all letterforms hold views that are loving
The first part of this newsletter is a BULLETIN BOARD with upcoming and current shows, projects, book releases and events, that I hope you will come to and share with your communities.
And the second part is ROOTS, WEBS, NETS, and BRANCHES. A written offering, sharing of work, expansion & footnotes of what's going on in my studio, practice and brain.
This part is paid and I invite you to support my work for $5 a month or $50 a year.
ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES BULLETIN BOARDS is my practice, is labor, is my work.
Part 1. BULLETIN BOARD
Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community, and Pedagogy
October 2- December 15, 2023
Opening reception: this Thursday, October 5, 5:30pm
I will be there and would love to celebrate with you!!
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, One College Street
Worcester, Massachusetts 01610, Exit 15 (College Sq./Southbridge St.) off I-290
Corita Kent (1918-1986) also known as Sister Mary Corita, was a pop artist, educator and social justice advocate. The exhibition, Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community and Pedagogy, demonstrates the importance and timeliness of Corita Kent’s art and teaching practice to this generation of artists. Featuring Kent’s work and the work of contemporary artists Mary Banas and Breanne Trammell, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Roz Crews, Jen Delos Reyes, Christine Sun Kim, Jorge Lucero, Mary Lum, Maria del Carmen Montoya, Aaron Rose and Lee Walton, the exhibition presents a range of artistic approaches to teaching, close looking, social justice and collaboration.
Last week for Proximities
August 26- October 7, 2023
Open on Saturdays, 1-4pm and by appointment
4328 B Airport Rd., Santa Fe, NM
Best Western is pleased to announce Proximities, a five-person exhibition of work that explores the interconnected web of nearness and occurrences. Proximites includes the work of Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Amanda Curreri, Nick Larsen, Hilary Nelson, and J Rivera Pansa. The works in this exhibition are comprised of hand made paper, digital and traditional weaving techniques, stained glass, manipulated photographic collage, and regenerative sculpture. The artists share a speculative sense of discovery in reshaping how things could be. There is an intentionality that threads each artist’s practice. Along this thread are themes of anarchy, activism, romance and ecology that open into multitudes.
Please contact Shane Tolbert & James Sterling Pitt by email at office@westernbest.org with questions or to schedule an appointment.
The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artists’ Book
October 12, 2023 - February 9, 2024
Opening: Thursday, October 14, 6-8pm
Panel conversation with curator Anthea Black and Nadine Bariteau
Saturday, October 15, 4-6pm pst, 7- 9pm est
This will be a virtual event**more info on this soon!
Kala Art Institute Gallery
2990 San Pablo Ave, Berkeley, CA
The artists’ book is a perfect form to experience the pleasures and politics of the handmade. Saturated ink spreading across a page. Layer upon layer. Looking that quickly opens up a range of senses. The Embodied Press features artist’s books and publications by queer and transgender artists, from graphic novels and collage-works to bold experiments with letterpress, screenprinting, video, performance, and risograph. Works from the 1970s to today overlap several successive chapters of LGBTQ+ and queer-feminist political action to expand our readings of contemporary queer culture. Artists in The Embodied Press make important visual and material choices in their use of printing techniques, sequencing, and manipulation or absence of text; they revel in visual abstraction as an antidote to the daily pressure of navigating our identities. What happens when a book “frustrates legibility” or becomes difficult to read? It must be felt. Held. Absorbed and activated. Each work poses questions about difference, intersectionality and power to show that sexual, gender and racial difference cannot be easily understood or legitimized through public visibility alone. These ideas find great resonance in the artists’ book field as it radically expands the ways books can be produced, read, and understood as a form of culture. Curated by Anthea Black.
Cleveland Institute of the Art’s Lunch on Fridays Series
Friday, October 14, 12:15-1:30pm
Free and open to the public!
Cleveland Institute of Art, Peter B. Lewis Theater
11610 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH
MOSS Artist Workshop, in conjunction with Don’t Mind If I Do
Saturday, October 15, 2-4pm
MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland, OH
On view from July 7, 2023- January 7, 2024
Lewis Gallery, MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland, OH
Featuring work by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Pelenakeke Brown, Sky Cubacub, Emilia Louise Gossiaux, Felicia Griffin, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, Jeff Kasper and Finnegan Shannon.
Finnegan Shannon is a creator of loopholes. Their work is mischievous, methodically chipping away at traditional museum practices. By framing institutional change as artwork, the pace of possibility quickens. With Shannon at the helm, Don’t mind if I do is an experiment in more deeply collaborative exhibition-making, demonstrating how even temporary changes in power structures create pathways of access for visitors, artists, and staff.
This project is the realization of my access fantasy !!
I’m disabled and I need to sit and I love to sit. I’ve been dreaming about an exhibition where instead of having to move from artwork to artwork, I could sit somewhere comfortable and have the artwork come to me. So voilà! A conveyor belt of artworks surrounded by a variety of seating options.
When planning this project, a big question was: what artwork should the conveyor carry? The artists, writers, and thinkers featured nourish my life and practice, and I can’t resist a chance to share their work. Each of the objects presented asks for varied ways of interacting and opens up possibilities for how and what an artwork can convey.
-Finnegan Shannon
Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, got some press & an article by one of the co-editors Jay Saper, in Teen Vogue (who knew)!!!
And buy the beautiful book, published by Wendy’s Subway
Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 38 writers, artists, scholars, and activists to offer accessible reflections on 36 questions to help young Jews—and anyone else who picks up this book—feel grounded in the Jewish radical tradition, unlearn Zionism, and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians, offering the B’nai Mitzvah as an opportunity for political awakening open to all. Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educator Jay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by seminal scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis, and illustrations by the artist Nicole Eisenman, this essential volume offers an accessible and challenging set of personal and collective responses to critical questions for our time.
Questions included range from “What even is a Bat Mitzvah?” and “I’m queer/nonbinary/secular/old/not even Jewish—are Bat Mitzvahs for me?” to “Why are there Israeli and American flags in my synagogue?” and “Why do people plant trees in Israel as a Bat Mitzvah gift?” and “What does the olive tree symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What does the watermelon symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?” and “How do I talk to my family about this stuff?”
Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah is published with support from the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, and the ICA at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and coincides with Bassichis's traveling exhibition More Little Ditties in summer and fall 2023.
Part 2. ROOTS, WEBS, NETS, and BRANCHES
I recently painted large letter forms on three walls for a show that opens this week. Letters the size of my arms open wide. It’s been a minute since I worked in this way, with letters as the core medium. But it was sweet to invite them back into the forming of these three new site specific pieces. In new ways, I let the shapes that these letter forms create, become the windows to other worlds.
Worlds for questioning what a devotion to loving could look like.
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