AGBS presents an artist talk by new media artist Rodell Warner, followed by a conversation between Warner and Dr. Eddie Chambers.

Thank you to our partners on this event, The Warfield Center & Caribbeanist Labs on Religion.

Free and open to the public.

WAVE PATTERNS artist Michael A. Booker will lead a drawing workshop dedicated to his signature pen-drawing style. Booker will guide participants through the “wave pattern” pen-drawing technique on view in his Idea Lab exhibition at Art Galleries at Black Studies.

Participants will learn pen mark-making techniques that yield rich, vibrant drawings. Bring your curiosity and spontaneity! No drawing experience necessary—participants of all ages and experience level are welcome. Materials will be provided.

Join us for a public conversation between WAVE PATTERNS artist Michael A. Booker, and artist Deborah Roberts.

Free and open to the public.

Carre Adams is the Chief Curator and Director of the Carver Museum & Cultural Center in Austin, Texas—an institution dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of Black material culture. 

In addition to his curatorial practice, he is also an artistic director, mixed-media artist, filmmaker, and music producer. His creative work explores love, sovereignty, and inheritance. His projects have been featured on Arts in Context produced by PBS, Feministing, Glasstire: Texas Visual Art News & Reviews, Art in America, Sightlines, and Forbes. 

A former co-director at allgo, a statewide queer people of color arts and justice organization, he has repeatedly sought professional opportunities that allow him to align his creative pursuits with movements for racial equity and justice. He received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in Visual Arts and African and African Diaspora Studies. 

Dr. Bridget R. Cooks is a scholar and curator of American art. Her research focuses on visual art by African Americans, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She is core faculty in the PhD Programs in Visual Studies and Culture and Theory. Her books, articles, and essays can be found widely across interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogues. She is most well-known as the author of the book, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (UMass, 2011) which received the inaugural James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History. 

Cooks’ first career was in museum education. In this capacity she worked at the Oakland Museum of California, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cooks has curated several exhibitions including, Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California (2018) at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective at the California African American Museum (2019) (CAAM), The Black Index (four venue national tour), Dissolve (Langson IMCA, University Art Gallery, UC Irvine) and Lava Thomas: Homecoming (2022) at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. 

She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships from organizations including the Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, and California Humanities.

Ulili Emore is an east coast native, hailing from South Jersey, and a doctoral student in the Program in Higher Education Leadership (PHEL) at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the racial disparities in student loan debt at the graduate-school level and its impact on the socioeconomic futures of Black students. Additionally, she is interested in understanding how increased credentialization within the labor market contributes to the debt crisis for Black students and whether Black students see a true return on investment (e.g., salary gains, upward professional mobility, etc.) for their graduate degrees in relation to the financial risk of increased debt accumulation.

In addition to being a doctoral student, Ulili works full-time at the University of Texas at Austin as a Program Manager in the Contextualization & Commemoration Initiatives (CCI) unit within the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost (EVPP). In this role, she is responsible for the project management and coordination of the Sweatt v. Painter Gallery and Entry at T.S. Painter Hall and the Precursors We are Texas East Mall commemorative projects. These projects serve as a scholarly public history endeavor to recognize, acknowledge, and understand UT's past, while honoring the Black men and women whose legacy paved the way for a more inclusive UT.

Dr. Kellie Jones is Chair of the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies and Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.    

Dr. Jones, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has also received awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University and Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals.  She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award in 2018 and was named a Best Book of the Decade in 2019 by ArtNews, Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times, and a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum.

Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit. Her exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s at the Brooklyn Museum, was named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.

Originally from Oakland, California, Dr. Jacqueline Smith-Francis has spent close to twenty years documenting, preserving, and sharing familial and community histories by and about Black and African American communities in Texas, California, and Arkansas. She specializes in developing presentations and workshops that blend history and archival preservation with social-justice advocacy and mindfulness-based pedagogies. Dr. Smith-Francis is currently the African American Community Archivist at the Austin History Center, where she enjoys collaborating with communities to uncover and celebrate the unique stories and traditions of past and present Austin communities.

