How I Went Jank…

Join us on Zoom this month for artists Kamari Carter and Lamar Robillard, in conversation with Anaïs Duplan, Dellyssa Edinboro, and John Engelbrecht, co-presented by the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. Carter and Robillard will discuss their work, contemporary practices, and experience as part of the Jank Museum project at EFA Project Space in December 2021.

RSVP for the Zoom link via Eventbrite

Image: Lamar Robillard, Tennis Painting IV: Game, Set, Melancholy (Naomi Vs Serena), 2021, Linen canvas, enamel house paint, acrylic, Plastisol ink, 56 9/16” x 44 5/16”

Bios:

Kamari Carter (b. 1992) is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, Flux Factory, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and has been featured in a range of major publications including ArtNet, Precog Magazine, LevelGround and WhiteWall. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, and the Bettering American Poetry anthology. Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. Duplan’s video and performance work has been shown at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2020. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He now works as Program Manager at Recess and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Poetry at Columbia University.

Dellyssa Edinboro is the Education Coordinator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS). She enjoys learning about the educative role of community-engaged creative work and teaching, studying, and reading about activism and agency in educational spaces.

John Engelbrecht is an artist, arts organizer, educator, and Executive Director of Public Space One (PS1). Since joining PS1 in 2009, he has steadily built the beloved regional arts institution operating locally as Iowa City’s arts hub through securing national recognition (in grants, awards, and accolades in the contemporary arts field), thanks to its innovative programming (residencies, performances, exhibitions, and public projects) and wide-ranging artist network. Under his tenure, the organization has grown from its DIY/DIT roots to owning, occupying, and programming three buildings in downtown Iowa City and operating major projects including the Iowa City Press Co-op, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, and the Media Arts Co-op.

Lamar Robillard is a conceptual artist, photographer and educator working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. Lamar’s practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity and spirituality as it relates to identity, Black material culture and the self-coined “Unfavored American” experience. Inspired by various forms of literature, media, representation and history, he aims to insert his theory of second class citizenship into the canon through a lifelong exploration of the Unfavoured American experience while simultaneously providing authentic representation for Blackness with the absence of the Black body politic. Lamar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Art Port Kingston, Bed-Stuy Art House, HAUSEN and Art Helix Gallery.

RSVP for the Zoom link via Eventbrite

Art & Magic: Artists and the Occult
A Zoom Workshop

Tuesday, February 8 - 6:00 - 7:30 PM via Zoom

In conjunction with Cosmic Geometries, please join Hilma's Ghost on Tuesday, February 8th, 6:00-7:30PM EST for a free virtual program with four artists who have divinatory practices that are deeply entwined with their studio practice. Melissa Brown will talk about her use of Tarot to adapt complex visual mythologies in her paintings; Isa Carillo will discuss how she uses numerology to construct portraits; Maria Molteni will focus on her use of altars and astrology; and Laurel Sparks will illuminate on her use of sigils to make abstract paintings. Hilma’s Ghost will also expound with a brief talk on the history of art and magic. 

This session is free and open to all. 

If you would like to buy one of our decks, EFA Project Space has a limited supply of ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT decks in New York that you can pick up in person. First purchase the decks on our Hilma’s Ghost website here and use the code “EFA.” Then, please contact Judy Giera at judy@efanyc.org to pick up the deck once you have paid on our site. 

Hilma's Ghost's ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT deck holds itself in conversation with the Rider-Waite-Smith, which is not only the most popular deck in worldly distribution today but was illustrated by a womxn, Pamela Colman Smith. More than a century later, Brooklyn-based artists, Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray apply an abstract lens to the cards’ rich symbolism to access their semiotic potential and surface divinatory meanings. The artists worked together for more than 300 hours to construct the 78 original drawings for their tarot deck, an amalgamation of their unique and distinct visual languages. The original drawings are on Fabriano Murillo paper with a combination of gouache, ink, and colored pencils, their size directly proportional to the Tarot card dimensions. Both artists hold extensive knowledge regarding western and non-western abstraction, with Tegeder pulling from Bauhausian and Minimalist traditions, and Ray from spiritual and esoteric forms from South Asia, as well as the patterning and craft traditions of Asian textiles. Within these drawings lies a rich sensibility for color, shape, and compositional elements, expressing hybrid traditions of abstraction that is intrinsically experimental and daring. The project in its entirety was presented by Carrie Secrist Gallery at The Armory Show in September 2021 and was included in this as one of the exhibitions to see in a review for The New York Times by Will Heinrich.

Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder  and Sharmistha Ray  in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by cultivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 served as a reckoning for art history’s blindspots, especially for women artists considered too ‘mystical’ for the conservative art world. 

​Named after af Klint, Hilma’s Ghost believes that western heteropatriarchal societies maintain a false binary between spirituality and science. This bias serves to overlook womxn artists whose explorations of ancient and pre-modern knowledge systems is a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation. Following a year of lockdowns and social distancing, Hilma’s Ghost acts as a restorative project that uplifts these voices and makes them visible. Since its inception, Hilma’s Ghost has run online workshops that have been attended by over 700 people, from all over the world. The Instagram archive also documents the stories of womxn artists. To learn more about Hilma's Ghost, check out our website or follow us on Instagram. We regularly post about our programs and profile living womxn artists working with aspects of the occult and/or spirituality.  

This program is being held in conjunction with Cosmic Geometries, a group exhibition curated by Hilma’s Ghost, at EFA Project Space until February 26, 2022. This program is made possible with the kind support of Carrie Secrist Gallery. To view the curatorial walkthrough and meet some of the artists, link to our first program from January 13, here. View our second program, Going Beyond Basics: Tarot for Artists and Creatives, here. 

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Melissa Brown (she/her) is fascinated by patterns and drawing from sources high and low including lottery tickets, painted fingernails, landscape painting, and ukiyo-e prints. She explores form and perception in her lushly layered prints, paintings, and mixed-media works. Her training as a printmaker, working primarily with woodcuts (which she describes as “the most archaic form of printmaking”), informs her interest in repetition and its meaning. Brown is particularly focused on the repetitive patterns found in natural and urban environments. Skillfully combining abstraction and representation, she produces landscape scenes touched with surrealism, full of floating rocks, undulating waves, radiant skies, and trees covered with bark composed of expressive faces. Solo projects and exhibitions include Big Medium for PrintAustin, Austin, Texas, Essex Flowers, New York, New York, Roberto Paradise, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Kansas Gallery, New York, and Canada, New York. Group exhibitions include Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, The Hole, New York, Musee International Des Arts Modestes, France, Novella Gallery, New York, Mass Gallery, Austin Texas, and Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, among others. https://www.melissabrown.tv

Isa Carillo (she/her, b.1982, Guadalajara) has been defined by a research of hidden and enigmatic aspects of the collective unconscious and a connection to a critical and empirical vision of pseudoscience applied to individuals. Her interest in hidden or invisible phenomena began to develop at the start of her career by combining themes referring to the subconscious present in everyday life. Through the collection of elements such as personal files, photographs and graphic material among others, the artist stores images and information that she later uses as catalysts to develop her projects. In this way, the point of departure becomes the place of union between memory and form thus proposing a bridge towards the invisible. She has exhibited individually and collectively in institutions such as Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Museo Taller Clemente Orozco, Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano, Centro Cultural de Arte Moderno in Guadalajara, Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, Mexico City and Museo de Pintores in Oaxaca, Mexico. http://isacarrillo.com/

Maria Molteni (They/She, b.1983, Nashville) is a queer transdisciplinary artist, educator, mystic and Siren. They are the grandchild of Tennessee square dancers, stunt motorcyclists, quilters, beekeepers and opera singers of various European backgrounds. Their practice has grown from formal studies in Painting, Printmaking and Dance to incorporate research, social engagement and play-based collaboration with the living and dead. Molteni pictures themself as an Atlantian Phys Ed coach for visionary communities like Shakers, Bauhaus or Black Mountain College. Molteni is an active member of the Golden Dome school as well as Lake Pleasant, the oldest Spiritualist community in the US (contemporary of Lily Dale). Check out Maria’s work at @strega_maria / www.mariamolteni.com or travel to the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA to see Unseen Hours: Space Clearing for Spirit Work, on view through March 13, 2021.

