Hannah waiters
class of 2021
Hannah Waiters is an artist, educator and researcher who is currently in pursuit of her MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies. Hannah Waiters graduated with a B.S. in Earth Sciences from the University of California Santa Cruz. As a first generation African American, Waiters is fighting the curse of temporality, by showing the how objects of a lowly status long to be permanent. Her afrofuturist research and artwork are important in that she is looking to make present a history. Her work seeks to uncover the life, the history, the power, the grief and joy of fallen objects.
Hannah’s Thesis
Fire Under Glass: Black Freedom in Edgar Arceneaux’s Orpheum Returns—Fire’s Creation
Plexiglass vitrines reflect historical case studies of dispassionate references to slave labor in America. My thesis explores the potentialities of “urban” vernacular artifacts through conceptual artist Edgar Arceneaux’s sculpture, Orpheum Return’s—Fire’s Creation (2010), and its conceptual material process. I interpreted this artwork through art historical phenomenology, Black social history, and Black conceptualism. Using theoretical frameworks from W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jennifer A. González, I examine Black vernacular artifacts relating to violence, the Black American experience, and art history. I argue that, in Orpheum Returns—Fire’s Creation, Arceneaux deploys the metaphor of fire, adopting a new means of a conceptual materialist praxis. Specifically, I historically contextualize works like Orpheum Returns—Fire’s Creation to respond to white male conceptual art movements in the 1960s and 1980s that were central to the art institution’s display modes and discourses of that time.