In Death’s Futurity, Sampada Aranke examines the importance of representations of death to Black liberation. Analyzing posters, photographs, journalism, and films that focus on the murders of Black Panther Party members Lil’ Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson, Aranke constructs a visual history of the 1960s and 1970s Black Power era.

Photographs of Hutton that appeared on flyers and posters called attention to the condition of his death, while the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton enabled the consideration of Hampton’s afterlife through visual meditations on his murder. Printmaking and political posters surrounding Jackson’s murder marked the transition from Black Power to the prison abolition movement in ways that highlighted the relationship between surveillance, policing, incarceration, and anti-Black violence. By foregrounding the photographed, collaged, filmed, and drawn Black body, Aranke demonstrates that corporeality and corpses are crucial to the efforts to shape visions of a Black future free from white supremacy.

Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and Black cultural and aesthetic theory.

Death's Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power is co-hosted by the Wattis Institute with the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies and is organized by Jacqueline Francis and Diego Villalobos.

Land to Light On, is a collaborative public programming series between the Wattis Institute and CCA's academic departments focusing on racial capitalism, abolition, and decolonization.

A brand new spoken-word monologue & “live-action juke-box” by Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Balitronica

FREE! Space is limited. Register here.

La Pocha Nostra and the artists are thrilled to present excerpts from their most recent performance manuscripts and bank of ritual actions. Utilizing a casino roulette and traditional tarot deck, Balitronica utilizes various forms of oracular magic to select spoken word texts and props for Gómez-Peña live performance. The fate of the script and the performance are determined by methods of divination and chance.

In this new project, the artists are unplugged, thinking out loud and articulating the challenges and possibilities of reinvention in the midst of multiple pandemics. The performance includes new texts written during the past two years combined with “classics” from Gómez-Peña’s own living archives.

Artist Statement by Gómez-Peña:

“My new performance represents the fruit of my life’s work in all its iterations: live performance, lecturing, archiving, literary work, mentoring, community activism, all coming together to address the dangers of the times we live in with its disregard for human life and insidious undermining of democracy.

At this time in my life I am thinking as much about legacy as I am trying to continually produce socially conscious experimental artwork that is simultaneously plugged into the national debates. I have learned from decades of touring performance material to locations beyond the Border that a call to action - in the form of a work of art - has the power to elicit compassion and inculcate a desire for social justice.

For me performance art is a form of radical democracy and citizenship which depends on the presence of the audience/community to succeed. I view my approach to creating this hybrid piece as "performing the archives" for multiple contexts: The art world, academia, community and the media. I am particularly interested in connecting with a new generation of audience members who may not have been exposed to the history of my generation, performance art and the Chicano movement.” - Guillermo Gómez-Peña

This event is free and open to the public. Organized by CCA's Critical Ethnic Studies Program. Co-sponsored by the Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program, Individualized Studies Program, Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging, and Humanities & Sciences Division.

In the spring semester of the thesis year, students formally present their research to the public. The day-long Visual & Critical Studies Symposium groups graduating students into thematic panels moderated by prominent scholars representing relevant fields. The event is a rite of passage for the students and a proud moment for those who ushered them to this professional threshold.

The 2023 VCS Spring Symposium will take place on Saturday, April 22, at 12:00 noon, in Blattner Hall, 75 Arkansas St, San Francisco, CA 94107. Reception to follow. To register for the event, and for more information, please click here.

This year there are three VCS students presenting:

Liz G, Envisioning an Enchanted World: On Christi Belcourt’s The Wisdom of the Universe

Alexander Antai Hwang, Transgressive Motion: Glitched Being in Na Mira’s Night Vision(Red as never been)

Wenmimareba Klobah Collins, Most Campy Objects Are Urban: Transgression in Villano Antillano’s “Muñeca”

Joining the VCS Class of 2023 will be two graduate students from San Jose State University:

Vickie Simms, Willie Cole: Found Objects - Fine Art

Matthew Skurdahl, Retelling History: The Historical Mural at Chicano Park

The five speakers will be grouped into two thematic panels. The VCS Spring Symposium is an opportunity for students to hone their public speaking and presentation skills while demonstrating their ability to interpret visual information and promote critical revisioning. Each presentation is approximately 12 minutes long, with each panel followed by a Q+A and capped by the presentation of the 2022 VCS Alumni Award to Dr. Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa (Class of 2012). 

For more information about the day's events, including a pdf of the program, and to register for the event, please click here.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

To register in advance for this webinar, click here.

Featuring Elizabeth Hamilton, Jontyle Theresa Robinson, and Shantay Robinson, and moderated by Jacqueline Francis, this panel is the first program of "Contested Bodies: Black Women in Art and Culture," a convening series that is supported by a Terra Foundation for American Art grant and the participating institutions--California College of the Arts, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Tulane University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas-Austin.

To register in advance for this webinar, click here.

