Tue, Feb. 16, 2021 ⁄ 5:00–6:30pm

Mt. Analogue Discussions #1 w/ Julia Bryan-Wilson

JBW ID

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.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sunday’s Anarchy is Female workshop felt like exactly where we needed to be. A large group of people arrive at the shop ready to get to work; to plan and organize together, to imagine ways of being, acting, resisting, and re-imagining the world outside of, and in resplendent antagonism towards, the specter of patriarchy.

Many flags were hand-drawn and matchbooks stamped. Variations on the Anarchy is Female logo were printed. 200 were produced and handed out, many of these being delivered to Washington D.C. for the inauguration, and others staying here for various actions.

As the day ran on Crystal and Sam both thought the gathering shouldn’t simply occur just once. After the Inauguration we’ll re-group and plan on future, possibly monthly, Anarchy is Female gatherings. Stay tuned.

 

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Risa Puleo interviewed Sam for Hyperallergic in relation to the comic action, Sgt. Kroll Goes to the Office, as well as the differences between the Chicago and Portland schools of so-called Social Practice, and its role in the age of Trumpiness.

Give it a read.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

“This is not to say that I deny membership in certain groups or communities. Not at all. But the ‘We’re here, too!’ agenda says nearly nothing to me about the real problems and conflicts in the world. The way those then-new orgs (especially in liberal Minnesota) attracted corporate ‘good works’-type funding–and pretty quickly professionalized their staffs–for me was a red flag. It was a good moment for Asian Americans looking for professional opportunities in the arts, but not for Asian American cultural workers whose political agendas overflowed the confines of identity assertion.” an excerpt from Anthony Romero and Dan S. Wang’s forthcoming conversation in print, The Social Practice That is Race

 

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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· Resident Weirdo· ∞