Deep thoughts with amazing Confluence collaborator Jennifer Newsom during our second class workshop for Fate is Kind.
Fri, Feb. 19, 2021 ⁄ 11:00am–12:15pm
Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action
Workshop #3 – Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action – Discussion begins @ 11am / Friday, February 19th
https://carleton.zoom.us/j/96423561102?pwd=cG16VUtLT0ZwMk1taUIwUHdXK25sQT09
Looking towards aspects of the African diasporic tradition and its tools, such as cooperative creation, improvisation, and deep listening, we are provided both inside and outside of the context of musicianship, guides that can play significant and important roles in our lives as active neighbors in community. These are social tools to carry with us day-to-day.
For this third workshop for the class Fate is Kind, we will be joined by artist, musician, and 9th Ward elder Douglas Ewart. Centering our focus on the techniques and histories of so-called jazz, “social music” as it was described by Miles Davis, or simply, as described by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Great Black Music we will, in general, think through how this traditions qualities play a role for non-musicians to be more attentive neighbors. And in specific, we’ll listen to how these attitudes and qualities have played out in Douglas’ life and work, and what his experiences in cooperative creation can teach us moving forward in common.
In preparation for our visit to the Fate is Kind class by 9th Ward neighbor, artist and musician, Douglas Ewert, we are viewing this conversation between Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richards Abrams, Frederick Berry, and George Lewis.
As well, we are listening to the first hour of a series of radio programs originally broadcast in the late 60s on NYC’s WBAI, a long conversation between composers John Cage and Morton Feldman.
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the City, an excerpt from his Critique of Everyday Life.
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading Action Around the Edges, an excerpt from curator and critic Douglas Crimp’s critical memoir, Before Picture. This essay, read in tandem with text from Situationist International, looks at the intersection between interventionist art practices, namely that of Gordon Matta Clark and his piece Days End – a structural intervention of a derelict warehouse pier on NYC’s Hudson River – and the historical legacy and politics surrounding the gay cruising scene of the same era around the Hudson piers.
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading excerpts from the Situationist International Reader.
Tue, Feb. 16, 2021 ⁄ 5:00–6:30pm
Mt. Analogue Discussions #1 w/ Julia Bryan-Wilson
Art, Work, Craft, Resistance: Julia Bryan-Wilson in Discussion
WHEN: Tuesday, February 16 at 5:00 PM (US Central Time)
WHERE: via Zoom https://carleton.zoom.us/j/94805489346?pwd=d0hpdXhlWEpoOGdQSVZ0eXY4a3NPUT09
From her pre-academic days in radical feminist media networks to her focus on art and labor, craft and activism, and now the role of dance as a cultural form of grassroots resistance to repressive structures, Julia Bryan-Wilson has paid unique focus on how matters of everyday existence intertwine with deep rooted needs for cultural production as a social force for change. For this first session in the Mt. Analogue Discussions, Confluence Studio’s on-going series of conversations with artists, academics, activists, and global thinkers, we are proud to collaborate with the Art Dept. of Carleton College to host a discussion with Bryan-Wilson about how she sees her role as an art historian who works across difference and geographies and how she sees her work as a scholar as co-extensive with her work as an activist. Through this personal frame we hope the discussion will provide space to reflect more broadly on both the state of artistic production today as well as the role that the academy could play in furthering the cause of equity and equality.
About Julia Bryan-Wilson
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Doris and Clarence Maro Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also directs the university’s Art Research Center. Her research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of three journal special issues (“Amateurism,” Third Text, 2020; “Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016).
Bryan–Wilson is an adjunct curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where in 2019 she co-curated the exhibit Women’s Histories: Artists before 1900; in 2020 at MASP she organized Histórias da Dança/Histories of Dance. With Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the ICA Philadelphia, and MOCA North Miami. She is currently writing a book about Louise Nevelson.
Fri, Feb. 12, 2021 ⁄ 11:00am–12:15pm
Invisible City: The Psychology of Place
Workshop #2 – Invisible City: The Psychology of Place – Discussion begins @ 11am / Friday, February 12th
https://carleton.zoom.us/j/96423561102?pwd=cG16VUtLT0ZwMk1taUIwUHdXK25sQT09
Each social landscape is embedded with its own unique, ever changing, psychological elements. The city, its dense and frenetic nature, creates a space of swirling social transformations where each day represents new possibilities of living in proximity. Time, as with everything, has its effects, and attitudes change. These changing attitudes find form in the urban landscape through our interactions as well as the structures we build and vice versa.
For our second workshop in the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind: Abstraction and Patterning in a Life with Others we will be joined in conversation by Jennifer Newsom, architect (Dream the Combine) and professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota to discuss the ways that artists can help illustrate these social flows and patterns, their forms and attitudes.
As always we will seed, as well as continue, our conversation through Social Margins, the Confluence social annotation platform; “an assembly in text.”
An excerpt from the Situationist International Reader