Elizabeth Hamilton, PhD, is an assistant professor at Fort Valley State University and art historian whose research focuses on visual culture of the African diaspora, feminism, and Afrofuturism. Her first book is Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art (Routledge), which is the winner of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. Dr. Hamilton has published research in Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts, the International Review of African American Art, Harper's Bazaar, Smithsonian Voices, and CAA Reviews. She received the National Women’s Study Association: Women of Color Caucus Essay Award for “Abandoning the Negress and Recovering Laure in Manet’s Olympia.” She curated an exhibition, A Different Mirror: (re)Imagining Black Womanhood at the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia. Dr. Hamilton participated in the Art Writing Workshop, which is a partnership between the International Art Critics Association/USA Section (AICA/USA) and The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She completed her master’s and doctorate at the University of Florida’s School of Art and Art History, where she was a McKnight Doctoral Fellow. Before that, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wyoming.

Jontyle Theresa Robinson is a curator and art historian. At present, she is a United Negro College Fund Mellon Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Organizer of “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists,” an exhibition that toured the United States in 1996, Professor Robinson is conducting research to expand the original project in celebration of its thirtieth anniversary. “Revelations from Bearing Witness, 2026” will consider women artists from Africa, North and South American and the Caribbean. Among Professor Robinson’s important exhibitions are "Three Masters: Archibald Motley, Eldzier Cortor, and Hughie Lee Smith” (Kenkeleba Gallery, 1998) and "The Art of Archibald John Motley, Jr." (Chicago Historical Society, 1991). The latter exhibition laid the foundation for  the Whitney Museum of American Art’s "Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist" (2015). In 2016, Robinson conceptualized the Alliance of Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) Museums & Galleries, a coalition of fourteen art and culture institutions dedicated to the diversification of the museum and art world through the preparation and training of outstanding students and recent alumni from HBCU museum studies, art conservation, archives, and art and art history programs. The Alliance also  supports the preservation, sustenance, and operations of our member museums and galleries and their collections and staff. Professor Robinson is the inaugural director of the Alliance.

Shantay Robinson is a doctoral candidate in the Writing and Rhetoric program at George Mason University. She received a Master of Fine Art in Writing from Savannah College of Art and Design. She is a lecturer of first-year writing at Howard University. Her interests include visual rhetoric and Black Art. Shantay is a freelance art writer at Smithsonian Magazine, ARTNews, and Washington City Paper. She has moderated and sat on panels at Art and Agency: Exploring the African American Quilting Tradition and Black Talk, Back Talk Capacities of Criticism at Prizm Art Fair. She also served as a visual arts judge at Shreveport Regional Council’s Critical Mass 8 Art Competition. She presented papers about art and education at several conferences and has been published in Teaching Artist Journal and International Review of African American Art.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies, Fine Arts, and Writing, with Undergraduate Writing & Literature and Critical Ethnic Studies

Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

In my forthcoming The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I suggest that the feminist killjoy is a queer figure with a queer history. When you reclaim the term feminist killjoy you end up in conversation with other people who, like you, find a potential or promise in that term, how its negativity can be redirected. In this lecture, I explore the queerness of the project of killing joy as a project of redirecting negativity. I develop some of my arguments about “the unhappy queer” from The Promise of Happiness (2010) as well as “queer use” from What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019). By giving the feminist killjoy a queer history, I also explain how and why killing joy is a world making project. 

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, her first trade publication, and is currently writing a follow up text, The Complainer's Handbook. She has begun a new research project on common sense. Her previous books include Complaint! (2021),What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000) and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998).
Instagram: @saranoahmed | Twitter: @SaraNAhmed

After Dr. Ahmed's lecture, she will join in conversation with Zahra Noorbakhsh, the San Francisco Bay Area comedian, writer, actor and co-host of the #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast.
Instagram: @zahracomedy

This program is part of the Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts series (a partnership between CCA and the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco).

ENTRY DETAILS:

Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies, Fine Arts, and Writing, with Undergraduate Writing & Literature and Critical Ethnic Studies

Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, Yau attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. His first book of poetry, Crossing Canal Street, was published in 1976. Since then, he has won acclaim for his poetry’s attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface. In poems that frequently pun, trope, and play with the English language, Yau offers complicated, sometimes competing versions of the legacy of his dual heritages—as Chinese, American, poet, and artist. A contributor for Contemporary Poets wrote: “Yau’s poems [are] often as much a product of his visual sense of the world, as his awareness of his double heritage from both Oriental and Occidental cultures.” Yau’s many collections of poetry include Corpse and Mirror (1983), selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series, Edificio Sayonara (1992), Forbidden Entries (1996), Borrowed Love Poems (2002), Ing Grish (2005), Paradiso Diaspora (2006), Exhibits (2010), and Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012). Yau’s work frequently explores, and exploits, the boundaries between poetry and prose, and his collections of stories and prose poetry include Hawaiian Cowboys (1994), My Symptoms (1998), and Forbidden Entries (1996).

