and Amir Farjoun, both students in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance—reflect on some of the questions about materiality and knowledge that arise in their field, and the particular challenges theatre and performance studies might offer to object-oriented thought. Click here to read Part 1 reflections and thoughts by conference organizer Eylül Fidan Akıncı.
On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this two-part blog post, three of the conference organizers—Eylül Fidan Akıncı, Sarah Lucie, and Amir Farjoun, all students in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance—reflect on some of the questions about materiality and knowledge that arise in their field, and the particular challenges theatre and performance studies might offer to object-oriented thought.
This two-part piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their Reparations365 project, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan, who served as the editor. Benedict Nguyen introduces their piece as follows: I try to write about a lot of things: gentrification and space, the power and capacity to choose where to be (in dance and in the world), reparations and who’s owed what, and how to reorganize institutions and non-profit boards, workers cooperatives, and more. In Part I, I start by throwing myself under the bus to connect the evolving gentrification in the South Bronx and dialogues on equity and changing institutions in dance. In Part II, I try to imagine some specific-ish solutions to these questions to reconsider institutional structures more democratically. There are specific examples and ideas and some pop culture references and more. Thanks for reading this super-maximalist thought experiment.
In this reflection on a recent meeting of the VHS Archives Working Group, Juan Fernández discusses archives and memory and “intellectual feelings," which he describes as "a need to better understand past lived experiences and a desire to gain a deeper understanding of a missing/moving image." Identifying absences in the documentation of queer Latina/o/x social spaces in Los Angeles, including backyard T-parties and nightclubs that have since shut down, he is working to develop alternate routes of gathering minoritarian social histories that are capacious enough to include personal desire, memory and nostalgia.
Lost & Found Managing Editor Stephon Lawrence and poet Layla Benitez-James discuss Benitez-James' new chapbook “God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure” as well as her thoughts around the compulsion to collect, turning over ideas of desire, and the entangled holiness between a portrait of Jimi Hendrix and the Virgen de Guadalupe.
In memoriam of the extraordinary artist James Luna, we are sharing his keynote performative lecture at the "Scales of Visibility in Global Indigenous Art" conference from October 2016.