Laurel Sparks (she/her) uses tactile geometry to create alchemical paintings that propose an encoded world view, paying tribute to occult histories of abstraction, counter-culture legacies and ancient mystery traditions. Sigil magic systems are applied to encrypt esoteric glyphs, magic squares, or text, while woven patterns produce dazzle camouflage. As secrets hiding in plain sight, the compositions are not meant to be decoded, but experienced as talismanic resonances. Exhibitions include Rubedo at Kate Werble Gallery (New York City), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and Berman Museum at Ursinus College; Fire Island artist-in-residence (2013) and fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop at Elizabeth Foundation (New York City, 2014). https://laurelsparks.com.

VISITOR INFO

View Cosmic Geometries Wed–Sat 12 pm-6 pm, no appointment necessary, mask and proof of full vaccination required for entry. For more information and accessibility notes please visit: https://www.projectspace-efanyc.org/about.

EFA Project Space, launched in September 2008 as a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary arts venue founded on the belief that art is directly connected to the individuals who produce it, the communities that arise because of it, and to everyday life; and that by providing an arena for exploring these connections, we empower artists to forge new partnerships and encourage the expansion of ideas.

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts is a 501(c)(3) public charity, dedicated to providing artists across all disciplines with space, tools and a cooperative forum for the development of individual practice. We are a catalyst for cultural growth, stimulating new interactions between artists, creative communities, and the public.

Join EFA Project Space Program Director Dylan Gauthier and guests for a webinar around various ways that residency programs can nurture and support the “whole artist” by addressing and broadening our approach to access, equity, inclusion, diversity, sustainability and care, inside and outside of the studio.

REGISTER for the ZOOM WEBINAR HERE

Structures of Support for the Whole Artist, 5:00pm
Eve Biddle, Jamie Blosser and Howardena Pindell, moderated by Dylan Gauthier
How can residencies support intersectional artists’ identities, needs, and expectations, beyond their professional practices? From parent artists to artists of color to disabled artists and more, how can residencies be more accessible to the “whole artist”? This panel will be a conversation between artists and residencies.

This panel is presented as part of the 2021 Rethinking Residencies Symposium co-hosted by Rethinking Residencies and the Vera List Center for Art & Politics.

Please Register Via Zoom: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMsdO-rpj4vHtwXz8AS05AG8AAuIeWBDn12

EFA Project Space's SHIFT Residency for Arts Workers hosts a virtual town hall and round table with artist-arts workers organizing for institutional change, equity, and justice within and outside of NYC cultural institutions. The evening will feature short presentations by representatives of the Culture Workers Education Center (CWEC), Arts Workers for Black Lives (AW4BL), Museum Workers Happy Hour, and former and current museum educators. The presentations will be followed by breakout working sessions in which all attendees are invited to join. Accessibility: ASL interpreting provided, contact for specific needs - projectspace@efanyc.org.

Speakers (Affiliations)

Natasha Bunten (Culture Workers Education Center)
Kerry Downey (Artist and Museum Educator, SHIFT Resident)
Megan Elevado (Arts Educator, Marabou at the Museum, NYC Museum Workers Happy Hour)
Patrick Jaojoco (FABnyc, Arts Workers for Black Lives)
Natalia Viera Salgado (Abrons Arts Center, Arts Workers for Black Lives)
Antonio Serna (Artist, Documents of Resistance/People’s Cultural Plan and SHIFT Resident)

Context

Across the city, and around the world, the COVID crisis and shutdown has severely impacted arts and culture workers, with many museum staff still furloughed, cuts to education departments and public programs ongoing (and worse predicted in coming fiscal years), and many museums grappling at the same time with institutional racism and unequitable labor practices. This upheaval in the arts sector, set against the background of wider demands for social and racial justice, also presents opportunities for institutional change and a reckoning with the ways in which our arts institutions have historically functioned, the often opaque frameworks and hierarchies through which ostensibly public institutions are run, and their role in the communities they serve. 

Aiming to create connections between a number of groups engaging in organizing in the cultural sector, the evening will include short presentations by arts worker organizers followed by breakout working group sessions in which all attendees are invited to join. Arts Workers, employed or unemployed, furloughed and precarious workers, those in transition between fields, artists, and allies are invited to attend and contribute to this coalition building-focused event. Topics to be discussed include institutional approaches to diversity and anti-racism, board structures, job security and salary transparency, funding and divestment, abolition and decolonization, and responsibility to broader communities both within and outside the art world.

