Virtual event, March 21st, Streaming and available to all on MASS MoCA’s YouTube channel.

7:00-8:15pm EST. Accessibility: The event will have automated live captions.

To celebrate the launch of the CARE SYLLABUS module,“I Can’t: Feeling Through Burdens of Care,” this virtual event brings together the writer Maggie Nelson and the artist Marc Swanson for a night of conversation on the occasion of Nelson’s recently published book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Swanson’s new MASS MoCA exhibition, A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco.

With anecdotes from art and life, this conversation draws attention to the particularities of care as they arise in nuanced relation to the labors and limits of artistic creation and interpretation. When the rally cry of care sounds far and wide, where do we focus our energies? What role, if any, might art -- and artistic engagement -- play in navigating our capacities to give and receive care? In their discussion, Nelson and Swanson will touch on shared investments evident in their recent works, which explore connections between queer experience, alternative understandings of time, and climate crisis.

RSVP for a reminder here:

Join Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown, guest-curator of the second CARE SYLLABUS module, “Black Elegies in Sight & Sound,” for an in-person evening at the museum dedicated to the potentials of close listening.

Free but RSVP required. More info and RSVP Here.

Join CARE SYLLABUS as a part of MASS MoCA's Community Day: a day of free museum admission for Berkshire residents on Saturday, July 17. Come and meet the CARE SYLLABUS co-directors to learn more about a special partnership between MASS MoCA and MCLA developed during the pandemic.

There will be a participatory community mural project, responding to the prompt, "Who cares?", as well as an opportunity to earn some CARE SYLLABUS merchandise by reflecting on the different valences of care in your life.

Learn more about Community Day on MASS MoCA’s website.

For Jupiter's ingress into Pisces on May 13, Johanna Hedva will be in conversation with their dear friend, artist and follower of the fates Constantina Zavitsanos, to discuss how queer and crip people persist through deviant forms of knowledge that approach fate as material to be de-, un-, in-, and re-formed. Topics will include, but are not limited to: art, doom, abolishing the give/take binary in care, astrology, dependencies, fugitivity, and magic.

This keynote event is part of Johanna Hedva’s guest-curated CARE SYLLABUS module, “Care in End Times.” It is made possible with the support of MCLA’s Hardman Award.

Accessibility information: This virtual event will have closed captions and ASL interpretation.

The event will be live-streamed on MASS MoCA’s YouTube page on May 13, from 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EST. RSVP here for a reminder.

About the Participants

Johanna Hedva

Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives between LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming/Wolfman 2020), a collection of poems, performances, and essays, and the novel On Hell (Sator/Two Dollar Radio 2018). Their album Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a doom-metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual was released in January 2021, and their 2019 album, The Sun and the Moon, had two of its tracks played on the moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into eight languages.

Constantina Zavistanos

Constantina Zavitsanos works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound to elaborate what’s invaluable in the re/production of debt, dependency, and means beyond measure. Zavitsanos has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New Museum, Artists Space, The Kitchen, and Participant Inc. in New York; at Arika in Glasgow, Scotland; and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. With Park McArthur, they coauthored “Other Forms of Conviviality” in Women & Performance (Routledge, 2013) and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). They co-organized the cross-disability arts events “I Wanna Be With You Everywhere” at Performance Space New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Zavitsanos is a 2021 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Roy Lichtenstein Award. They live in New York and teach at the New School.

Join CARE SYLLABUS for the third in a series of lectures, part of The Mind’s Eye Works-In-Progress Colloquium.

Title: Private Performance as Caretaking

Abstract: In this exploration of performance, acts of endurance, and the role of caretaking in the arts and recovery, Melanie Mowinski examines the idea of wilderness mindset. Mowinski defines wilderness mindset as being present to the unpredictability of life, a concept she developed through her walking practice. When one deliberately seeks the uncomfortable or the opportunity to be lost while walking, resiliency, perseverance, confidence and fortitude get exercised. What is done “alone” can be framed as private performance, an act of endurance in the ongoing care for the body and soul within this great unknown.

RSVP here.

Speaker Bio
Melanie Mowinski lives and works in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts where she is a professor of art at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA). Mowinski holds an MFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an MAR from Yale University. Mowinski balances hyper control & very specific rules with experimental investigations in her letterpress and book arts making. She gravitates towards the creation of one-of-a-kind artist books housed in unusual and traditional enclosures. Her books under the imprint PRESS • 29 PRESS are in private and public collections around the world.

Link to Zoom Webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89154376715

Join CARE SYLLABUS for the second in a series of lectures, part of The Mind’s Eye Works-In-Progress Colloquium.

