Reimagining Monuments, Race and Revolution at The Old Stone House, Brooklyn

EXHIBIT OPENING MARCH 14 6 pm – 8 pm
on view through JUNE 19

Artists: Kimberly Becoat, Alex Callender, Maureen Connor/Institute for Wishful Thinking, DARN Studio, Damien Davis, Rose Desiano, Ayasha Guerin, Zaq Landsberg, Jennifer Mack Watkins, Maureen McNeill, Lyra Monteiro, Sal Muñoz, Marilyn Nance, Emmaline Payette, Chip Thomas, Kamau Ware

Race and Revolution: Reimagining Monuments is the third iteration of Race and Revolution, a series curated by Katie Fuller that aims to bring the conversation of systemic race and racism from the past into the present by displaying excerpts from historical documents alongside contemporary artworks. 

Reimagining Monuments questions the relationship between historical memory and historical monuments and the implications of the histories that remain absent. Sixteen artists respond to existing New York monuments or to sites they feel should have a monument. Alongside the artists’ work, quotations from historical documents about the corresponding monuments or sites open up dialogue regarding a need to re-examine these physical, selective sound bites of memory.

Celebrating Black, Queer Life in New York City

On my birthday! I’ll be moderating a special event with the Urban Democracy Lab on 2/27 :

Urban Intersections: Black Queer lives in New York City

Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
1 Washington Place
New York, NY, USA

6:30pm — 8:00pm

Few calls to action have been as powerful in movement building as that of the Combahee River Collective in 1977. The collective, composed of Black feminists who identified as and with the working-class and lesbians, demanded an active commitment “to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression,” seeing as their “particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Decades later, this intersectional politics helped buoy the Movement for Black lives, Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100, and other 21st century campaigns for racial, gender, class, and sexual justice. In celebration of Black History Month, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and the boundless, ongoing relevance of the Combahee River Collective’s message, this event brings together key activists working at the intersections of Black and queer politics in New York City.

Politics and Space Workshop at Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne, Germany)

Sorry I’m Late. XOXO Echo
At Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany
23.11. – 19.12.2018
Opening on Thursday 22 November 2018, 7pm

Upon the invitation of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the former Zurich-based project space Taylor Macklin is organizing an exhibition on the constitution and interpretation of spaces and their conditions.

With: Der Alltag (Sensationen des Gewöhnlichen), Andrea Büttner, Nicolas Buzzi, Brice Dellsperger, Maya Deren, Ayasha Guerin, Flavio Merlo & Ben Rosenthal, Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf, Carissa Rodriguez, Li Tavor, Miriam Yammad, Constantina Zavitsanos

Politics and Space workshop with Ayasha Guerin on Friday 23 November 2018, 3 – 5pm

Above Image from: Der Alltag (Sensationen des Gewöhnlichen), Nr. 4/82, Thema: Warten!

Below: Some documentation

Works on Water Residency, Governors Island, New York. Fall 2018

Very pleased to announce I'll be an artist in residence in one of the historic Nolan Row houses on Governors Island October 15-31st, 2018. The residency is supported by Works on Water and Underwater New York.

In Residence, I will workshop a performance that will walk the former waterline of the now landfilled Collect Pond, engaging the socio-ecological history at different points of the beach beneath the streets of Lower Manhattan. Historians believe the Collect was a kettle pond with 70 foot deep waters. Once the city’s primary source of freshwater, the Collect was a sacred place for the Lenape, New York’s  indigenous people. It was fed by multiple springs which flowed north out of the pond and then west through a salt marsh that has also since been filled. Over two centuries of early New York, enslaved people were buried at the African Burial Ground on the Pond’s south-west shore. Later, many places on site served as stops on the underground railroad. Since its landfill, several carceral structures have been erected on the Collect.

In the WoW governors island studio space, I will create an installation, marking the pond’s former shape, and will develop the performance with visitors who come to visit my process. The walls of the studio will exhibit historical maps of landscape change from my research and photographs of past and current communities who live upon the Collect, providing additional context for the performance. 

A Conversation with Curtis Talwst Santiago

My conversation with Curtis Talwst Santiago about the themes of his later show "By Sea" is published in Bomb Magazine. Read it here

"By Sea" at up at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York until June 24th 

"The Black Beach and the Sea" at "ReSignifications: The Black Mediterranean" Palermo, Italy.

