Welcome to fall 2023 at the Arts Research Center! We are excited to sponsor and co-sponsor a dynamic series of events including:
- poetry readings, craft talks, and a writing workshop with writers that include aracelis girmay, J. Michael Martinez, Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif, Robert Sullivan, and dg nanouk okpik
- artist/choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater (ARC’s fall 2023 artist in residence) will work with dancers to create a four-day open rehearsal Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth in response to the Duane Linklater: my motherside exhibit at BAMPFA
- the first in a new year-long series of conversations, The Loft Hour, with Berkeley’s cohort of 10 new arts faculty from Art Practice, English, History of Art, Film & Media, Music, and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
- an internet bus tour designed by Barcelona-based artist Mario Santamaría, in collaboration with Professor Alex Saum Pascual
- hosting BCNM’s Raven Chacon, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist
We hope to see you at these events and more!
Maziar Maghsoodnia Memorial Fund 2023 Reading Featuring Solmaz Sharif
September 13, 2023 at 4pm
David Brower Center, Tamalpais Room
Solmaz Sharif will give the 2023 Maziar Maghsoodnia Poetry Fund Reading, in conversation with Lubna Safi, an advanced Ph.D. candidate at MELC and the author of Your Blue and the Quiet Lament: Poems.
Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Asst Professor of English at Berkeley.
Sponsored by: Maziar Maghsoodnia Poetry Fund, Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Arts Research Center
Writing Workshop featuring Maōri Poet Robert Sullivan
Wed, Sept 20, 2023 at 1pm
Online
Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi and Kāi Tahu), a specialist in Māori and Pacific poetics and wayfinding as a phenomenological, close reading method, will give a two-hour online writing workshop. Sullivan has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children, including the 2022 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry, Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i, the Montana New Zealand Book Award for co-editing Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, the Māori Literature Award for co-editing Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English, and the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year for Weaving Earth and Sky, a retelling of Māori myths and legends. Tunui Comet is his eighth collection of poetry. His book Star Waka, for which he earned a Literary Fellowship at the University of Auckland, has been reprinted many times. He is a great fan of all kinds of decolonisation. His scholarly work is published in Routledge India’s Indigeneity series, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The New Zealand Journal of Literature, Landfall, Biography, and Ka Mate Ka Ora.
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center
All Arts Welcome!
Open House and kick-off for The Loft Hour
September 21, 2023 at 4pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23
MORE INFO HERE
Join with art colleagues, students and faculty at a welcome back open house!
The Loft Hour will meet the third Thursday of each month for food and conversation with our new cohort of Arts faculty. Come enjoy a break in your day and listen to these practitioners chat about the arts research that is breaking them open right now, in conversation with a senior faculty member. Hosted by the Arts Research Center in our new loft space, and supported by the Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts and Humanities.
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center
Latinx Poetry Now: Reading and Conversation with
J. Michael Martinez + aracelis girmay
in conversation with John Alba Cutler
September 28, 2023 at 11am
Maude Fife, 315 Wheeler Hall
MORE INFO HERE
Join the Arts Research Center for our first Poetry & the Senses reading of fall 2023, featuring incredible poets and multimedia artists J. Michael Martin and aracelis girmay. Following their readings, they will be in conversation with Prof John Alba Cutler (English).
J. Michael Martinez is a multimedia artist and the author of three collections of poetry, including Heredities, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Museum of the Americas, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. He is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.
aracelis girmay makes poems, multigenre texts, picture books, and collages. In collaboration with artist Valentina Améstica and the Center for Book Arts, a limited edition chapbook of her new work will be out later in the fall. She is the editor of So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket, 2023) and is the editor-at-large of the Blessing the Boats Selections. She is also on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. For her work girmay was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She will begin teaching at Stanford University in fall 2023.
Presented by the Arts Research Center and co-sponsored by Engaging the Senses Foundation and the English Dept.
dg nanouk okpik:
Lunch Poems Reading and Craft Talk
October 05, 2023
Reading: 12-1pm, Morrison Libary
Craft Talk: 4-5:15pm, Hearst Field Annex D23
MORE INFO HERE
dg nanouk okpik will give a Lunch Poems Reading from 12-1pm in Morrison Library, followed by a Craft Talk from 4-5:15pm in ARC (Hearst Field Annex D23). Both events are free and open to the public.
okpik is the author of Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), which won the American Book Award and the May Sarton Award. okpik was also the recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Santa Fe. dg nanouk okpik was born in Anchorage, where she spent much of her life, and her family is from Barrow, Alaska. okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit. She received an AFA in liberal arts / liberal studies from Salish Kootenai College, earned both an AFA and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program.
