You are invited to a public talk by Vashti Dubois, Founder and Executive Director of The Colored Girls Museum, Philadelphia

Monday, January 25, 2021
2:00 - 3:00 pm EST

NLS is pleased to present a public talk by Vashti Dubois, Founder and Executive Director of The Colored Girls Museum, Philadelphia, on Friday, July 22. The talk will be followed by an open panel discussion with Grace Sanders Johnson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania. The Colored Girls Museum is devoted to the everyday stories and histories of Black girls, creating space to portray Black girlhood as a monument to, and ritual of, care. This talk is part of “Sighting Black Girlhood”, a course and project being undertaken by Deborah Thomas and Grace Sanders at the University of Pennsylvania with partners including with Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi, Senior Lecturer, University of Johannesburg; The Colored Girls Museum; and New Local Space, for which four Jamaican visual artists, Camille Chedda, Tishana Fisher, Sasha-Kay Hinds and Oneika Russell, were invited to create work through a praxis inspired by the portrait campaign “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” that was presented by The Colored Girls Museum from February to June 2021. Sighting Black Girlhood expands on this conceptual framework to include women and girls in the African diaspora in the context of broader socio-economic inequality. By centering this gendered experience of Blackness, the Sighting Black Girlhood project begins to redress imposed silence and invisible suffering.

ABOUT THE GUESTS
After a thirty-year career in the nonprofit sector, DuBois founded the Colored Girls Museum (TCGM) a grassroots “place-based” living museum that honours and memorializes the experiences of women and girls of the African Diaspora. This museum is equal parts research facility, exhibition space, gathering place and think tank. TCGM has been engineered to travel, popping up in cities and neighbourhoods around the world, transforming ordinary spaces into Colored Girls Museum outposts. TCGM is the first museum of her kind. In addition to her upcoming induction as a 2022 honoree at the Germantown Hall of Fame, DuBois is a 2022 Fellow at Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, where she will be working on her forthcoming book, Housework: A Memoir.

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Research Associate with the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence, and Modern Blackness. Thomas co-directed the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.

Grace L. Sanders Johnson is a historian, visual artist, and. Her areas of study include modern Caribbean history, transnational feminisms, oral history, and environmental humanities. Sanders Johnson has worked with various art-archival projects including Concordia University’s Oral History Project Histoire de Vie (Montreal 2011) and has produced the art-archive installation Nou Pa Bliye: Haitian Feminist Expressions and Translations (2014). She is currently completing her first book, White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship and Political Wayfaring in Haiti (Spring 2023, University of North Carolina Press).

Join NLS and the School of Visual Art at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts for a live conversation between artists Simone Leigh and Deborah Anzinger moderated by curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson.

Monday, January 25, 2021
2:00 - 3:00 pm EST
Register at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nls-guest-artist-series-simone-leigh-tickets-136976312839


ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Simone Leigh’s practice incorporates sculpture, video, and installation; all are informed by her ongoing exploration of black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh works in a mode she describes as auto-ethnographic. Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art; her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination commingle.

Leigh was born in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois. Recent projects and exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (2019) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; ‘Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon’ (2017) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; ‘Psychic Friends Network’ (2016) at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London; ‘The Waiting Room’ (2016) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; ‘The Free People’s Medical Clinic’ (2014) a project commissioned by Creative Time; a public installation presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem at Marcus Garvey Park, New York; and a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017).

Leigh will represent the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. She was the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth where her monumental sculpture ‘Brick House’ was unveiled in April 2019. Leigh’s work was featured in ‘Loophole of Retreat’, a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, to commemorate her achievements as the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize 2018.

New Local Space is a non-profit contemporary visual art initiative in Kingston, Jamaica that operates as a subsidiary of Creative Sounds Ltd. Through funded residencies, fellowships and internship NLS support the work of visual artists committed to breaking new ground in their disciplines, and to connect such artists to the global contemporary art community.

This event is made possible in part through a partnership with the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development Next Gen Programme.

Image credit: Simone Leigh photographed in her studio, 2020 (c) Simone Leigh. Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis

NLS welcomes Danielle Purifoy, our 2020 Guest Lecturer who will present at the School of Visual Arts, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts.
Purifoy will present on her interdisciplinary collaborative work that incorporates a socially and environmentally transformative practice at the intersection of race, gender, reproductive rights and environmental justice.

School of Visual Art
Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts
1 Arthur Wint Drive, Kingston 6
Thursday, March 19, 2020
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Danielle Purifoy is a writer, lawyer, and current Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D in Environmental Politics and African American Studies from Duke University. Her current research traces the roots of contemporary environmental inequality in the U.S. South, particularly in the development of Black towns and settlements. Danielle is also an editor for Scalawag, a magazine devoted to Southern politics and culture and a board member of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network. Her past work includes In Conditions of Fresh Water, a multimedia Black spatial history project in collaboration with sculptor Torkwase Dyson that tells the story of place, race, and power in the U.S. South through the lived experiences of Black people and through the abstract representations of the infrastructure and architecture that they navigate, negotiate, and transform.