6/8/18, in Palermo, Italy, I am presenting my paper "The Black Beach and the Sea," at The Black Mediterranean conference. In this paper I expand on my work at Black Portraitures: IV, which drew from the writings of Edouard Glissant to theorize the archipelago in relation to being, blackness, and the climate crises responsible for the proliferation of new diasporas, with particular attention to how Glissant’s caribbean-born thought intersects with work about the black mediterranean. In doing so, I move from land to sea, from thinking with the archipelago to thinking with the aquipelago. Such frameworks challenge the coherence of territorial perspectives and encourage the accountability of a world in nuanced relation and temporal entanglements. I explore how "the Sea" may serve as a cognitive space for this work, as a point and platform of observation - a haunted place, a place of contemplation, connection, and care.

ReSignifications: The Black Mediterranean is the ninth conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body and its relevance to what is happening in the Mediterranean today. We received over 100 proposals that engaged in topics referencing activism, art, the global art market, politics, tourism, sites of memory, dance, music, film, and photography. At the backdrop to the conference will be the exhibition ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Readings, with the connected Wole Soyinka: Antiquities Across Times and Place. Collateral events of the MANIFESTA European Biennial of Contemporary Art, the exhibits will display the works of an array of international artists and the African art collection of Nigerian Nobel Prize for Literature Wole Soyinka, who will open the conference.

The conference is co-sponsored and held in collaboration with the University of Palermo, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography & Imaging, the City of Palermo, New York University’s LaPietra Dialogues, Institute for African American Affairs, and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Harvard University.

"Blackness as Archipelago" at Black Portraitures IV, Harvard University

On 3/23 Amrit Trewn and Myself have organized a panel "Blackness as Archipelago" to develop the archipelagic framework with five unique persepctives at Black Portraitures "The Color of Silence," held at Harvard University.  Panel description below:

 This panel considers islands as both sites and conceptual positions for black futures. The scholars and artists will explore both the material and socio-political conditions that islands may produce: isolation and enclosure, dependencies and linkages, peripheral fugitivities and radical political subjectivities. What do we gain from thinking about blackness as Archipelago? How do the material effects of racial-capitalism manifest in similarly bounded experiences around the globe? And how can thinking about blackness in this way open new lines of inquiry into the study of black social, political, and ecological experience? These presentations learn from the poetry of Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Braithwaite as well as scholarship of Carmen Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Michelle Stephens, who have long theorized the archipelago in relation to being, the continental, and blackness. Ayasha Guerin (NYU, American Studies), Amrit Trewn (NYU, American Studies), Lindiwe Malindi (University of the Witwatersrand, Sociology), Ron Morisson (University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts) and Justin French (Photographer, New York) will model methodologies for attending to images and cartographies of island-spaces that imagine alternative black futures.

The Black Archive with BUFU at Eyebeam, Brooklyn

This Valentines Day I'll be joining BUFU at Eyebeam to present work about my historical research in black archives and the labor of love that is archiving my own story. Please Join us!

Set on Freedom Care Workshops @ Queens Museum July 16

Set On Freedom at Queens Museum

Excited to announce Set On Freedom a month of art and programming at the Queen's Museum, curated by myself and four other participating artists:

Set on Freedom (SoF) was an artist retreat organized by the Open A.I.R. Artist Service Program at the Queens Museum for women, gender non-conforming, trans, queer artists of color in the summer of 2016. The program was held following violent tragedies like the mass shooting at Pulse and in the midst of several high-profile acts of police brutality that took the lives of Black people. Over the course of the year, a group of us, all queer artists of color from the summit, continued to hold space to discuss how the themes of displacement, dispossession, home, and strength have impacted our everyday experiences and informed our artistic practices. One year following the inaugural SoF retreat, the works presented in this exhibition and accompanying program series, Set on Freedom, were created during the our work to foster an inclusionary and mutually-supportive artistic community. Acting as self-disciplined cultural organizers during this process, we have explored their own representations of race, gender, sexuality, and love, de-centering whiteness and imagining radical systems of progress to uplift themselves as queer artists of color.

Participating Artists:
Jes Fan
Lee Bullitt
Sue Jeong Ka
Ayasha Guerin
Tiffany Joy Butler

New Work Showing at Miami's Rojas + Rubensteen Projects Gallery

Pleased to be debuting new work with Rojas + Rubensteen Projects, a new contemporary art gallery + community hub in Little River, Miami. The gallery is committed to "Providing a platform to discuss global topics with diverse artists and emerging collectors, + creating an accessible space for locals, the gallery will be curated as an evolving organism of installations, painting, photography, sculpture, video + live performances." 

My work will be a part of the upcoming exhibition "Swing State."