Presented by the Arts Research Center with the English Depts Lunch Poems Series and co-sponsored by Engaging the Senses Foundation
Internet Tour: Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations
Oct 12, 2023 from 9am – 1:30pm
Bus Tour begins at Hearst Museum
Anthropology and Art Practice Building
“Internet Tour” is an initiative by Barcelona-based artist Mario Santamaría, whose successful bus tours have explored the hidden digital infrastructures of many European cities. Now in Berkeley, in collaboration with Prof Alex Saum-Pascual, and together with the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Arts Research Center, we’ll embark on a collective exploration of the world’s preeminent technology hub, the San Francisco Bay Area, as we unearth its Internet infrastructure. Traveling by bus and on foot across Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland, this guided tour will also feature poetic and artistic experiences. We’ll visit the places through which our voices, images, cryptocurrencies, and future intelligences circulate as cursed matter that flows from the same wound. Where to go from there?
Sponsor(s): Berkeley Center for New Media with the Arts Research Center, Insitut Ramon Llull, and the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study
mymotherside panel with BAMPFA
Oct 14, 2023 at 1:30pm
BAMPFA
Duane Linklater: mymothersside is the artist’s first major survey exhibition. The exhibition includes works in sculpture and video that focus on enduring ancestral practices such as hunting, berry gathering, and fur trading; digital translations of tribal objects held in institutional collections; and a series of large-scale structures made with teepee poles.
Sponsored by BAMPFA, co-sponsored by the Arts Research Center.
The Loft Hour:
Zamansele Nsele + Nicole Starosielski
Oct 19, 2023 from 12 – 1pm
ARC – Hearst Field Annex D23
Come meet your new colleagues Zamansele Nsele (History of Art) and Nicole Starosielski (Film & Media) as they chat about the arts research that is breaking them open right now, in conversation with a senior faculty member.
Zamansele Nsele is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art. She is widely published and active as a critic, journalist,and cultural organizer. Nseles interests in critical theories of Blackness in visual art; with a particular emphasis on the tradition of resistance art movements in the United States and South Africa. Her research interests also explore the citationality and curatorial adaptation of the Black literary tradition into visual artworks and art exhibitions
Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media, conducts reseah on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, and teaches classes and supervises projects on digital media, environmental media, media and communications infrastructures, media history and theory, and integrated media theory and production, among other areas.
sponosred by the Arts Research Center and the Deans Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities
Claudia Rankine + Pamela Sneed: A Conversation on Commemoration
in conversation with Simon(e) van Saarloos
Nov 08, 2023 at 5pm
Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
ARC co-sponsored event
How to care for erased stories, while simultaneously creating different ways of storytelling: stories that do not rely on legibility, relatability, certainty and factual proof? Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting and Rhetoric PhD student at UC Berkeley, invites poets Claudia Rankine and Pamela Sneed for a conversation on commemoration.
In Citizen. An American Lyric, poet, playwright and MacArthur fellow Claudia Rankine writes: “This would be your fatal flaw–your memory, vessel of feelings …” The accumulation of everyday violence and racism forms heavy memories that make it difficult to imagine a present and future different from the past. In Funeral Diva, poet and visual artist Pamela Sneed laments surviving the AIDS crisis in NYC as a Black lesbian. While grieving the friends she lost, Sneed also mourns the erasure of Black lesbians and their labor and asks: “Who takes care of the caretakers?”
Sponsored by the Department of Rhetoric, the Arts Research Center and Engaging the Senses Foundation, Townsend Center for Humanities, English Dept, and Holloway Poetry Series,
What Gets Amplified: Raven Chacon with Berkeley New Media Center
Nov 13, 2023
hosted at the Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex, D23
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Raven Chacon will discuss his recent works, using scores and field recordings as the medium for relaying narratives of outdoor spaces (Aristotle’s Lyceum) and indoor spaces (Catholic churches).
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center, the Department of Music, the Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Department of Art Practice. An Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium lecture, presented as part of BCNM’s Indigenous Technologies initiative.