46th Annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: Art and Political Imagination
avFilm screening and conversation with filmmaker Cauleen Smith, lecture by art historian and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood, reading of June Jordan’s poetry by Asha Futterman, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Evie Shockley, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, conversation with artists Scherezade Garcia and Nadir Souirgi, and a live music performance by Rhiannon Giddens
Conference Description
The 46th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: Art and Political Imagination presents a series of film screenings, conversations with artists and curators, a poetry and prose reading, and a live music performance to explore urgent questions around political tyranny, geopolitical crises, modes of freedom, and influence and mutuality in artistic creation.
Why now? Over the last year of life amidst the dual pandemics of Coronavirus and systemic racism, our communities have endured disruption, fear, incalculable losses, and changes that we will be comprehending for years to come. We have rallied resources and mutual support, from community fridges to bail funds, formed new habits to check in on our neighbors, family, and friends, and shared safe practices for political action in changed circumstances. Over the spring and summer, faced with the routine and ritual horror of anti-Black police violence, communities across the country and internationally erupted in protest. The generations-deep demand to abolish the police and linked institutions of brutality grew louder than many anticipated in our lifetimes. And, amidst all of this, many of us have turned to art.
In this time of crisis and upheaval, why are we turning to art? What can art do, what do we think it should do, and how do we wrestle with these demands?
Music, dance, theatrical performances, film, visual art, poetry, and literature have long legacies as conduits for articulating and manifesting political critique, representation, emotion—rage, joy, grief, lament, hope—and imagination. Art is also a medium of provocation or controversy, expressing views that may be socially forbidden or outright criminalized. Art fuels social change and is an expression of that change. As Audre Lorde wrote decades ago, “Poetry is not a luxury.”
Given the constraints of the ongoing pandemic and the need to continue to hold our events virtually, we will replace the traditional two-day format of the S&F Conference with a festival of events over a few weeks in the spring of 2021.
Conference Program
Monday, March 15 at 6:30 p.m.
“Pilgrim” and “Crow Requiem”
Screening and Talk with filmmaker Cauleen Smith and Tina Campt
Thursday, March 18 at 6:30 p.m.
Visions of Abolition: Black Women’s Fight to End Mass Incarceration
Lecture by Nicole Fleetwood
Thursday, April 1 at 6:30 p.m.
“And what shall we do, we who did not die?”: A Reckoning with June Jordan
Reading and conversation with Asha Futterman (BC ’21), Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Evie Shockley, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Monday, April 5 at 6:30 p.m.
Soft Borders: Conversation with Artists
Nadir Souirgi and Scherezade Garcia in conversation with Kaiama L. Glover, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College
Friday, April 16
Livestreamed Concert by Rhiannon Giddens
Presenter Bios
Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. One of the founding researchers in Black European Studies, her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe, focusing on the role of vernacular photography in processes of historical interpretation. Her books include: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), and Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017). She has held faculty positions at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, and Barnard College. Campt serves as a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. At the Cogut Institute, she leads the Black Visualities Initiative.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in Criticism and selected as a best art book of 2020 by the New York Times, Artnews, and Art Newspaper. She is also curator of the exhibition Marking Time, currently on view at MoMA PS1 through April 4, 2021. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and the Urban Justice Center. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.
Asha Futterman (BC ’21) is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Africana Studies and English with a concentration in creative writing. She is also a research assistant at BCRW and an investigative researcher at the Invisible Institute.
Scherezade Garcia is an interdisciplinary visual artist born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and based in New York. In her work she addresses contemporary allegories of history and processes of colonization and politics, which frequently evoke memories of faraway home and the hopes and dreams that accompany planting roots in a new land. By engaging collective and ancestral memory in her public intervention and studio-based practice, she examines quasi-mythical portraits of migration and cultural colonization. Garcia holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons-The New School and an MFA from the City College of New York. She is the recipient of a 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. She is a co-founder of the Dominican York ProyectoGráfica and sits on the Advisory Board of No Longer Empty. She has participated in the S-Files Biennial, the IV Caribbean Biennial, the Havana Biennial and other international venues. Garcia has exhibited widely with projects such as Super Tropics, Paradise Redefined, Theories of Freedom, This Side of Paradise-No Longer Empty, Souvenir, Stories of Fallen Angels, Tales of Freedom and others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Housatonic Museum, Museo de Arte Moderno de Santo Domingo and private collections. Her personal papers are in the collection of the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Her latest public commission by Columbia University, The Liquid Highway is on view until June 2016 at Miller Theater. Garcia is currently represented by Lyle O Reitzel Gallery (Santo Domingo and New York). She is a faculty member of the Parsons School of Design in New York.