A noted art critic and curator, Yau has also published many works of art criticism and artists’ books. Reviewing Yau’s The United States of Jasper Johns (1996) a Publishers Weekly writer commented: “If you already have a weighty, profusely illustrated book on artist Jasper Johns but are still a little bemused, this is the book to buy.” Yau covers the career of the controversial neo-Dadaist painter, from his 1955 Flag to the 1993 After Holbein, deriving much of his text from interviews conducted with the reclusive Johns over a period of fifteen years. “In graceful, accessible prose,” the Publishers Weekly reviewer noted, “Yau deciphers the many art-historical sources within Johns’s art …[and] is capable of crafting the single phrase, such as ‘visual echo,’ that describes the activity within Johns’s work.” In addition to Johns, who he also wrote about in A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2008), Yau has written on artists such as Andy Warhol, Joe Coleman, James Castle, and Kay Walkingstick. He has also collaborated with artists Archie Rand, Thomas Nozkowski, and Leiko Ikemura in poetry and art books like Hundred More Jokes from the Book of the Dead (2001), Ing Grish (2005), and Andalusia (2006). Calling Yau a “genius,” Robert Creeley described Ing Grish as a “brilliant train of wildly divergent thought.”

Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been the Arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail. He teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.

ENTRY DETAILS:

Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

ZOOM: Click here to join the virtual event

Between 1988 to 1992, Benjamin Patterson lived between two nations–the United States and Germany–in anticipation of developing his international, globetrotting art career. In addition, these years demarcate Patterson’s gradual re-commitment to performance art and expressions of Fluxus at the turn of the century. His peripatetic, bi-continental lifestyle was as much a direct function of asserting hypervisibility in response to historical erasure as it was a refusal of the precarity facing most artists stateside. Patterson’s pursuit of international audiences and communities actively engenders multinational and spatiosocial relationships that require observers and scholars to deconstruct implicit and explicit nationalist biases. This talk will consider three cases in which the artist’s movement calls for a language and interpretive framework beyond the rhetoric of escape. I highlight how Patterson’s claim to multiple centers connects to an ideological act of self-possession. By emphasizing the usability of transnational scholarship to recover his history, I will also explore the necessity for addressing scholarly positionality to place and its impact on his work, identity, and the site specificity of archives.

julia elizabeth neal (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art of the United States at the University of Michigan. She concentrates on conceptual, sonic, and performance-based practices by artists of African descent. In her research, neal attends to critical intersections between the visual, the politics of identity and (trans)nationalism since the postwar era. Her scholarship considers the centrality of the nation state to art and politics, as well as sound art, and gaming as alternative platforms for abstract thought and perception. She incorporates archival study, critical historiography, deconstruction, and critical race theory to investigate problematics of power and representation.

neal’s book project extends from her dissertation on the intermedia art praxis of Benjamin Patterson, which historicizes his commitment to deconstructing sociocultural perceptions and value systems as he sought alternative strategies for artistic and social criticality. Her research on the artist is supported by the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Getty Research Institute, the Terra Foundation for American Art and Spelman College. In collaboration with the Estate of Benjamin Patterson, neal published Performance Works within the State of Benjamin Patterson: A Catalogue Raisonné Volume I in 2021. Her writings on Black artists can be found in journals and exhibition catalogues, including Texte zur Kunst, all-over Magazin für Kunst und Äesthetik, Telfair Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and caa-reviews. In 2023, neal is contributing an article on Benjamin Patterson to Harald Kisiedu’s and George Lewis’ forthcoming anthology, Afrodiasporic Contemporary Composers: An Untold History, with Wolke Verlag.

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ZOOM: Click here to join the virtual event

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107

This talk will propose Black Melancholia as a critical art-historical and curatorial practice which engages with methodological as well as ethical questions when we encounter gaps in the archive and are confronted with the non-linear aspects of anti-blackness in Black artists lives.

Nana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, California. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. She is the author of Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art (2021), editor of Reshaping the Field: Art of the African Diaspora on Display (2022) and, her articles have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, e-flux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale and darkmatter. She curated the event ‘Performances of Nothingness’ (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, New York 2022). 

ENTRY DETAILS:

Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

Joinery, Joists and Gender began as one book and became another.

The exhibition was mounted, interviews with makers were completed, and we thought we understood what the book would be. But taking that research into book form, I realized that the history that demanded to be written required both new ways of thinking and new material sources.

As an artist and curator used to writing 300-word curatorial or project statements, I will share my learning process in taking a deep and sustained dive into writing a new history, that of women and non-binary makers in the woodshop. Seeking an expanded research process—drawing on secondary sources that included published academic research, print materials, and found photographs from internet sources as diverse as eBay, YouTube, and Instagram—my understandings were challenged, reshaped, and expanded. The resulting book was made better at each step.

Deirdre Visser (she/her) is Visiting Curator at Mills College at Northeastern University, and an independent writer, curator, and artist living in San Francisco’s Mission District. Curator of The Arts at CIIS from 2010-2022, Visser mounted exhibitions and programming featuring some of the most critical voices of our time, including: Rick Lowe, Dr. Deborah Willis, Amalia Mesa Bains, Wendel White, Zora Murff, and Mia Nakano. Like her curatorial practice, her writing and visual art is rooted in the belief that arts and culture advance civic participation and engagement in our communities and provide us invaluable tools and languages to tell stories too long unheard, catalyzing and nourishing discourse across differences.