Title: Witches, Girlhood, and the Ethic of Care

Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Castro outlines childhood studies interpretations and applications of the feminist ethic of care to expand the concept of children’s ethic of care to their material cultures. Castro discusses the caring girlhood of young witches as represented in examples from film, streaming media, and literature to argue that girl witches are material culture – subsumed into the narrative and cultural imaginary, a witch (when younger) is no longer a scary person but instead a material culture artifact. The young witch is first and foremost carer for others around them, whether that be animal, friend, relative, or trusted adult.

PLEASE JOIN LECTURE VIA THE ZOOM LINK ABOVE. 

Speaker Bio
Ingrid E. Castro is Professor of Sociology at MCLA. She earned her MA and PhD in Sociology, with two Graduate Certificates in Cinema Studies and Women & Gender Studies, from Northeastern University. She regularly writes on children and childhood, specifically child and youth agency, ethic of care, generationalism, and interpretive reproduction. Her edited volumes include Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations (2017); Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In Between (2019); Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time (2019); and Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds (2020).

ZOOM LINK for 4/13:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84085840095

Join CARE SYLLABUS for the first in a series of lectures, part of The Mind’s Eye Works-In-Progress Colloquium.

Title: Imitation of Life: A Lyric Essay

Abstract: In this reading of an essay begun during this past year, Zack Finch explores whether performance art and literature can enact the sorts of funerary, healing, and socially cathartic care work traditionally reserved for more religious rituals and ceremonies of mourning.  Moving across a spectrum of aesthetic texts, including installation works by Taryn Simon, sculpture by Fred Wilson, essays by Stéphane Mallarmé, and films by Douglas Sirk and Stan Brakhage, this work-in-progress takes a personal, auto-theoretical approach to the question of how one navigates loss and separation under the conditions of the ongoing pandemic. 

RSVP here.

Speaker Bio
Zack Finch is a poet, essayist and scholar of modern and contemporary US poetry and poetics. He has received awards and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Wallace Stevens Society. His work has appeared in places including American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Fence, Jacket2, Poetry and Tin House. A graduate of Warren Wilson's Program for Writers (MFA in poetry) and University of Buffalo's Poetics Program (PhD), he currently teaches writing and literature courses in the English Department at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

On the occasion of Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown’s CARE SYLLABUS module, “Black Elegies in Sight & Sound,” artist Jennie C. Jones is joined by Dr. Brown, associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and author of The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press), to discuss Jones's site-specific installation in the Ground/work exhibition, These (Mournful) Shores .

Tuesday, March 23, 6:00 - 7:00 PM

To receive a link for the event, please RSVP HERE (via The Clark’s website).

What would it look like if we placed care at the forefront of our creative pursuits, critical inquiries, and civic dialogues? How would it feel if care were to be taken seriously as a method of relationality and creation? What if, beyond a means, care was a goal—an endpoint inseparable from a beginning?

Join the co-directors of CARE SYLLABUS, Victoria Papa (MCLA), Levi Prombaum (MASS MoCA), and Laura Thompson (MASS MoCA), for an information session and workshop to learn more about teaching and learning with the multimodal content of CARE SYLLABUS. This interactive event will include an overview of the project, suggestions for incorporating material into courses and other programming, and an experiential activity aimed at generating discourse about care.

This event is open to all and especially geared towards community members of MCLA, MASS MoCA, and CARE SYLLABUS affiliates including WCMA, Williams College, and The Clark.

A recording of this event can be made available to those interested in learning more: e-mail info@caresyllabus.org for more information.

NEW DATE: Tuesday, January 26, 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm.

Due to NMAI’s recent Covid-related closure, this event will now take place on Tuesday, January 26, at 6:00pm. This postponement from the original December date ensures that panelists and audiences alike can engage with NMAI’s collection objects in real-time during our discussion. It also helps keeps NMAI’s staff members safe and healthy. We look forward to seeing you on January 26th. Thank you for your understanding.

The National Museum of the American Indian’s (NMAI’s) collection, an extensive repository of Native American and First Nations artifacts, has profoundly reoriented its collection practices in the last few decades: placing expertise and authority in the Indigenous communities which it serves rather than in the museum itself.  

But what does this shift look like in practice? How are Indigenous artists engaging with NMAI’s collections today? How can collection care be reimagined further, to better serve Indigenous communities? 

Join artist Wendy Red Star, guest-curator of the first module of CARE SYLLABUS; artists Tanis S'eiltin and Peter Morin; as well as Christine Oricchio, Collections Specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian, for a roundtable discussion about these questions, driven by engagement with artworks and objects in the NMAI collection.

The event will be streamed live on Facebook and Youtube on January 26th.

Sign up for a reminder here.