Swing State is about challenging systems of American power.
The art on view oscillates in the dialectic between Freedom + Control that is at the heart of political discourse. The choice to choose. The privilege to inhale. Surveillance + consumption...

Join us for the opening reception
Monday November 28 @ 7 PM

Featuring work by
Laia Abril (Barcelona), Damon Casarez (Los Angeles), Jacobia Dahm (Berlin), Orestes De La Paz (Miami), Ben Gomez (Miami), Ayasha Guerin (New York), Meirav Ong (New York), Kenneth Pietrobono (New York), Matthew Spiegelman (New York), Ryan Turley (New York), Alexander Zimmer, Jeremy Handrup + Gabriel Bump (Chicago)

"Cuban Windows" at Black Portraitures III Conference in Johannesburg

I have been invited to present Cuban Windows, a documentary street photography and mapping project I began with Lily Saporta Taguiri in 2014 at the third annual Black Portraitures conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. We will be sharing our work at Session F2. Visualizing Land. You can find the full schedule here: http://www.blackportraitures.info/schedule/

BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] III: Reinventions: Strains of Histories and Cultures is the seventh conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body. It offers a forum that gives artists, activists, and scholars from around the world an opportunity to share ideas from historical topics to current research on the 40th anniversary of Soweto. Presenters will engage a range of topics such as Biennales, the Africa Perspective in the Armory Show, the global art market, politics, tourism, sites of memory, Afrofuturism, fashion, dance, music, film, art, and photography.

The conference will be held November 17-19, 2016 in Johannesburg and held in collaboration with the U. S. Department of State, U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, Patrick H. Gaspard, Goodman Gallery, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Harvard University, New York University’s LaPietra Dialogues, Tisch School of the Arts and the Institute of African American Affairs.

IdeasCity Athens Fellowship and Public Conference

I'm really honored to have been selected as an IdeasCity fellow for the New Museum's rad residency and conference that will take place in Athens, Greece this September. Read about the program HERE

IdeasCity is a collaborative, civic, and creative platform that starts from the premise that art and culture are essential to the future vitality of cities. IdeasCity Athens will take place September 19–24, 2016 and will feature an intensive five-day residency program with forty Fellows, culminating in a public conference featuring internationally acclaimed speakers from the fields of art, architecture, design, policymaking, and urbanism. Speakers will include John Akomfrah, Tania Bruguera, dream hampton, George Prevelakis, Nick Srnicek, and Hito Steyerl, among others. The conference, which will be free and open to the public, will take place on September 24, 2016 at the Athens Conservatory.

"Brownstone Bushwick" Moving to 721 Broadway

My series of photographs and oral histories from the Bushwick-Linden community garden is moving to the Gulf + Western Gallery  at Tisch. Running October 16th - November 29 2014  

Brownstone Bushwick documents the block activities of the largely Afro-Caribbean community who reside in turn of the century brownstone homes on the block of Linden street between Broadway and Bushwick Avenues in Brooklyn, NY. Since the mid 20th century, Bushwick has struggled in adapting to the crippling efforts by real estate speculators, mortgage brokers, banks and insurance companies in redlining their streets, and the “benign neglect” and “planned shrinkage” by local government. One of the strongest engines of community building for the Linden street block has proven to be the planting of trees and other nature, which has signaled, like flares, a call for collaborative neighborhood improvement to battle the onslaught of urban blight that engulfed much of the neighborhood around them. The Linden-Bushwick community garden has grown, since 1974, to host over twenty vegetable garden plots and provide nutritious sustenance for residents of the area. Using photography and oral history collection as methods of inquiry, “Brownstone Bushwick” builds a record of the efforts by resident individuals who have worked with nature to build a neighborhood deemed safe and attractive enough for its newcomers to gentrify. Homeownership, differences in lifestyle aspirations, nationality, race and gender, have all played a role in creating a diverse collection of Linden street histories. What unites these neighbors’ reflections on their time spent on the block, however, is a sense of shared pride, resilience, and empowerment that they have collaboratively built and find today in their dignified urban environment.

My work in Philadelphia: "Feeding Cities" Photography Exhibition

Two of my Berlin works have been selected for the juried photography exhibition at the Institute for Urban Research conference "Feeding Cities: Food Security in a rapidly Urbanizing world." These works will be on view from March 7-21st in the Morgan Fine Arts Gallery (205 south 34th street, Philadelphia)

Allmende-Kontor

Über Lebenkunst

Read my Photo Essay In The Nation

The Nation Published a photo-essay I wrote about the Rockaways, Queens NY in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Read it here: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171499/photoessay-sandy-ravaged-rockaways-one-month-out