Public Programs
CANCELED: Making Tender: A Book Talk with Carla Williams
AGBS regrets to announce that this program is canceled due to unforseen circumstances.
We AIM to reschedule this event in the future.
AGBS is pleased to announce “Carla Williams: Making Tender,” a public lecture with artist and art historian Carla Williams. Williams will discuss her recent monograph, Tender, a collection of self-portraits Williams made in private between 1984 and 1999 during her undergraduate and graduate studies. Experimenting with large format and Polaroid cameras, Williams drew her camerawork and poses from the histories and cultures of fine-art photography and soft-core pornography. Wrangling these male-driven, heterosexual visual cultures to seek out the possibilities of her own self-portraiture as a young queer Black woman, Williams kept these efforts to herself after she graduated. She continued to explore representations of Black women in the history of photography in her germinal work as an historian, curator, and archivist—work that includes such groundbreaking texts as The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (with Deborah Willis, 2002)—and only recently returned to her self-portraits to create Tender (2023). Winner of the prestigious Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Award, Tender offers “an artist in tender commune with her younger self, by someone who has committed much of their artistic practice to advocating for Black women’s visibility and representational politics,” as PhotoBook Award juror Renée Mussai describes.
Join us to hear Williams discuss the making of Tender, followed by a discussion with photography historian Natalie Zelt and audience Q&A.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
This program is supported by a grant from The Mellon Foundation’s Affirming Multivocal Humanities initiative.
REGISTER
CANCELED: Making History: A Seminar with Carla Williams
AGBS regrets to announce that this program is canceled due to unforseen circumstances.
We AIM to reschedule this event in the future.
“Making History: A Seminar with Carla Williams” is a seminar with University of Texas graduate students and faculty, and community scholars, and artist and art historian Carla Williams.
Knitting together artmaking, collections stewardship, writing, and activism, Williams holds a transformative presence in the history of photography. Williams’ contributions include her co-authorship of the groundbreaking The Black Female Body: A Photographic History with Deborah Willis (2002) and her recent artist’s book, Tender (2023). In The Black Female Body, Williams and Willis assembled 165+ photographs of Black women from old and out-of-print books, assorted archives and private collections, and museums across Europe and the United States. Including works by photographers of diverse identities—from well-known artists like Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems, Catherine Opie, and Walker Evans, to anonymous makers creating images for anthropological and/or pornographic use—The Black Female Body makes visible the complex politics of Black female representation in art and visual culture.
At the seminar, attendees may expect a free-flowing discussion about the process of recovering, interpreting, and illuminating the history of Black women and photography, the pleasures and challenges of working with varied collections and institutions, and the creative and innovative archival methods such histories require, among other topics.
This program is supported by a grant from The Mellon Foundation’s Affirming Multivocal Humanities initiative.
This program is open to UT faculty, graduate students, and community scholars. To inquire about available seats, email joy.scanlon@austin.utexas.edu.
Printmaking Workshop with Rashaun Rucker
This workshop has reached maximum capacity. Please consider joining us for the public conversation between Rashaun Rucker and Michael Ray Charles on Friday 10/25.
Learn relief printmaking techniques from artist Rashaun Rucker at this printmaking workshop for creative people with all levels of experience. Rucker will teach the printmaking technique he utilized to create The Ghost at New Bethel, on view in his Idea Lab exhibition. Participants will learn printmaking techniques that yield crisp, vibrant works of art. These techniques can be utilized at home– no specialized machinery required!
No experience necessary. Please bring a drawing from which you'd like to make your print. We recommend this workshop to adults, as it involves sharp tools. All materials will be provided.
Rashaun Rucker Artist Talk ft. Michael Ray Charles
Join us for an artist talk and public conversation between Rashaun Rucker, Idea Lab exhibiting artist, and Professor Michael Ray Charles, AADS Faculty and renowned artist. Rucker will present an artist talk tracing the development of his multi-media practice and the research that supports it, including his exploration of ancestral legacies, Black religious traditions, and Christian iconography.
Following his presentation, Rucker will be joined by Michael Ray Charles for a public conversation. A Q&A with the audience will follow.
Free and open to the public. Refreshments provided.
Austin Museum Day
Austin Museum Partnership proudly presents the 27th Annual Austin Museum Day! Austin Museum Day is a free, city–wide rediscovery of Austin-area museums. The event allows families a unique opportunity to visit and explore the dynamic museum community including local exhibits and activities at over 30 participating institutions for free!
Both Christian-Green Gallery and Idea Lab will be open in celebration of Austin Museum Day. Experience Nicole Awai’s “oozing” sculptures and paintings at Christian-Green Gallery; then, make a rainbow scratch drawing inspired by the spontaneity and mystery of her artwork.
Visit Idea Lab to experience Rashaun Rucker: Patron Saints of a Black Boy, an exhibition of sculptures, drawings, and photographs that explore family as a source of spiritual guidance and inspiration.
Artist Reception & Gallery Tour: Nicole Awai
Art Galleries at Black Studies welcomes you to an Artist Reception for In the thick of it exhibiting artist Nicole Awai. The reception will feature an artist-led tour beginning promptly at 6:15 pm. Reception to follow.
This program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided.