Presented as part of EFA Open Studios 2020.

Participant Bios

Natasha Bunten is the Director of Culture Workers Education Center, and a nonprofit consultant focusing on strategic planning, organizational development, and labor. Previously, she served as Deputy Director then Interim Executive Director of Artis, and oversaw the Young Collectors Council at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Natasha has produced public programs, performances, and exhibitions in partnership with Third Streaming and Performa, the Maryland Institute College of Art, New Museum, and The Walters Art Gallery. For more than a decade, she has lectured on professional development for workers and with students, and collaborated on educational projects investigating cultural labor in the U.S. economic system. 

Kerry Downey is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist and teacher. From 2007-2019 they worked as an educator at The Museum of Modern, running over fifteen Community and Access Partnerships and programs across New York City. Downey left MoMA prior to COVID firings to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design. They have also taught at Parsons/The New School of Design, Hunter College, and City College of New York. Downey’s art (video, printmaking, painting, drawing, writing, and performance) has been shown nationally and internationally.  As a teacher and artist, their work explores relationality through the many ways we inhabit our bodies and access forms of power. 

Megan Elevado is a Filipinx-Irish-American writer, artist, and historian based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work interprets design, architecture, and art through a sociological lens exploring how art, objects, and the built environment affect personal and group identities, reflect the beliefs and traditions of cultures, serve as social conditioning tools, and have the power to incite societal change. Megan’s ongoing project Marabou at the Museum documents her analysis of Western museums as embodiments of colonial legacies through their administrative structures, architecture, and fundraising, collecting, and curatorial practices. Megan’s analysis is informed by her experiences working at cultural institutions including the American Museum of Natural History, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Tenement Museum. She currently teaches material culture and museum studies at Parsons The New School for Design. Megan is co-organizer of NYC Museum Workers Happy Hour, providing museum workers with a forum for discussion, organizing, and collective action.

Patrick Jaojoco is a Filipino American curator, researcher, writer, and organizer currently working as Director of Programs at FABnyc. He works in and researches urban historiography, the spatial & cultural implications of decolonization, and decolonial theory and practice. In his curatorial practice, he works to gather people together in an effort to collectively build political historical knowledge. He is a member of NEW INC at the New Museum (2019–2021), where he works on a project called the Decolonial Mapping Toolkit; and is a current AICA Art Writing Workshop mentee. He has worked in several New York City arts institutions over the last decade, including Art in General, Creative Time, and Storefront for Art and Architecture, and has organized numerous independent exhibitions and public programs throughout New York. He was a 2015-2017 Curatorial Fellow at SVA’s MA Curatorial Practice program, and received his BA in English Literature and Environmental Studies from New York University. 

Natalia Viera Salgado is a Puerto Rican independent curator and curatorial consultant based in New York City and Puerto Rico. She is also the co-founder of :Pública Espacio Cultural, an independent art space in Alto del Cabro, Santurce Puerto Rico. Her art historical research focuses on contemporary art in relation to decolonial practices, architecture, social and environmental justice, and new media with a keen interest in hybrid and interdisciplinary projects. She has collaborated with División del Diseño(Puerto Rico), worked at El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY), Art in General (Brooklyn, New York), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, New York) and The Nathan Cummings Foundation (New York). Viera is a founding member of Colectivo se habla español, a collective working on artistic and social projects that expand the limits of language while addressing migration, identity, human rights, and memory. She is currently the curatorial resident at the Abrons Arts Center. 

Antonio Serna is a Mexican-American artist, activist, and independent researcher, originally from Texas and currently living in New York. His current project Documents of Resistance focuses on the art and activism of artists of color. Antonio Serna has organized over a dozen autonomous art projects, workshops, and campaigns. Notable collaborative self-organized projects include The People’s Cultural Plan launch at Artists Space 2017; Strength in Numbers/Solidarity Mixer for Equity, Cue Art Foundation and Common Field in 2017; Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016, Documents of Resistance: Collective Timelines at Interference Archive in 2015,  Arts & Labor: Radical Think Tank at Sunview in 2015, Arts & Labor: Alternative Schools of Art at CAA 2015, The artCommons at Queens Museum International 2013, and What Do We Do Now? Arts & Labor Alternative Fair at Eyebeam in 2013. Antonio is currently co-host of Museum Workers Happy Hour, a cultural worker support group that advocates for change from a workers perspective within New York museums and cultural institutions. He has taught art and design at Brooklyn College CUNY and Parsons School of Design. Antonio holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, and a BFA from Parsons School of Art. Links: www.antonioserna.com | www.Linktr.ee/NYCmuseumworkersHH