Dr. Gaila Sims and Dr. Delphine Sims are sisters from Riverside, California. They both work with and write about museums: Delphine is a curator dedicated to supporting artists of the Black Diaspora, and Gaila works on public history, museum display, and archival practice. Gaila is the Curator of African American History and Special Projects at the Fredericksburg Area Museum. Her scholarship critiques American museums and interpretations of slavery. Delphine is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley and Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She researches the intersections between the history of photography and Black geographies.

Join AGBS exhibiting artist Alicia Henry in conversation with (un)knowing curator Phillip Townsend, AGBS Curator of Art. In this virtual program, Henry and Townsend will discuss the artist’s mixed-media sculptures and installations, notions of identity, the relationship between legibility and obscurity, and much more.

Join AGBS for the opening of our new exhibition, Alicia Henry: (un)knowing curated by Phillip Townsend.

Join exhibition curator Phillip Townsend for a public tour of Michael A. Booker: WAVE PATTERNS. Learn about the artist’s distinctive drawing practice, the research that informs his work, and how codes function inside and outside his art.

Drop in for an educator-led tour of Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees’ Travelogue Series: Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry at Christian-Green Gallery. All are welcome!

Drop in for an educator-led tour of Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees’ Travelogue Series: Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry at Christian-Green Gallery. All are welcome!

Drop in for an educator-led tour of Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees’ Travelogue Series: Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry at Christian-Green Gallery. All are welcome!

AGBS is pleased to announce Gender, Sexuality, Sex Work, a panel focusing on the intersections among issues of gender, sexuality, and sex work in the representations and experiences of Black women. Featuring Tiffany E. Barber, Mireille Miller-Young, and Amber Jamilla Musser and moderated by Laura G. Gutiérrez, Gender, Sexuality, Sex Work, brings together scholars working in the fields of Black feminisms and sexualities, performance art and sex work, embodiment and identity, erotics and pornography (among others), to discuss their research and engage in conversation. 

This panel is part of Contested Bodies: Black Women in Art and Culture, a trans-institutional series of online or hybrid convenings that brings together Black women art historians, artists, performers, and critics from throughout the African Diaspora to discuss contemporary issues of Black female representation and reality. The first event in the series, “Modernism and the Appropriation of Black Women’s Bodies,” took place in April 2023 at the California College of the Arts.

This event will be livestreamed and recorded for virtual attendees.

The event will be livestreamed at this link.

About the panelists

Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual, multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture, examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis.

Dr. Barber is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles as well as curator-in-residence at the Delaware Contemporary. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize.

Dr. Mireille Miller-Young is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. The former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries. Her groundbreaking book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014), was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Dr. Miller-Young was the co-convener of the Black Sexual Economies Project at Washington University School of Law and lead editor of the 2019 anthology, Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital. Dr. Miller-Young has published in numerous anthologies, academic journals, and news outlets including Porn Archives, Queer Sex Work, Ethnopornography, Sexualities, Meridians, GLQ, Colorlines, Ms., The Washington Post, The New York Times, and $pread, a sex worker magazine. A sought-after speaker and expert for news, radio, podcasts, and documentaries, Miller-Young has been featured in NPR’s Marketplace, HuffPost Live, For Harriet, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Sony’s Hefner podcast serial, Discovery+’s Viagra: The Little Blue Pill That Changed the World, and the recent hit, Netflix’s History of Swear Words starring Nicolas Cage.

Dr. Miller-Young is an editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (2013), which has been translated into German and Spanish and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology, and she is an editor of the recently published volume Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (2019). Formerly the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2019-2020, Dr. Miller-Young is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin where she is working on her next book, entitled Hoe Theory. Additionally, Dr. Miller-Young’s innovative research agenda includes current projects such as The Black Erotic Archive and The Sex Worker Oral History Project.

Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality, queer theory, and aesthetics. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and the forthcoming Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024) She co-edited with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez, ASAP's special issue on Queer Form (2017) and with Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, and Karma Chavez of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021), and with Linda Bloom and Martha Fineman, "Care and its Complexities" Signs (forthcoming, Fall 2023). She also serves as a member of the Social Text Collective and president of ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present). She writes art criticism for Brooklyn Rail. 

Dr. Laura G. Gutiérrez is Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Public Practice in the College of Fine Arts and Associate Professor in Latinx Studies in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research areas are Latinx and Mexican performance, visual culture, queer studies, and feminisms. Gutiérrez is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (recipient of an MLA book award) and has published on Latinx performance, border art, Mexican video art, and Mexican political cabaret. She was a Scholars Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles during the Fall of 2022 and a UT Provost Author’s Fellow from 2022-23. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Binding Intimacies in Contemporary Queer Latinx Performance and Visual Art. Gutiérrez is on the programming team and serves as co-Artistic Director of OUTsider Festival in Austin, Texas.

About the series 

Contested Bodies: Black Women in Art and Culture is a trans-institutional series of online or hybrid convenings that brings together Black women art historians, artists, performers, and critics from throughout the African Diaspora to discuss contemporary issues of Black female representation and reality.  It is a forum for diverse approaches and inclusive discussions on how Black women's visuality can be more effectively engaged. 

Contested Bodies is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and is a collaboration between art historians at institutions across the United States: the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (Lowery Stokes Sims), the University of Pennsylvania (Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw), The University of Texas at Austin (Cherise Smith), Tulane University (Mia Bagneris), the Maryland Institute College of Art (Leslie King-Hammond), the California College of the Arts (Jacqueline Francis), and Hyperallergic.com (Isis Davis-Marks). 

Join us for the opening of Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees’ Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry, a site-specific installation of painted canvases that extend beyond their frames with dyed and manipulated cloth, and a soundscape featuring vocalized sounds. TwoTrees encourages visitors to consider their relationship with Nature, Spirit, and the journey home to a known, unknown, and unknowable Cosmos. 

The opening reception of Un-Tying will include an “enlivening” that TwoTrees and sound eco-archaeologist Gideon Crevoshay have created with Austinites from around the city. This live exploration of sound will invigorate the space, encouraging attendees to open their connections to Nature.

RSVP

Join exhibiting artist Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees and playwright Virginia Grise for a public conversation about TwoTrees’s Travelogue Series, on view this fall at Art Galleries at Black Studies.

They will explore the conceptual foundations for Travelogue Series—how time moves in our lives, the role of Spirit in all that we do, and how art weaves through these experiences. TwoTrees and Grise will pose questions to one another and encourage open exchange with interested interested audience members. 

About the Facilitators: 

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees is a self-taught artist who has spent a life at the crossroads where species, cultures, beliefs and the unknown collide and find both dissonance and resonance. Her work helps humans re-orient to our indigenous mind and regenerate our essential relationship with the Earth’s wisdom. She is a past recipient of the Lila Wallace International Artist Award and her work has been exhibited and is in collections in the US, Europe and New Zealand. She has been Artist in Residence for the The Vermont Network for Domestic Violence, a Whistenton Public Scholar at the Kettering Foundation and faculty in the Leadership in Sustainability Masters Program/University of Vermont Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. 

From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large-scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa – Virginia Grise writes plays that are set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. 

Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). Virginia is a recipient of the Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing, and the Jerome Fellowship from the Playwrights Center. She is an alumna of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women's Project Theatre Lab and the NALAC Leadership Institute.

In addition to plays, she has created an interdisciplinary body of work that includes multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site-specific interventions, and community gatherings. Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons, and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts and is The Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mía Theatre in Dallas, Texas and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.  

The exhibition Travelogue Series: Falling Into Language will be on on view in the Idea Lab before and after the conversation.

RSVP

Add Your Voice: An In-Person Sound Workshop

How might language enhance separateness as well as communicate connection?
What sounds are in us beyond the words that we speak?
Is language part of our evolution or devolution from our cosmic origin?
How can we access connection and sensing without words?
What traditions shape human sounds? 