In 2019 Deirdre co-curated Making a Seat at the Table with Laura Mays, which opened that fall at the Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. This exhibition showcased the work of 43 women and non-binary woodworkers who are expanding the practice while holding down the center. In March 2022 Routledge released her book, Joinery, Joists and Gender: a History of Woodworking for the 21st Century, the first written history of women and gender non-conforming makers in the woodshop.

She is also engaged with the arts as a form of civic participation, working for the past decade with the Skywatchers Ensemble, a radically relational and enduring community arts collaboration in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Deirdre received an MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Irvine, and an BA in Studio Art from Mills College.

ENTRY DETAILS:

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

On April 29th, 1992, the acquittal of four white police officers who beat Rodney King, a Black civilian, incited five days of protests, looting, arson, and assaults. While scholars have examined the videotaped beating and documentation of the unrest, few have explored the potential of art as an important record. In this lecture, Dr. Rose Salseda will recover the missing historical narrative through the analysis of Adrian Piper’s Black Box/White Box (1992), a multimedia installation that combines minimalism’s sleek aesthetic with jarring visual and auditory devices. Also incorporating Piper’s writing and references to music and literature, Dr. Salseda reveals Piper’s strategies to engage viewers in examining how white supremacy and xenophobia characterize both the King beating and the nation’s treatment of African Americans throughout history. 

Dr. Rose Salseda is an assistant professor of Art & Art History at Stanford University. Specializing in the fields of African American and U.S. Latinx art, and with a research background in the art of the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, Dr. Salseda’s research explores the politics of race, identity, and representation as well as the intergenerational, cross-racial, and immigrant experiences of anti-Black racism and xenophobia.

ENTRY DETAILS:

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

ZOOM: VCS Forum | Jorella Andrews

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Description—which is often taken to have little analytic or critical value and as such is rarely practiced—is at the core of phenomenological method. Why, and to what ends? And why—or so I argue—is at the core of phenomenological method. Why, and to what ends? And why—or so I argue—is it a vital practice when seeking to engage hospitably and innovatively within spaces and scenarios of the most challenging kind?

In this talk (which will also have a practical element, so please bring an image of your choice—perhaps an image you are currently thinking or writing about) we will consider the critical and decolonising/self-decolonising force of description, and its capacities to open up previously disregarded terrain. Our key texts are a short text by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty from 1954 called 'On News Items' and an article by me titled ‘Interviewing Images: How visual research using IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis) can illuminate the change-making possibilities of place, space, and dwelling’ (2020).

Jorella Andrews is Professor of Visual Cultures in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. In her research, writing and teaching, she examines the relations between philosophical inquiry, the image-world, and art practice. Her current focus is on the practical potential of aesthetics and image-based phenomenological research to intervene in key areas of contemporary concern such as the development of non-ego-centric approaches to personal and collective identity, the importance of self-directed, situated learning in academic and non-academic contexts, and the development of non-coercive approaches to change-making in personal and public life. These interests intersect with her long history of community-based activity, as an academic but also as a volunteer in the London borough of Lewisham where she lives and works. She is the author of several books and articles, including two monographs, The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty and Showing Off! A Philosophy of Image (2018 and 2014, both Bloomsbury) and edits the Visual Cultures as… series (Sternberg Press/MIT).

ENTRY DETAILS

ZOOM: VCS Forum | Jorella Andrews

Free and open to the public

One Day Public event, Live Performance, Poem Reading, and Artists’ Talks to Show Our Community Solidarity with Brave Women in Iran.

The Wind In My Hair is an event organized by VCS graduate student Katayoun Bahrami and presented by Clarion Alley Mural Project, in collaboration with CCA Center for Art and Public Life and ARTogether showcasing the Iranian community and their allies in the Bay Area and beyond, to stand in solidarity with Iranian women and to call for the end of excessive violence against protesters in Iran. Together, we call on all communities to support human rights. The protests in Iran have deeply moved and shaken us all—some of us are directly affected; others stand in strong solidarity as allies.

Clarion Alley, San Francisco, CA 94110

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

How do we follow the rules of language when we may not understand what is being communicated? How might we understand how voices and accents are trained and disciplined? Inspired by scholars Halcyon M. Lawrence, Thao Phan, and Jan M. Padios, Santos's academic research delves into voice (mis)recognition and speech technologies through the lens of feminist media histories, computational media, and speculative practices. In this presentation, she will share her research and creative work on playable media through a practice she engages in quite regularly, docu-poetics and subversion through methodology.

Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.

Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, and Vice Motherboard. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She co-founded REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. In 2022, she received the Mozilla Creative Media Award for her interactive, docu-poetics work The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022). She serves as an advisory board member for POWRPLNT, slash arts, and House of Alegria.

ENTRY DETAILS:

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

Embodying Archives: Care as We Process

Archival theory and practice have seen a shift in how archivists approach and process archival collections. Gone are the days of the neutral librarian. How archives are collected, defined, described and accessed has become contested territory. For myself, as a San Francisco citizen and an archivist, these two roles become intertwined when processing archival collections that document the San Francisco urban culture where I am invested in living and that I am preserving for a larger public. It is the production of the archival body that is being redefined and I will share the everyday lived experience of being a photo archivist in an urban public library setting. As a curator and an archivist, this talk will reflect on the stakes involved in preserving, presenting and interpreting the visual history of the city.

