Forms of Reparations: The Museum and Restorative Justice
A virtual speaker series presented by the Museum & Curatorial Studies graduate students of the School of Art at California State University, Long Beach.
Free and Open to the Public
Facade from the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Photo by David L Ryan/Globe Staff.WHEN
Chaédria LaBouvier: Intellectual Labor and Institutional Violence
Wednesday, September 23rd, 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST
Dr. Atreyee Gupta: Non-alignment and Decolonization
Monday, September 28th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST
Watch the livestream here: https://youtu.be/rKmV1hf_9L0
Decolonize This Place: Visiting Art & Activism Talk by Nitasha Dhillon, Amin Husain, and Amy Weng
Monday, September 28th, 5:00-6:30 PM PST
Watch the livestream here: https://youtu.be/4CXIIcdYUaM
Alma Ruiz: The Potential of Los Angeles Art Museums
Wednesday, September 30th 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST
Watch the livestream here: https://youtu.be/aCZN0b_7K6U
lauren woods & Kimberli Meyer: American Monument & the Power of Collaboration
Monday, October 5th, 1:00-2:30 PM PST, Moderated by Andrea Guerrero
Watch the livestream here: https://youtu.be/yd4utQWvi4Y
Edgar Heap of Birds: Spirit Citizen
Monday, October 5th 5:00 - 6:30 PM PST
Watch the livestream here: https://youtu.be/GK0uWOs1TzI
La Tanya S Autry, Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, & Laura Raicovich in Conversation: Dismantling the Master’s House and Collective Perseverance
Wednesday, October 7th 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST, Moderated by Nizan Shaked
Watch the livestream here: https://youtu.be/D_2AZPy0q9Y
Artists protest the opening of Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties (LACMA, 1981). Photo by Anne Knudsen/Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Collection, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.
WHAT & WHY
Pressure is mounting on art museums to divest from toxic wealth, to address historical injustice, and to represent the diversity of demographics and practices of the social fabric they inhabit. Activist groups and artist collectives, as well as intellectuals, scholars, and community members are demanding more tangible acts of restitution.
In 2018 our university made headlines when our campus museum director was fired and the exhibiting artist, lauren woods [lower case], paused her artwork American Monument in response. As an ongoing nomadic monument and archive documenting the loss of African American and Black lives to police brutality, this living artwork is a platform for analyzing the construction of race, material violence, and structural power. For many faculty and students this loss underscored institutional complicity with systemic racism.
California State University, Long Beach resides on the sacred village site of Puvunga, the spiritual site of emergence of the Tongva and Agjachemem peoples. Construction of the campus and surrounding area in the 1950s displaced the central cemetery of the village site. Many, but not all, of the individuals who were laid to rest hundreds of years prior were removed and housed in deteriorating conditions. With the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), our university became legally recognized as a ”museum” due to the presence of ancestral remains and funerary objects. The collection and its cultural and historical significance, are still largely unknown by those on campus and beyond.
Forms of Reparations: the Museum and Restorative Justice aims to identify the many subtle ways by which cultural institutions sustain white supremacy, imperialism, and exploitation.
Organized with the charge, blessing, and consultation of the School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies, this series invites leading scholars, activists, and artists to present their work, lectures, and participate in panel discussions, addressing questions such as: How do individuals work within the system to enact reform? Has the recent currency awarded to the term decolonization taken away its original revolutionary intent? Can institutions and activists work together, or are they structurally determined to occupy opposing sides?
Installation view of Afterlives of Slavery at Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, 2019. Picture by ©KIRSTENVANSANTEN.
WHO
Alma Ruiz
Alma Ruiz is Senior Fellow with the Center for Business & Management of the Arts at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California. She is a former senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, having left in 2015 after thirty-one years at the museum. Ruiz's curatorial work focused on exhibitions of postwar artists, with an emphasis on emerging and Latin American artists. Two of her most notable exhibitions at MOCA, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (1999-2000) and Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space (2010), rewrote the recent history of contemporary installation art to include a Latin American perspective. Since 2015, Ruiz has worked as an independent curator on projects such as the 2016 20 Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala City. She is currently working on an exhibition of Guatemalan artist Diana de Solares for the Craft Contemporary to open in October 2020.
