CARE SYLLABUS guest curators assemble a range of materials to instruct and inform on their chosen topic. The content here is transdisciplinary in scope, justice-oriented, and collaborative in spirit.
MODULES
Curated by the CARE SYLLABUS Advisory Collective, Supported by the Northern Berkshire Cultural Council and the Mass Cultural Council, March 2022
To admit the “I can’t,” the theorist Jan Verwoert has suggested, may sometimes be “the only adequate way to show that you care -- for the friends, family, children or lovers who require your presence, or for the continuation of a long-term creative practice that takes its time.” Which admissions of limitation, and which textures of refusal are yielding new ways of navigating this current moment of personal and collective exhaustion? How might the burdens of care reconfigure binary logics that structure popular discourses of care? How is saying "I can't" a privilege? What happens when refusal is not an option, but rather a boundary consistently undermined, or a reality regularly enforced?
ABOUT THE CARE SYLLABUS ADVISORY COLLECTIVE
An advisory collective of institutional partners guides CARE SYLLABUS. It consists of members from Berkshire Cultural Research Center, MASS MoCA, MCLA, The Clark Art Institute, Williams College, and Williams College Museum of Art. It also consists of artists and makers from the community. Unlike other modules, which have been authored by a single expert in care, this module brings together many of the voices which have supported CARE SYLLABUS programming in its many forms. Learn more about the members of the advisory collective here.
4. On the Impurity of Forms
Curated by Dr. Rizvana Bradley, November 2021
We are living in an era of immanent impurity. Modernity’s organization of space and time, and the principles of separability, determinancy, and sequentiality that support it, have been made utterly untenable by the catastrophic entanglement of the transatlantic slave trade, settler colonialism, and the global ascendency of capital. How has modernity’s racially gendered violence impacted the ways in which we sense and feel? In our disordered present, what can we make, and unmake, of this world?
ABOUT DR. RIZVANA BRADLEY
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley. She holds a BA from Williams College and a PhD from Duke University. Before coming to UC Berkeley, Bradley was an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale, an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality at Emory University, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at the University College London. Born in Kenya, and raised in the U.K., Germany, Poland, Tanzania, and the U.S., Bradley’s research and teaching focuses on the study of film and media at the intersections of literature, poetry, contemporary art and performance. Her scholarly approach to artistic practices in the fields of African American cultural production, as well as the wider black diaspora, expands and develops frameworks for thinking across these contexts, specifically in relation to global and transnational artistic and cinematic practices.
Bradley is currently at work on two new scholarly book projects. The first is a recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and offers a critical examination of the black body across a range of experimental artistic practices that integrate film and other media.
Curated by Johanna Hedva, May 2021
Disability Justice is a framework that illuminates connections between the deathly forces in our world: linking ableism with racism, capitalism and colonial-imperialism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. What happens when we integrate rather than refuse the pain, toil, and doom of surviving? How do we put our interconnectedness into practice?
ABOUT 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.
2. Black Elegies in Sight & Sound
Curated by Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown, March 2021
If an elegy is a lament for the dead presented in poetic verse, how might Black elegies articulate this lament in ways that exist beyond those parameters? In an effort to protectively evade further harm, what are some of the artistic strategies that exist in Black elegies? What might be the look, the sound, of this release?
Explore this module.
Image: Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #12 (shot in 2010, printed in 2016). Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan, Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo. Print size: 24 x 32.25 inches. Image size: 24 x 29.2 inches.
ABOUT DR. KIMBERLY JUANITA BROWN
Kimberly Juanita Brown is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her research engages the site of the visual as a way to negotiate the parameters of race, gender, and belonging. Her book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction, the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space and the women represented there. She is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled “Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual.” This project examines images of the dead in The New York Times in 1994 from four overlapping geographies: South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, and Haiti. Brown is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of women of color whose work gathers at the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies. The Dark Room has been in operation since 2012 and currently has nearly one hundred members from the United States and Canada.
Curated by Wendy Red Star, December 2020
Indigenous objects - and indigenous historical records - are frequently displaced from their peoples. How can we engage the colonial structures responsible for such separation? What forms of care might help repair this physical and emotional distance?
Image: Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke Feminist # 3, 2016
ABOUT WENDY RED STAR
Artist Wendy Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star’s work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. Intergenerational collaborative work is integral to her practice, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art.
Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fondation Cartier pour l’ Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Portland Art Museum, Hood Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among others. She served as a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University, the Figge Art Museum, the Banff Centre, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Dartmouth College, CalArts, Flagler College, and I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs. In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2019 Red Star will have her first career survey exhibition at the Newark Museum in Newark New Jersey.
Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Portland, OR.