This event was funded by Engaging the Senses Foundation, and co-sponsored by the departments of English, Ethnic Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, and the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture.
Danez Smith and Patricia Smith, who were meant to read together on campus this past March, graciously joined us online instead. This past December, they spent nearly a half an hour each reading their poetry for our virtual audience, and afterwards, spoke with one another as well as some folks from ARC. Our Program Director, Laurie Macfee, as well as one of our 2020 Poetry & the Senses Fellows, Menat El Attamah, engaged them in a range of topics from the pandemic to the poetic imagination.
This event took place online.
Find the full recording here.
Ajuan Mance, a local artist and professor at Mills College, graced ARC with her virtual presence near the end of this past November. Her talk was focused on a project that she completed over the course of six years, from 2010 to 2016, called 1001 Black Men. Just as is implied in its title, the project is made up of 1001 portraits drawn of Black men whom Mance encountered personally, mostly in the Bay Area, but throughout the United States as well.
In spite of the many moments lost to the global upheaval this year, the Arts Research Center made an attempt to virtually celebrate an exhibit that has yet to make its date. On November 12, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson was joined by her co-curator Olivia Ardui to present the exhibition catalog for their show “Histories of Dance,” which was scheduled to take place in 2020 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo but was drastically reduced due to the pandemic.
This event was co-sponsored by the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
On this last and very tense election day, the Arts Research Center had the pleasure of virtually hosting Erin McElory of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, whose talk was a welcome distraction to us all. Topically, they began their talk by recounting the current president’s roots in the realm of private property and capital accumulation, noting that his father Fred Trump accrued his wealth in his role as a New York City landlord.
This semester, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson is teaching a class intertwined with our Visual Activism series, also called “Visual Activism.” Instead of generating our own account of Michael Rakowitz’s recent ARC talk, we’ve decided to feature five unique responses from students in the course.
This semester, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson is teaching a class intertwined with our Visual Activism series, also called “Visual Activism.” Instead of generating our own account of Alfredo Jaar’s recent ARC talk “When the Music Stops,” we’ve decided to feature four unique responses from the students in the course.
Tess Futterman:
A recording of this event is unavailable.
All of us at the Arts Research Center were fortunate enough to kick off our Fall 2020 programming with a virtual visit from Favianna Rodriguez, a local Bay area visual artist whose work is inextricable from her aims as an activist. Her talk was the first in a series called Visual Activism, which was programmed in conjunction with our director Julia Bryan-Wilson’s art history course by the same name.
I’ve started to think making art is like owning a polo horse, or buying a Lamborghini in the midst of a recession. I’ll be editing a video and have this moment where I’m staring at Premiere Pro, and think: Christ, this is so stupid. Am I really editing and re-editing this same 30 seconds of footage when there are so many actual problems in the world? Did my grandmother survive a famine for this?
is a subtle swirling viscosity surrounding you & me
always or only the ‘always’ I know as this life
dust is the cohesion & creates coherence between us
dust of what all of us are & have been or at least
this planet’s numinous phenomenal ‘all of us’ as such
its consistency heightens my facility to sense
the dead
whom I can’t recognize without allowing for
what will become of me