Christina Moretta is Photo Curator at the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. Notwithstanding the specificity of her job title, she wears many professional hats: that of an archivist, appraising, acquiring, arranging and describing archival collections; that of a librarian, unraveling the mysteries of San Francisco just a bit more with each reference query; that of a rights manager, helping filmmakers, authors and curators use and publish visual gems from the archives; that of a teacher, sharing the world of primary resources to students of all levels and disciplines; and that of a history nerd, distributing rare facts as she walks around town with indulgent friends and family. Her workplace serves as the official archives for the City & County of San Francisco and its San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection has over two million visual materials documenting San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Moretta holds a B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from University of California, Irvine, a M.L.I.S. with a focus on archival studies from San Jose State University and an M.A. in History from San Francisco State University. She is an active member of Society of American Archivists, Society of California Archivists and Art Libraries Society of North America.

ENTRY DETAILS:

195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies and CCA Graduate Comics

Blattner Multipurpose Room
75 Arkansas Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

In Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women’s and gay liberation—including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet—were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so called “normal” gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women, queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new environments—from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an upper-East Side New York City apartment to an all-female version of Earth— and finding new ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be imagined in the mind’s eye and interpreted by diverse publics. Surprisingly, such creative attempts to represent queer gender and sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly generic, popular forms including the sequential format of comic strip serials, the token figures of science fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the serialized rhythm of installment fiction. Through studies of queer and feminist cultural productions including Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1970), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1976-1983), Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1989-1991), Fawaz show how artists innovated in many popular mediums and genres to make the experience of gender and sexual non-conformity recognizable to mass audiences in the modern US. Ultimately, Queer Forms tells the pre-history of the contemporary renaissance in feminist and LGBTQ political cultures by developing a genealogy of late twentieth-century artifacts that projected images of gender and sexual rebellion, which came to infuse the American popular imagination in the 1970s and after.

About "Queer Love on Barbary Lane: The Serial Experience of Coming Out of the Closet with Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City" Ramzi Fawaz says:

In this talk, I analyze the content and reading experience of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, the most popular serialized gay fiction of the 1970s, which appeared in daily installments in the San Francisco Chronicle between 1976-1983. I argue that the serialized rhythm of the narrative—which followed the social and sexual misadventures of a cadre of queer friends in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood—modeled gay liberation’s conception of “coming out of the closet” about one’s sexuality as a process that unfolds over time through repeated encounters with new erotic possibilities. I draw upon interviews I conducted with actual San Francisco readers of Maupin’s original text alongside close analysis of the rhetorical and literary modes of address that Maupin deployed to make “coming out” a widely accessible form for articulating one’s sexual and social desires, regardless of one’s specific sexual identity. I show the story’s unfolding narrative about 1970s queer social life and the actual experience of reading it daily alongside other San Francisco residents helped disseminate the radical sexual politics of gay liberation to both gay and straight audiences alike.

After his lecture, Professor Fawaz will be in conversation with Professor Jeanette Roan (CCA History of Art and Visual Culture and Visual & Critical Studies programs). Dr. Roan is an interdisciplinary scholar. She is working on a study of graphic novels and comics from the perspective of visual studies theories and methodologies, with a particular emphasis on Asian American comics creators and representations of racial identity. For more information on Prof. Roan, see this biography on the CCA website.

Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. He is Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of two books including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016), and Queer Forms (2022). The New Mutants received the 2017 ASAP Book Prize and the best first book award from the New York Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. With Darieck Scott he co-edited a special issue of American Literature titled “Queer About Comics,” which was awarded the 2019 best special issue of the year from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

ENTRY DETAILS:

Blattner Multipurpose Room
75 Arkansas Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107

Free and open to the public. COVID protocols in place. Masks are required indoors for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors but unvaccinated individuals are required to wear masks at all times.

VCS FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
Organized by CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies

NOTE CHANGE OF PRESENTATION MODE: This event will now be presented via Zoom. To join the talk, please click this link.

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

Critic as Curator as Queer Historian

In spring 2017, artist and former editor of OUT/LOOK magazine, E.G. Crichton invited artists, writers, activists, and educators to participate in a multifaceted group exhibition and publishing project reflecting on the history and legacy of the periodical, OUT/LOOK: Birth of the Queer. Participants would be paired with an archival issue of the magazine and asked to respond in whatever manner or medium they chose. Participating as a writer and cultural critic, the essay I contributed to Birth of the Queer would be the first in a series of events which led to the production of the queer historical anthology OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture. This presentation will explore how to develop a project using multidisciplinary skillsets and following multiple paths of inquiry.