During his residency T’Waunii Sinclair has been exploring revolutionary narratives within black history and identities using the Haitian Revolution as his point of departure. Sinclair’s work is driven by the discourse and scholarship surrounding race, politics, race-politics and histories of subjugation. In his current work Sinclair experiments with installation and sculpture as a means to focus on the machete as an aesthetic object and relic of cultural significance to black people as a tool of labor and revolution.

T’waunii Sinclair (b. 1992, Manchester, Jamaica) studied Painting at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston Jamaica (2015). In 2017 Sinclair exhibited in the Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica) and in 2019 the group exhibition Dark Matter, Cage Gallery, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, (Kingston, Jamaica).

Image courtesy Nari Ward and Lehmann Maupin gallery

The Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in partnership with NLS presents a public talk by guest artist Nari Ward on Wednesday, October 24 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

Bert Rose Studio, School of Dance
Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts
1 Arthur Wint Drive, Kingston 6

Nari Ward (b. 1963, St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in New York) is known for his sculptural installations composed of discarded material found and collected in his neighborhood. He has repurposed objects such as baby strollers, shopping carts, bottles, doors, television sets, cash registers and shoelaces, among other materials. Ward re-contextualizes these found objects in thoughtprovoking juxtapositions that create complex, metaphorical meanings to confront social and political issues surrounding race, poverty, and consumer culture. He intentionally leaves the meaning of his work open, allowing the viewer to provide his or her own interpretation. One of his most iconic works, Amazing Grace, was produced as part of his 1993 residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in response to the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic of the early 1990s. For this large-scale installation, Ward gathered more than 365 discarded baby strollers—commonly used by the homeless population in Harlem to transport their belongings—which he bound with twisted fire hoses in an abandoned fire station in Harlem. Echoing through the space was an audio recording of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s Amazing Grace on repeat. The lyrics speak about redemption and change, generating optimism and a sense of hope. As with most of his work, this installation explored themes informed by the materials, community, and location in which he was working. The work has since been recreated at the New Museum Studio 231 space in 2013, and in several locations across Europe. With each change of context, the significance of the work changes as each community differently associates with these found objects.

María de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez' work is about the position of herself, a Cuban born body, in a permanent state of displacement and her relationship to space. According to the artist "I cannot go back to Cuba and be the way I was before, now I am someone else. My paintings try to express the state in which this happens. They are about the inability to belong in any defined structure.” De los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez has developed an index of color relations to determine specific emotions and memories. The colors can be autonomous or have a new meaning altogether when encountering other colors and the forms they inhabit.

María de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez was born in Holguín, Cuba in 1992 and immigrated to New Orleans, USA in 2004. She received a Bachelor’s in Fine Art from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2015 and participated in a residency at Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture on 2016. De los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez is currently enrolled in the MFA programme in Painting at Yale University.

Life After Art School is a casual presentation and discussion of options and strategies for approaching an art career and art practice as a new artist led by Tide Rising Art Projects. While this event was created to help provide new art graduates go forward in the art field by providing information all interested persons are welcome. We will be discussing topics such as higher education, building a network, portfolio sharing tools, studio practice, representation etc. Please RSVP.

The 'Life After Art School' presentation began in 2016 as a one-off event as part of Oneika Russell's contribution to The Edna Manley College's Painting Department art talk series facilitated by Omari Ra (Head of Department)

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Dak'Art Report is a slideshow presentation of observations and highlights of the scope of the 13th Dakar Biennale which opened on May 8th 2018 by Biennale participant, Oneika Russell. It will provide a look at Contemporary African and African diaspora Art as well as a survey of the strategies used by the Bienniale body to activate the city.

Both events are free and open to the public.

SCHEDULE

Life After Art School - 10am- 11:15am
Q&A - 11:15am - 11:30am

Dak'Art Report [Oneika Russell] - 11:40am- 12:10am
Q&A - 12:10AM- 12:30AM

Join us at the Edna Manley College on Wednesday for a public lecture by Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier. Cozier’s lecture will discuss the potential free/play spaces that Caribbean artists are constantly imagining, constructing, and navigating, including in his own creative practice and at Alice Yard. He will also discuss how the established idea of the Caribbean persists—as a viable fiction, as a site of exchange, an owned product or territory traded between various beneficiaries, internal and external. This event is free and open to the public.

Presented by the National Gallery of Jamaica in partnership with the Edna Manley College and NLS.