Open Rehearsals

Open Rehearsals open a door onto work still in the middle of itself.

The Arts Research Center's Open Rehearsals invite artist-scholars to bring unfinished work, an animating question, process material, or a place they're stuck—not to present it, but to think with it, out loud. This is a space for contemplation that understands itself as rehearsal. It welcomes thinking undertaken with materials, or as practice. It makes room for work that, in its improvisational open-endedness, knows itself to be incomplete, unfolding over time and across practitioners and institutions.

line
man standing next to painting on wall, gesturing toward it

Ashon T. Crawley

white space

ASHON T. CRAWLEY
Open Rehearsal 1

Thursday Nov 12, 2026 at 4pm PST/7pm EST

Followed by Graduate Session 5:30pm PST/8:30pm EST 

90 MIN ONLINE EVENT (register here)

Ashon Crawley is a multidisciplinary artist working in the visual and the sonic, and a Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.  Crawley has been an interdisciplinary arts fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, a New City Arts Initiative Fellow, and a LIT (Learning It Together) Artist Fellow, and his work has been featured on the National Mall in Washington DC, Bridge Projects, and the California African American Museum. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination; and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press), an epistolary exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love. His third book, From Infinite World: The Sound of the Hammond Organ and the Tragedy of AIDS in the Black Church (WW Norton Dec 2026), addresses the impact of the AIDS crisis for black social life. Entering the conversation by considering musicians, singers and choir directors that labored for black churches, “From Infinite World” explores the ways gender, sex, sexuality remain unthought and untheorized but are no less real practices of the living and the dead. All his writing and his approach to art practices is about what he calls otherwise possibility. 

print of woman with raised arms singing or praying and hand drawn symbols

yes. surrender.bloom. (Number 5), print. By Ashon T. Crawley

white space

Read more about Ashon Crawley's studio practice and writing at his website here

abstract painting of man crying

here is another positive black image_i will fear no evil – i am not a man. i cry, by Ashon T Crawley

color photo of artwork in front of washington monument with woman sitting on bench

HOMEGOING Washington Monument – South Grounds. Installation view, Ashon T. Crawley. A sonic memorial to the AIDS crisis that honors fallen Black queer musicians and spirituality. Photo by Steve Weinik.

bookcover with an abstract painting behind text
The Lonely Letters, by Ashon T. Crawley. Awarded the 2020 Believer Book Award for Nonfiction presented by The Believer Magazine; awarded the 2021 Lammy Award in Nonfiction awarded by Lambda Literary.
line

Graduate Sessions

Following each Open Rehearsal, the Arts Research Center will bring together the featured artist-scholar and a small group of graduate students for a more intimate conversation. Places are limited. If you'd like to take part, please submit an expression of interest here.

Return to the Open Rehearsal homepage