Elena Gross (she/they) is the Co-Director of the Berkeley Art Center and an independent writer and culture critic living in San Francisco, CA. She received an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2016, and her BA in Art History and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2012. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Elena was formerly the creator and co-host of the arts & visual culture podcast what are you looking at? published by Art Practical. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists and most recently in queer artistic and literary histories of the late 20th century. She has presented her writing and research at institutions and conferences across the U.S., including Southern Exposure, KADIST, Harvard College, YBCA, California College of the Arts, and the GLBT History Museum. In 2018, she collaborated with the artist Leila Weefur on the publication Between Beauty & Horror (Sming Sming Books). The two performed a live adaptation of their work at The Lab, San Francisco. Her most recent writing can be found in the publication This Is Not A Gun (Sming Sming Books / Candor Arts). Elena is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Culture (Rutgers University Press).

ENTRY DETAILS:

ZOOM: VCS Forum | Elena Gross

Free and open to the public.

ORGANIZED BY

Wattis Institute with the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies, co-sponsored by CCA's MFA Writing and BA Critical Studies programs

njwhittington@cca.edu

Anti-Black Anti-Fatness and Desire, a lecture by Da'Shaun Harrison and conversation with Ajuan Mance

To live in a body that is fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to socio-politically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.

Da’Shaun Harrison—a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer—offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. In their writing and work they take on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and the carceral system, as well as the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, illustrating the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so Black fat people can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.

Da'Shaun Harrison is a Black, fat, queer, and trans theorist and abolitionist in Atlanta, GA. Harrison is the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, and is a public speaker who often gives talks and leads workshops on Blackness, queerness, gender, fatness, disabilities, and their intersections. Harrison currently serves as the Editor-at-Large for Scalawag Magazine.

Harrison will be in conversation with Ajuan Mance, artist, writer, and Professor of African American literature at Mills College, Oakland.

Anti-Black Anti-Fatness and Desire is co-hosted by the Wattis Institute with the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies and is organized by Jacqueline Francis, Diego Villalobos, and Kim Nguyen. The program is part of the Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts series (a partnership between CCA and the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco); and co-sponsored by CCA's MFA Writing and BA Critical Studies programs.

Land to Light On, is a collaborative public programming series between the Wattis Institute and CCA's academic departments focusing on racial capitalism, abolition, and decolonization.

Land to Light On is an ongoing conversation with no foreseeable end. We carry the words of Dionne Brand with each iteration: I don’t want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don’t like it, none of it, easy as that. I’m giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can’t perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists.

Khan Wong’s debut novel The Circus Infinite is not only a gripping science-fiction tale set in a lushly imagined universe teeming with fabulous aliens, extraordinary powers, and political drama, but also a story that celebrates the full spectrum of gender and sexuality, with a gay, ace relationship at its center. To top it all off, it revolves around a circus, the perfect manifestation of outsider community, artistic expression, and a sense of wonder. MFA Comics Chair Justin Hall interviews Wong (a friend for over twenty years) on the writing process, world-building, QTPOC representation in science-fiction, and his favorite X-Men characters. 

Publisher’s Weekly describes The Circus Infinite as an “intimate, joyful space opera debut [that] hooks readers from the outset with its blend of action, magic, and queer romance.” Come meet the author and see what makes him tick!

When: Thursday, April 28th 10:30-11:30am

Where: 195 DeHaro Street

Why: Because who doesn’t love a big, queer circus in space?

Note: California College of the Arts requires all visitors to campus to be fully vaccinated and masked while indoors.

The symposium showcases the thesis work of the program in Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) students at California College of the Arts (CCA). The event is a rite of passage for the students and a proud moment for those who ushered them to this professional threshold. There are a total of five students presenting--Liz Hafey, Katherine Jemima Hamilton, Liz Ordway, Aliya Parashar, and Kristen Wawruck--grouped into two thematic panels. Each presentation is approximately 12 minutes long; there is an additional presentation by Dorothy R. Santos, the 2022 VCS Alumni Award recipient. Following the presentations in Timken Lecture Hall, there will be a reception in the Backlot, from 2:30 to 3:30 pm.

For those unable to attend in person, the event will be simulcast via Zoom. Please register for the webinar here. For more information, please click here.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

12:00 Opening Remarks | Jacqueline Francis & Việt Lê

12:15 Panel 1: Institutions | Moderator: Patricia G. Lange

Kristen Wawruck MTV as Form: Dara Birnbaum and Corporate Patronage

Katherine Jemima Hamilton Sonic Imaginaries: Sound and Resonance in Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick’s Masks and Candice Hopkins’s Curation at documenta 14

Liz Hafey Booby Traps: Cultural Critique in the Writings of Marcel Duchamp and Karen Finley

1:00 Comments and Q&A

1:15 Break

1:30 Panel 2: The Corporeal | Moderator: TT Takemoto

Liz Ordway The Power of Fat Liberation: Rereading Laura Aguilar’s Nude Self-Portraits

Aliya Parashar Towards a Transsexual Dwelling in Yantra Studies: Mythology, Post-Colonial Theory, Gender Identity

2:00 Comments and Q&A

2:10 Alumni Award Introduction | VCS Class of 2022

2:15 Alumni Award Presentation

2:30 Closing Remarks and Reception | Jacqueline Francis

ORGANIZED BY

Wattis Institute with the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

njwhittington@cca.edu

Against Accumulation: On Archives & Racial Capitalism

Jarrett Martin Drake and Eunsong Kim share the introductions to each other's forthcoming books — Drake's Archives on Fire and Kim's The Politics of Collecting: Race, Property & Aesthetic Formation. Both of their respective works grapple with how archives and museums are rooted in racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and reject reformist arguments for their continuance. The two writers and scholars speak about their research and present their engagement with each other's practices.