Rhiannon Giddens is a celebrated artist who excavates the past to reveal truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens has been Grammy-nominated six times, and won once, for her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group she co-founded. She was most recently nominated for her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, there is no Other (2019). Giddens’s forthcoming album, They’re Calling Me Home, also a collaboration with Turrisi, is due out this April and features songs of her heritage, sung to console her while she has been unable to go home to her native North Carolina due to the ongoing pandemic. She is a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players – and produced their album Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019), which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival. Giddens was recently named Artistic Director of Silkroad Ensemble, with whom she is developing a number of new programs, including The American Silkroad, an exploration of the music of the American transcontinental railroad and it’s builders. She has also written the music for an original ballet, Lucy Negro Redux (the first ballet written by women of color for a black prima ballerina), and the libretto and music for an original opera, Omar, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said.
Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, among other publications, and prize-winning translator of three works of Haitian prose fiction. Her most recent monograph, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Kaiama is currently at work on an intellectual biography titled, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life,” and a collection of essays with the working title “Black Diva Saves the World.” Kaiama has been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She has written regularly for the New York Times Book Review and was a host on PBS show History Detectives: Special Investigations. She tweets @inthewhirld.
Conor Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican/Irish multi-gendered street scholar and freedom maker who teaches Africana Studies and American Studies at Brooklyn College. Conor is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a participant in Free CUNY and Rank and File Action (RAFA), and in online and print circulation via AK Press, Mask Magazine, The New Inquiry, Verso, and Viewpoint Magazine. Conor is completing a book, New York Liberation School, about the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Feminist Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City from 1960 to the present.
Talia Shalev is a teacher, scholar, and poet. She is a co-editor of June Jordan’s “Life Studies,” 1966-1976 and Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974, both published through Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Her writing appears in The Seattle Review, The Volta, Cream City Review, and Women’s Studies: an inter-disciplinary journal. Talia teaches as a lecturer at the Stevens Institute of Technology and holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current research project is Some Inarticulate Major Premise: Poetry, the Will of the People, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections are the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017); both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer and LA Times Book Prizes. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem. Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Studio Museum of Harlem, Houston Contemporary Art Museum; Yerba Buena Center for Art, and the New Museum, New York, D21 Leipzig and Decad, Berlin. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Threewalls, Chicago. She shows her drawings and 2D work with Corbett vs. Dempsey. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is based in the great city of Chicago and serves as faculty for the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program.
Nadir Souirgi is an artist and educator living and working in New York City. In 2010 Nadir founded the Harlem County Bird Club, a program that introduces elementary school aged children to birdwatching and field science. In 2019, Souirgi received an award from The Linnaean Society of New York in recognition of his work with children. Souirgi’s work in bird watching and conservation, his experience as a child of Haitian and Moroccan immigrants who grew up in New York City and Miami, and his professional work with low-income children of color in Harlem form the foundations of his artistic practice.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, and winner of the 2018 Judith Markowitz Award for LGBTQ Writers. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best New Writing, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, American Literary History, The Scholar and Feminist, American Quarterly, Public Books, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, BET.com, and others. She has earned support and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her forthcoming book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), explores the politics of poetic experimentation in global black women’s art, literature, and hip-hop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, and is completing a novel.
Accessibility
All BCRW events are free and all are welcome.
Live captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided. For other accessibility needs, please reach out to Eve Marie Kausch, Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at ekausch@barnard.edu.
Image credits
Conference graphic and Visions of Abolition: Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016.
Artist talks with Scherezade Garcia and Nadir Sourgi: Scherezade Garcia, Bordering the Imaginary.
Livestreamed concert by Rhiannon Giddens: “Rhiannon Giddens’ 21st-Century Sound Has a Long History, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2019.