In “Add Your Voice,” we invite you to explore the role of language in human societies. The workshops are grounded in vocables—sounds without words or literal meaning. Vocables are part of an ongoing exploration of language, meaning-making, and connection to our cosmic ancestry. Together we will explore vocables as a practice to sound our way into the stardust, our cosmic source. We invite you to open to the unknown through deep listening, breath, voice improvisations, and responses to imagery.

These experiences are also invitations to participants to rehearse and record their work, and to perform live on September 14, 2023 at the opening of TwoTrees’ art installation, Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry at Christian-Green Gallery.

A background in singing is not necessary! We are particularly interested in how this practice can remove barriers of perceived separation and help us access more than is described in meaning-making language. 

Join us in the exploration of this powerful tool that points to our interconnection and uniqueness!

About the Facilitators

Gideon Crevoshay is a musician from the hills of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. He uses the human voice to explore the countless dimensions of sound, language, and improvisation. Gideon studies traditional and ancient forms of singing from the US, Caucasus, and Mediterranean, finding inspiration in the wisdom contained within these traditions and how they can inform present ideas of music making and community.  

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees is a self-taught artist who has spent a life at the crossroads where species, cultures, beliefs and the unknown collide and find both dissonance and resonance. Her work helps humans re-orient to our indigenous mind and regenerate our essential relationship with the Earth’s wisdom. She is a past recipient of the Lila Wallace International Artist Award and her work has been exhibited and is in collections in the US, Europe and New Zealand.  She has been Artist in Residence for the The Vermont Network for Domestic Violence, a Whistenton Public Scholar at the Kettering Foundation and faculty in the Leadership in Sustainability Masters Program/University of Vermont Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

RSVP for the In-Person Sound Workshop

Participants should dress comfortably and bring a mat for sitting if desired.

Add Your Voice: A Virtual Sound Workshop

How might language enhance separateness as well as communicate connection?
What sounds are in us beyond the words that we speak?
Is language part of our evolution or devolution from our cosmic origin?
How can we access connection and sensing without words?
What traditions shape human sounds? 

In “Add Your Voice,” we invite you to explore the role of language in human societies. The workshops are grounded in vocables—sounds without words or literal meaning. Vocables are part of an ongoing exploration of language, meaning-making, and connection to our cosmic ancestry. Together we will explore vocables as a practice to sound our way into the stardust, our cosmic source. We invite you to open to the unknown through deep listening, breath, voice improvisations, and responses to imagery.

These experiences are also invitations to participants to rehearse and record their work, and to perform live on September 14, 2023 at the opening of TwoTrees’ art installation, Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry at Christian-Green Gallery.

A background in singing is not necessary! We are particularly interested in how this practice can remove barriers of perceived separation and help us access more than is described in meaning-making language. 

Join us in the exploration of this powerful tool that points to our interconnection and uniqueness!

About the Facilitators

Gideon Crevoshay is a musician from the hills of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. He uses the human voice to explore the countless dimensions of sound, language, and improvisation. Gideon studies traditional and ancient forms of singing from the US, Caucasus, and Mediterranean, finding inspiration in the wisdom contained within these traditions and how they can inform present ideas of music making and community.  

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees is a self-taught artist who has spent a life at the crossroads where species, cultures, beliefs and the unknown collide and find both dissonance and resonance. Her work helps humans re-orient to our indigenous mind and regenerate our essential relationship with the Earth’s wisdom. She is a past recipient of the Lila Wallace International Artist Award and her work has been exhibited and is in collections in the US, Europe and New Zealand.  She has been Artist in Residence for the The Vermont Network for Domestic Violence, a Whistenton Public Scholar at the Kettering Foundation and faculty in the Leadership in Sustainability Masters Program/University of Vermont Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

RSVP for the Online Virtual Sound Workshop

Participants should work in a quiet place where they will not be interrupted or distracted, use headphones, and turn off notifications on your electronic devices.

Zoom link provided upon RSVP