Register
First Fridays for Students: September Edition
All UT students are welcome to this monthly gallery night featuring AGBS exhibitions, craft activities, and refreshments! Enjoy a warm, student-centered environment framing AGBS’ incredible art exhibitions. This month, visit Rashaun Rucker: Patron Saints of a Black Boy on view at Idea Lab, make glitter lanyard keychains in the Multi-Purpose Room, and enjoy Homeslice Pizza.
First Fridays for Students is hosted by AGBS’ Student Advisory Panel. The event is held every first Friday, 5-7p, at either Idea Lab or Christian-Green Gallery.
Artist Talk & Conversation: Rodell Warner & Eddie Chambers
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.
Drawing Workshop with Michael A. Booker
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.
Public Conversation: Michael A. Booker and Deborah Roberts
Join us for a public conversation between WAVE PATTERNS artist Michael A. Booker, and artist Deborah Roberts.
Free and open to the public.
Why Black Museums: Exhibitions and Relations
Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is excited to announce the second symposium in its multi-year program Why Black Museums, an annual series that honors and examines the cultural contributions of Black and ethnically specific museums. This program series asks: how do Black museums create their own imaginative ways of being museum spaces?
Taking place on Thursday, March 7, 2024 “Why Black Museums: Exhibitions and Relations” explores the connections among past and present exhibitions of Black art and historical objects. Examining the myriad ways that Black individuals and communities have developed for collecting, preserving, and exhibiting art and well-made objects, “Exhibitions and Relations” considers how these ways shape contemporary museum practice.
The audience is invited to join the moderators and presenters beginning at 10 a.m. for a coffee reception. We invite artists, scholars, museum professionals, students, and community members to gather with us in appreciation of these incredible speakers and cultural spaces and to look forward to these integral institutions’ future innovations.
The morning roundtable features Austin-based historians and curators Carre Adams of the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center; Ulili Emore of the Contextualization & Commemoration Initiative at The University of Texas; and Dr. Jacqueline Smith-Francis of the Austin History Center. Moderated by Dr. Gaila Sims, Curator of African American History at the Fredericksburg Area Museum, roundtable participants will discuss their work to preserve and interpret Black history in central Texas.
The afternoon panel features curators and scholars Dr. Kellie Jones, 2016 MacArthur Fellow and author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011) and Dr. Bridget R. Cooks, author of the award-winning study Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011). Dr. Jones’ paper, "Black Curators Matter: An Oral History Project," draws on Jones’ experiences curating at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Johannesburg Biennial as well as her germinal exhibitions: Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980 (Studio Museum, 2006), Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011), and Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties (Brooklyn Museum, 2014). Dr. Cooks’ paper, “Black Art, White Galleries: Two Case Studies” examines the incorporation of Black art into the permanent collections galleries at two mainstream museums and considers how the integration of Black art into mainstream collections may change prevalent narratives of American art. Following their papers, Drs. Jones and Cooks will join in discussion with Dr. Delphine Sims, Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Acknowledging the promise of accessibility and sustainability, this event is offered in a hybrid format, for those interested in participating from near and far. Those participating virtually may find the event on AGBS’ YouTube Channel, where a recording of the event will also be made available.
“Why Black Museums: Exhibitions and Relations”
Thursday, March 7, 2024
10 - 10:30 am: Coffee reception
10:30 - 12 pm: Roundtable:
Jacqueline Smith-Francis, Carre Adams, and Ulili Emore
12 - 1 pm: Lunch provided
1 - 3 pm: Presentations:
Dr. Kellie Jones, "Black Curators Matter: An Oral History Project"
Dr. Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Art, White Galleries: Two Case Studies”
Free and Open to the Public
About Why Black Museums
Why Black Museums is a collaboration among Dr. Cherise Smith, Executive Director of Art Galleries at Black Studies, Dr. Gaila Sims, and Dr. Delphine Sims. This multiyear initiative was conceived to honor and examine Black museums’ contributions to the museum field, and to celebrate AGBS as a promising addition to the larger community of ethnically specific museums.
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.
In Conversation: Alicia Henry & Phillip Townsend
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.
Opening Reception for Alicia Henry: (un)knowing
Join AGBS for the opening of our new exhibition, Alicia Henry: (un)knowing curated by Phillip Townsend.
Curator Tour of WAVE PATTERNS
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.
Public Tour at Christian-Green Gallery
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!
Public Tour at Christian-Green Gallery
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!
Public Tour at Christian-Green Gallery
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!
Contested Bodies: Black Women in Art and Culture
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).
Opening Reception and “Enlivening” for Travelogue Series: Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry
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
Conversation with Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees and Virginia Grise
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
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
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
Why Black Museums 2023
Art Galleries at Black Studies is excited to announce a multiyear program titled Why Black Museums, which honors and examines Black museums’ contributions to the museum field. This spring we will host our inaugural events, which will highlight several scholars and professionals working within the University of Texas at Austin Black Studies department as well as Black museums across the United States.
Gallery Tour and Talk with Curator Cherise Smith
Join Curator Cherise Smith for a gallery tour and talk about the exhibition Old Wounds, Dark Dreams
Opening Reception for Old Wounds, Dark Dreams
Join AGBS for the opening of the exhibition, Old Wounds, Dark Dreams, curated by Cherise Smith, Phd