Jarrett Martin Drake is a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology at Harvard University, where he engages in a variety of archival, educational, and organizing projects that pertain to prison abolition. Outside of Harvard, Drake facilitates workshops with grassroots organizations around topics such as liberatory memory work and digital archives. Prior to Harvard, Drake was the Digital Archivist at Princeton University as well as an advisory archivist for A People’s Archives of Police Violence in Cleveland.

Eunsong Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. Her practice spans: poetry, translation, visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. Her completed book manuscript, The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race in Aesthetic Formation (under contract with Duke University Press) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions.

Against Accumulation: On Archives & Racial Capitalism is co-hosted by the Wattis Institute with the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies and is organized by Jacqueline Francis, Diego Villalobos, and Kim Nguyen.

Land to Light On, is a collaborative public programming series between the Wattis Institute and CCA's academic departments focusing on racial capitalism, abolition, and decolonization.

Land to Light On is an ongoing conversation with no foreseeable end. We carry the words of Dionne Brand with each iteration: I don’t want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don’t like it, none of it, easy as that. I’m giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can’t perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists.

PART OF EVENT SERIES: VISUAL & CRITICAL STUDIES FORUM | 2021/2022 SERIES

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

njwhittington@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

PJ DiPietro

TOPIC: Trans of Color Is an Oxymoron: Humans, Nonhuman Animals, and Bodies Beneath Animals

PJ DiPietro works at the intersection of decolonial feminism, women of color thinking, Latinx studies, and trans* studies. They are assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of women’s and gender studies at Syracuse University, New York. They are also the academic coordinator of the graduate program in gender, society, and politics at the Latin American Graduate School of Social Sciences (FLACSO, Buenos Aires). DiPietro holds a PhD in Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture from Binghamton University (State University of New York) and received an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral Fellowship in the humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where they were visiting Assistant Professor of ethnic studies and Xicanx/Latinx Studies.

With a transdisciplinary approach, they engage anthropology, human geography, and philosophy. They are one of the co-editors of Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones(SUNY 2019) and their single-author manuscript will be published under the title Sideways Selves, The Decolonizing Politics of Trans* Matter Across the Américas. DiPietro collaborates with various organizations committed to social justice, including the Democratizing Knowledge Collective, the Association for Jotería [pronounced hotéreea) Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), the decolonial philosophy collaborative REC-Latinoamérica, and the travesti collective FuturoTransGenérico. 

DiPietro grew up in the Andean mountains of northwestern Argentina, near the border that the country shares with Bolivia and Chile. They come from humble beginnings and their family is mixed-race. They migrated to the United States about twenty years ago and have since lived in upstate NY and northern California. They identify as Latinx,trans*, and brown.

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA community and alumni

PART OF EVENT SERIES: VISUAL & CRITICAL STUDIES FORUM | 2021/2022 SERIES

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

njwhittington@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Elaine Yau

TOPIC:
Curating African American-made Quilts at BAMPFA

Elaine Y. Yau is associate curator of the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA, where she is organizing an exhibition from Eli Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts for fall 2024. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition that deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersection of discourses on folk art, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2019). Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She received her doctorate in History of Art and Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015.

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA community and alumni

PART OF EVENT SERIES: VISUAL & CRITICAL STUDIES FORUM | 2021/2022 SERIES

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

njwhittington@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

TOPIC: Settler-colonialism and the Founding of the US State

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades, working with Indigenous communities on sovereignty and land rights and helping to build the international Indigenous movement. She is professor emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay.

She is the author of numerous books and articles on indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico; The Great Sioux Nation; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which received the 2015 American Book Award, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, and most recently Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy and A History of Exclusion and Elimination (Beacon Press, 2021).

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA community and alumni

PART OF EVENT SERIES: VISUAL & CRITICAL STUDIES FORUM | 2021/2022 SERIES

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

njwhittington@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Richard Hylton

TOPIC: DONALD RODNEY'S DOUBLETHINK AND THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF RACE

Richard Hylton was born in London, England. Since the early 1990s, he has been actively involved in the visual arts sector, as an exhibition organizer, curator and, artist. He has organized a significant number of thematic and solo exhibitions and has also edited a variety of publications including The Best Janette Parris; Doublethink: The Art of Donald Rodney and The Holy Bible: Old Testament, an artist book by David Hammons which he co-produced with Virginia Nomarch. His first book-length study, The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector, A Study of Policies, Initiatives and Attitudes 1976-2006, offered hitherto unseen insight into the mechanisms and machinations behind ‘ethnic arts’, ‘black arts’ and ‘new internationalism’ and ‘culturally diverse arts’. Awarded a PhD in 2018 from Goldsmiths College, University of London, Hylton’s work is now broadly concerned with the politics of Black Diasporic art and art history. He is currently writing a monograph on Donald Rodney (1961-1998) one of the most important but equally underrepresented British artist of his generation. The history of African American art in the international arena also figures prominently in Hylton’s scholarship, resulting in published essays in the Routledge Companion to African American Art History; the International Review of African American, Art Review and Art Monthly. Between 2019-2021, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently Lecturer in Contemporary Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA community and alumni

