Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 6:30 – 8:30pm
Free to attend; registration required.
Langston Hughes Auditorium
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, NY
The event’s organization is based
on the idea of a finding aid. A finding aid is a document used in archives for
accessibility and discovery. We will transform a finding aid from an archival
inventory/guide into an artistic archival experience.
The goal is for
attendees to learn what an archive and archivist is or can be, the empowerment
associated with establishing an archival/artistic practice and to stimulate engagement
with existing archives.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Joyce-LeeAnn is a writer,
archivist and performance artist from Denver, Colorado based in Brooklyn, New
York. She received a BA in Writing and Literature from Naropa University via
Hampton University. She received a MILS with an Archives Certificate from Pratt
Institute. She works as a professional project archivist. Joyce-LeeAnn’s
writing explores the poetics of archival processing and investigates ways to
tell stories through preserved documents. Subjects covered in her prose |
poetry include: grief, healing processes, beautiful moments, writings on
restroom walls and a fragment of black Denver history. Her experimental
literary performances usually include a makeshift typewriter-drum-kit.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985) is a
photo-based artist, writer, and educator from East Palo Alto, CA based in
Brooklyn, NY. She is a Gallery/Studio Instructor at the Brooklyn Museum as well
as a public school teacher working with court involved youth in East New York.
Kameelah’s work enlists archival as well as archeological traditions to explore
collective memory and her family narratives through found images from eBay and
estate sells, material objects, and original photography. An object-based body
of work, she interrogates the trinity of spatial trauma within Black
communities — homelessness, incarceration, and forced migration and how this
influences both collective memory and the way we reconstruct narratives from
material fragments. Currently, she is an Artist-in-Residence at the Center
for Book Arts. In 2012, Kameelah was an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for
Photography at Woodstock. She will have her first solo exhibit at Real Art Ways
in July 2013 tentatively entitled The Imagined Archive. A former
Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Kameelah received her Master of Education
from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts in Policy and Africana Studies
from Pomona College.
Marilyn Nance is an American visual artist known for her images of 20th
century African American life—spirituality, music, art, and African retentions,
She grew up through many movements—The Civil Rights Movement, Black Power,
Black Arts, Anti War, Students Rights, the Women’s Movement, and the
Anti-Apartheid Movement.
A two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in
Humanistic Photography, her photographs can be found in the Smithsonian
American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and in
the Library of Congress.
Arianne Edmonds is
a Los Angeles native, storyteller and archivist. Her historical collection
spans from 1886-1950 and explores the uniqueness of early black Los Angeles,
through the lens of genealogy. She received her Bachelors of Science in
Communications, from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and started her
career in educational media at Sesame Workshop. She currently works with the
Taproot Foundation managing consultant relations and community partnerships.
Ladi’Sasha Jones is a is a collector and witness
worker of oral history narratives with a special interest in documenting Black
women’s stories and Black American family life. She approaches her
documentation practice by working from the intersections of cultural equity and
collective community memory.
Currently, Ladi’Sasha is working
on the curation of a public forum to share her collection of oral history
records via a digital sound art gallery — coming Summer 2013. Having earned her
B.A. in African American Studies from Temple University in 2010 and a M.A. in
Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2012, she recently completed
a Certificate in Oral History from Baylor University in April of 2013. She aims
to move towards freelancing and sharing her documenting services with community
and cultural arts organizations along with individual artists.
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Shawn(ta) Smith is a lesbian separatist, writer,
archivist and reference librarian. Her essays blend storytelling with
documentation and archiving. Her work will appear in “Black Gay Genius
Interview with Lisa C. Moore” in Black Gay Genius: Joseph Beam and In the Life
(forthcoming). She is currently editing a new anthology Her Saturn
Returns: Queer Women of Color Life Transitions, a compilation of narratives of
queer women and color in their Saturn. Shawn is a collective member of
the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the WOW Cafe Theater where she co-produces
Rivers of Honey, a monthly Cabaret highlighting the art of women of color.
Shawn is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Queens College while working as a
reference & instruction librarian at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. She is the former Archive Coordinator for
StoryCorps.
Sonia Louise Davis (b. 1988, New York City) is an
artist and photographer. Using a large format view camera, her work mines the
public and private archive, exploring collective memory and family history
through site-specific and community-based projects. Sonia is currently
participating in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program at the Bronx
Museum of the Arts. An honors graduate of Wesleyan University, she holds a BA
in African American Studies, with a concentration in Music and Visual Art.
Born in Las
Vegas, Salome Asega is an Ethiopian visual artist and independent curator
working in Brooklyn. She received her BA
in Transnational Visual Art and Social Practice from the Gallatin School at NYU
and is currently an MFA candidate in the Design and Technology program at
Parsons The New School for Design. She is also a founding member of the Sistah Friends Project.
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