Word Acts
Words are acts, in action they give us new breaths to survive to, Words are lubrication to making sense of this senseless world
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
What will it take for us to fly free?
Fall 2023 Resident, open for viewing anytime on the BES website
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is the Fall 2023 Current Resident, an innovative public art project that delivers Black art right to people’s doorsteps. In the second week of November, their project reached over 24,000 people in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle, WA.
What will it take for us to fly free? takes the shape of an insert in the weekly “shared mailed package,” the bundle of coupons and ads that Seattleites receive every week.
Branfman-Verissimo explains that the project is “Rooted in two key questions: ‘What time is it on the clock of the world?’ which is part of Grace Lee Boggs’ book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, and a question that I have been asking within recent body of work, ‘“What will it take for us to fly free?’ which provides past-present-future language and spaces of connectivity for Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, non-binary, folks of color.”
These two questions are in dialogue with seven answers by seven Black writers, artists and activists, who expand and pull us into a weaving of ways that we imagine and center Black futures. (Documented in the work-in-progress photos above. Reference texts can be found below.) Branfman-Verissimo carefully selected these seven answers from their library and archive; lines from treasured books, poems, paper taped to their studio wall, studied texts and the words that they keep close to their heart.
Asking us to be question-askers and answerers to the many ways we are crafting Black lead past-present-future making. Inviting in a web of dialogue with all our people, with our ancestors, our stacks of books, our friends and neighbors and mentors. Knowing that we must hold space for the large web of curiosity, grief, collective work, joy, living, survival and flight!
Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community, and Pedagogy
October 2- December 15, 2023, Gallery open: Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA
Boston Art Review, wrote a great review of the show and my work in it
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.
On view from July 7, 2023- January 7, 2024, Thursday-Sunday, 11am-5pm
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
The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artists’ Book
October 12, 2023 - February 9, 2024, Gallery open: Tuesday-Friday, 12-5pm
Kala Art Institute Gallery, 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.
FREE! No need to credit me (but it always brings me joy to see pictures of them out and about- so send them over if you think of it).
Please print and use these pieces for marching with, hanging up in windows, posting to your office door and car windows <3
For sale in collaboration with Narrow Bridge Candles, $4-$180 (sliding scale), all funds go towards Palestinian-lead Organizations (Adalah Justice Project and Palestinian Youth Movement) in the funding and support of on-going liberation and resistance work.
Thank you to all who purchased this work!! I have a handful of copies left and would love to get them out into your hands and homes and lives! First come first serve!!
These two prints are layered with work made while I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico this spring and Upstate New York this Summer. Working through ideas around centering trans, queer, non-binary flight, survival and soaring. Overlapped with patterns and forms of connectivity, webs, nets, quilts, flags. Writing, painting, workshopping, gathering, walking, learning from the sky, making paper, leaning into new rituals and rhythms that nourish myself, community and practice. Six months of work layered on top of each other. I am honored to have returned to New Mexico this past week to make these new risograph prints that I am now sharing with you!!
“we fly for we”, three color risograph print, 11” x 17”, 2023
$100 each + $7 shipping
“(flight) sssschool”, two color risograph print, 11” x 17”, 2023
$75 each + $7 shipping
To purchase, email me at: lukazabv@gmail.com to claim a print or as many as you like and let me know your mailing address and your venmo or paypal account name. This will be on a first come first serve basis. And only ship in the United States.
Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, Edited by Morgan Bassichis, Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky, published by Wendy’s Subway, $18
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
With lost-breaths, with heart broken, with time that makes no sense, with grief so huge, with beloveds by my side, with sadness so full, with winter is here, with flight, with wings still flapping, with snow flutters, with eyes that are watching genocide through our phones, with a list of the dead that is too long, with half of them being children, with the privilege of returning home, with collective anger, with rage that is a blessing, with letters & calls, with new friends, with affinity groups, with new roles, with movement school, with sun on my face, with horror on your face, with freeze, with screams…in total darkness, with MASS GENOCIDE, with all of us all over this world saying FREE FREE FREE PALESTINE
I come here to form new language and speak
We have taught me to communicate through words, drawings, printed, printed, xeroxed, handed out, printed, broken, fixing and becoming words
And so somehow we continue… we must… with screams that become wheat-pasted posters that become songs that become new words that free them all that become new worlds that give Palestinians the keys to return home
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