As an educator who was radicalized by Black feminist and womanist literature, I have always been clear that that was my goal for SISTORIES--to provide the grounds for Black women and nonbinary femmes to adopt a politic to address the root cause of the social issues that cause them harm by seeing and writing themselves into the historical narrative of Black femmehood.
Read MoreMemorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust is a public work originally installed for the inaugural Bullfrog Biennial at the Goldwell Open Air Museum in October 2019. The piece memorializes a 1980s dream to establish “Stonewall Park,” a gay utopian effort aimed for Rhyolite, NV, a piece of deserted mining country that lies between Death Valley National Park and the Nevada Test Site.
Read MoreDeveloping strong, meaningful, relationships between artists and archivists has so much potential to be fruitful for both fields. Interestingly, both art and archives have been historically undervalued in academia: artistic practice as a vehicle only for expression or reflection of issues, requiring translation by a critic or art historian to make sense of its real value (4), and archivists as “handmaidens of historians,” seen as passive intermediaries between records and the historians who interpret them (5)
Read MoreResearch is a solitary practice, but a research fellowship can be a tool for community-building, and the relationships between artists and archival materials can help upend and reshape our sense of history. Special Collections at the Providence Public Library (PPL) in Providence, Rhode Island offers an annual, 6-8 month Creative Fellowship for an artist to do intensive archival research and create new work, along with an interactive public program.
Read MoreThread Library, an artwork I made for the Iowa City Public Library (ICPL) in February 2020, suggests that information is always mediated by the tactile, tangible, material, and personal. Simply put, Thread Library is a collection of thread with a card catalog, and each thread is cataloged as if it were a book.
Read MoreBeing an Appalachian woman, artist, and herbalist, I am committed to honoring the women in my community. The women in this series have an intimate connection to the land and a beautiful and poetic way of communicating through plants and herbal medicine.
Read More...Voices in Collective Thought presents some of the events and popular reactions lived throughout the October 20th electoral fraud and current crisis in Bolivia. Last November, after a thirteen year long presidency and a scandalous attempt at fraud, Evo Morales stepped down from presidency.
Read More”Against the Best Possible Sources presents the latest chapter of my ongoing project involving extensive research of the TIME, Inc. corporate archive and an investigation of the earliest history of the first professional journalistic fact-checkers, a role created by TIME in 1923 and held exclusively by women until 1971.”
Read MoreI created this collection of video portraits of women in eastern Kentucky nearly ten years ago while pursuing my Masters in Fine Art from the University of Kentucky. It’s both comforting and humbling to revisit past work, but I find this timing especially poignant. I moved from Kentucky to New York City shortly after completing this film. I now find myself confined to a small apartment with my husband and baby in the midst of a global pandemic, in a universal holding pattern of our usual lives, contemplating how we want to shape our future life and home with our daughter.
Read MoreDuring my visit to One Archives in LA last summer, I found a wide range of materials across lines of class, sexuality, gender expression, and race, however there are still gaps in representation: there is less working class material and the collection still favours big coastal cities.
Read MoreIn 2017, the Providence Public Library published a comic book called Lizard Ramone in Hot Pursuit: A Guide to Archives for Artists and Makers. Written and illustrated by Jeremy Ferris, it forms the core of a simple toolkit for archivists.
Read MoreThe American Library by Yinka Shonibare CBE is a celebration of the diversity of the American population. It aims to be an instigator of discovery and debate. On the spines of many of these books are, printed in gold, the names of people who immigrated, or whose antecedents immigrated to the United States. On other books are the names of African Americans who relocated or whose parents relocated out of the American South during the Great Migration.
Read More“I was inspired by lectures of Dr. Darin Waters of UNCA about “collective historical memory” and as a white Ashevillian felt like it could be a learning experience that I could pass on through this work and inspire others in my community to take a look at the rich history that is in danger of becoming forgotten as our town becomes more homogenized.”
Read MoreMebane-based poet Jaki Shelton Green challenges us to think about community legacies, lineage, land, and ancestors in her 2019 poem, 'who will be the messenger of this land.'
Read MoreHarold Fisk’s maps of the Mississippi River’s meanders, traces and shifts over time were produced as part of a report for the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944. But where are they now?
Read MoreIt's a little past eleven in the evening on a Monday night & I guess this felt like the best time to lay out some of my thought process so far in this residency. I am not going to sit here and talk fluff, I want to be honest. I had no idea how challenging this would feel exploring this unknown world of digital archives with a trained mind that tells me I need to envision my end goal and work backwards.
Read More“Through a process that begins with the artist exposing himself to the footage from body cameras, public surveillance tapes and pedestrian iphone footage, Watts experiments with creating visual representations of suspended historicity and trauma.”
Read MoreIn ‘Notes From Metropolis’ by Christopher Lineberry, the artist uncovers information at the North Carolina State Archives about the 1957 Greensboro "Morals Trial."
Read MoreA framework to enhance understanding and evaluation of creative work at the intersection of arts and civic engagement, community development, and justice. It looks at 11 artistic attributes that address the potency of creative expression to embody and motivate change.
Read MoreMade during the Archives & Access project from 2012 to 2017, these films explore the breadth of projects and people that can be inspired by archive collections.
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