Part of event series: Visual & Critical Studies Forum | 2021/2022 Series

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

njwhittington@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Nelson Chan

TOPIC: “"Punk, Publishing, and Photography”

For a preview of the talk, check out this playlist.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nelson Chan was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents from Hong Kong and Taiwan and has spent most of his life between the States and Hong Kong. Having grown up on two continents with unique cultures, this immigrant experience has influenced the majority of his work. 

Nelson is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his BFA and a graduate of the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School, where he received his MFA. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; and 798 Space, Beijing, China. His books are collected in the institutional libraries of the Harry Ransom Center, The MET, The Guggenheim, The Whitney, and MoMA.

Book publishing is a primary focus of Nelson’s studio practice. He is a co-founder of TIS books, and from 2016-19 he was the Production Manager of Aperture Foundation. Now based in the Bay Area, Chan is an Assistant Professor of Photography within the undergraduate and graduate programs at the California College of the Arts.

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA community and alumni

Part of event series: Visual & Critical Studies Forum | 2021/2022 Series

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

swest@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Mitchell Schwarzer

TOPIC: “Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mitchell Schwarzer is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts, San Francisco and Oakland, where he teaches courses on the history of the arts from antiquity to modernity as well as seminars on architecture and urbanism. He holds a Ph.D. in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture from M.I.T. His books include: Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption (University of California Press, 2021); Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: History and Guide (William Stout Publishers, 2007); Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); Architecture and Design: SF (Understanding Business, 1998); and German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1995). His writings have appeared in over 125 edited books, scholarly journals and professional magazines.

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA community and alumni

Part of event series: Visual & Critical Studies Forum | 2021/2022 Series

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

swest@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Claire Kim

TOPIC: “Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies and human-animal studies. She received her B.A. in Government from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press 2000) won two awards from the American Political Science Association: the Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and the Best Book Award from the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity. Her second book, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press 2015), received the Best Book Award from the APSA’s Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity as well. Dr. Kim has given keynote and plenary talks in numerous countries, and she has written many journal articles, book chapters, and essays. She has published in popular venues such as The Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and she is frequently interviewed by the media on topics related to anti-Blackness, anti-Asian racism, protest movements, animals, and ecology. She has appeared as an expert commentator on MSNBC and in documentary films and podcasts. Dr. Kim has been the recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA community and alumni

Part of event series: Visual & Critical Studies Forum | 2021/2022 Series

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

swest@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Eric Stanley

TOPIC: “Clocked: Surveillance, Opacity, and the Image of Force”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Eric A. Stanley is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable and the coeditor of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Along with Chris Vargas they directed the films Criminal Queers (2019) and Homotopia (2011).

ENTRY DETAILS

Free and open to the CCA Community

Part of event series: Visual & Critical Studies Forum | 2021/2022 Series

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies and CCA@CCA

tierneyh@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Dean Spade

TOPIC: “Mutual Aid: Survival and Resistance in Times of Disaster”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), was published by Verso Press in October 2020.

This event is funded in part by an endowment gift to support The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series at CCA, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism.

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Free and open to the public

Part of event series: Visual & Critical Studies Forum | 2021/2022 Series

ORGANIZED BY

Visual & Critical Studies

tierneyh@cca.edu

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Svati P. Shah

Associate Professor, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

TOPIC: “Brothels and Big Screen Rescues: Thinking With Visuality in Representations of Transactional Sex”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Svati P. Shah is a researcher, writer and teacher who works on questions of sexuality, time, gender formation, juridical recognition, and caste capitalism in India. Their first major research project examined sex work, urban informal economies and labor migration in the city of Mumbai. Their current work explores contemporary queer and transgender social movements in India, and their genealogical relationships to the history of India’s autonomous ‘new left,’ which emerged in the wake of the Indian Emergency (1975-77).

Dr. Shah is currently an Associate Professor Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with adjunct appointments in the Departments of Anthropology and Afro-American Studies, and in the Social Thought and Political Economy Program (STPEC). In addition to the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Shah has also taught at NYU, Wellesley College, and Duke University in the US, as well as having served as a research associate at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, India. Dr. Shah’s international affiliations include African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), both at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dr. Shah’s research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright Foundation.

Their first monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, was published in 2014 by Duke University Press and Orient Blackswan in India. Their articles have appeared in a range of scholarly journals, including Antipode, the Economic and Political Weekly, Interventions, and South Atlantic Quarterly.

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Free and open to the CCA community and alumni