About SHIFT

EFA Project Space's SHIFT Residency provides peer support, mentoring, and studio space for artists who work in arts organizations (as curators, educators, administrators, etc) to boost their personal creative practices. SHIFT recognizes the work of arts workers for whom their livelihood isn’t just a day job, but a passion and responsibility, demanding high amounts of creativity, stamina, and sacrifice. The SHIFT Residency honors these artists’ commitment to the arts community with a supportive environment to revitalize their creative practices. Each year, residents are selected through a competitive nomination process based on the excellence of their work, their strong potential for artistic growth, their need to "shift" (however they might define this), and the outstanding contributions they have made to New York's cultural institutions. Since its inception in 2010, SHIFT has hosted over sixty artists working in a range of media, from sound and installation to painting, performance, and social practice. In addition to its role as a support network, SHIFT promotes advocacy for arts workers and seeks to increase equity and representation within the field.

In a time of global pandemic and social distancing, Join The Immigrant Artist Biennial and EFA Project Space invite you to take part in a roundtable discussion on Wednesday, April 22nd  from 7-9 pm (EST) via Zoom. The format of the roundtable will include introductory remarks by participating artists in the Biennial sharing their experiences with anti-Asian racism, xenophobia, and immigrant-bashing, to be followed by an open format discussion in which all are invited to share their experiences, fears, and hopes. Breakout rooms will be enabled for more intimate conversations in small groups. The evening will be co-moderated by The Immigrant Artist Biennial Founding Director and Curator, Katya Grokhovsky and by artist and EFA Operations Coordinator HC Huynh.

In lieu of a physical presentation of The Immigrant Artist Biennial's central exhibition "Here, Together!" at EFA Project Space, we have invited the curator and participating artists to present a series of Zoom-based roundtable discussions with the public. In response to an extreme anti-immigrant sentiment, coupled with a global rhetoric of exclusion, discrimination, and the closing of borders, The Immigrant Artist Biennial calls for urgent unity, visibility, and criticality, by facilitating a platform for cultural exchange. At each roundtable event, participating artists will share thoughts and work which touch on issues of identity, the meaning of home and place, and the doubly precarious position of living as immigrant cultural workers within a pandemic that transcends borders.

Background

The global coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis on multiple fronts, challenging our public health and economic systems, while casting a spotlight on massive social inequalities which call into question the underlying principles of an open society. Notably, over the past few weeks, the increase of tragic and violent acts of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant racism carried out in near-empty streets and given voice in online spaces has shocked many. Set against the toxic backdrop of a recent and prolonged rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, and an undercurrent of anti-Asian racism that has always permeated American society, perhaps this development should not surprise us. Yet, given the scale of the current tragedy, and the failure of our government to take significant and important early action to prevent an outbreak here in the US (an outbreak which at the time of this writing has affected over 600,000 and killed over 25,000 – of which 10,000 are in New York) it is also all too obvious that xenophobia, anti-Asian racism, and immigrant-bashing are not merely background noise, but are part of a coordinated campaign to redirect blame and distract from criticism of those in power on their handling of the crisis, while creating divisions in an already aggrieved and reeling populace.

Press: Dessane Lopez Cassell previewed this event for Hyperallergic.

Suggested Reading/Viewing

Adrian De Leon, The long history of racism against Asian Americans in the U.S. (PBS)

Cathy Park Hong, The Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020 (NYT Magazine)

Emily Liu, Covid-19 has inflamed racism against Asian-Americans. Here's how to fight back (CNN)

We Are Not Covid (Spreadsheet)

[Global] List of incidents of xenophobia and racism related to the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic (Wikipedia)

Image:

Cole Lu, Thoroughbred (No Caster of Weather Foretold), Bronze, 2019.