Chaédria LaBouvier
Chaédria LaBouvier is a writer, activist, art historian and scholar of Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2016 LaBouvier collaborated with Williams College Museum of Art to utilize Basquiat’s 1983 painting Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) as a centerpiece for a series of conversations about Black Lives Matter. In 2019, LaBouvier was hired by the Guggenheim as the guest curator for the exhibition Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story. She is the first Black curator, first Black woman, and first person of Cuban descent to organize an exhibition in the Guggenheim’s 80-year history. She is also the first Black author of a Guggenheim catalogue.
Dr. Atreyee Gupta
Atreyee Gupta is Assistant Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is presently completing Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960, a book on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it. Other book projects include Postwar – A Global Art History, 1945–1965 (with Okwui Enwezor). Most recent curatorial projects include When All That Is Solid Melts into Air: Exploring the Intersection of the Folk and the Modern in Postcolonial India (UC BAMPFA, 2020, co-curated with Lawrence Rinder).
lauren woods
lauren woods is a conceptual artist who creates hybrid media projects that engage with history as a lens by which to view the socio-politics of the present. Her most recent work, American MONUMENT (2018-ongoing), was initiated with Kimberli Meyer at the California State University, Long Beach University Art Museum, and came to fruition after traveling to the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California Irvine. woods has long been interested in monument making, contested public history, and the invisible dynamics in society.
Website: http://laurenwoodsartist.com
Kimberli Meyer
Kimberli Meyer is an independent curator, writer, architect, and cultural producer. She has previously held the position of Director at California State University Long Beach’s University Art Museum and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. Her major projects include commissioning and curating the United States Presentation at the Eleventh International Biennial of Cairo (2008), co-curating and producing How Many Billboards? Art in Stead (2010), co-curating Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Design as well as coauthoring the exhibition publication (2011), and most recently, working collaboratively with artist lauren woods on American MONUMENT (2018-ongoing).
Photo: Sylke Meyer
Edgar Heap of Birds
Edgar Heap of Birds is an artist, activist, teacher, and enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations. As an advocate for indigenous communities worldwide, his work consistently confronts repressed or unacknowledged histories of state and settler violence against Native communities. Through a multi-disciplinary practice that includes public art messages, outdoor sculpture, painting, and prints, he draws parallels between historical violence and ongoing injustices of the present moment.
Background: Fort Supply, 2017, monoprint installation.
La Tanya S Autry
As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, LaTanya S. Autry centers Black liberation and decolonization in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that both promotes public discussion about the Black liberation struggle and engenders fighting antiBlackness through the collective imagining of public art interventions, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography.
LaTanya has curated exhibitions and organized programs at moCa Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, and other institutions. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, LaTanya has developed expertise in the art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.
Aruna D’Souza
Dr. Aruna D’Souza, is a writer whose work focuses on modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminism, cultural critique, and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her writing on contemporary art has been published widely, including The Wall Street Journal, Art in America, 4Columns,and Art News.Her most recent book Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (2018, Badlands Unlimited) was named one of the best art books of 2018 by theNew York Times. She is the editor of Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2019, and is co-curator of Both/And, a retrospective of O’Grady’s work which opens in November, 2020, at the Brooklyn Museum.
Photo: Dana Hoey
Website: https://www.arunadsouza.com/
Laura Raicovich
Laura Raicovich is an independent curator, writer, and currently the interim director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art. Raicovich’s work focuses on socially engaged art practices and the civic role of museums. In early 2018, she left her position as the President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum in New York following a number of disagreements with board members about the need for the museum to take clear positions on matters impacting the communities it serves. She has lectured internationally on a broad array of subjects and has held positions at the Global Initiatives at Creative Time, the Dia Art Foundation, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Public Art Fund, and New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation. At this time, Raicovich is writing a book about museums, cultural institutions, and the myth of neutrality (Verso, 2021).
Helen Molesworth
Helen Molesworth is a writer and a curator. Her major exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized monographic exhibitions of Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, she serves as the Curator-in-Residence for the Anderson Ranch in Aspen. She recently hosted a podcast series called “Recording Artists” with The Getty and is currently at work on a book about art, love, and freedom.
Photo: Christopher Witkin
Decolonize This Place
A collective that combines theory, research, aesthetics, and organizing in its art practice, MTL was cofounded by Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain. In collaboration with Amy Weng, and many others, it operates under the expanded title. MTL+. Decolonize This Place (DTP) is an action-oriented movement and decolonial formation in New York City. DTP consists of over 30 collaborators including members of MTL+, grassroots groups and art collectives that seek to resist, unsettle, and reclaim the city. Foundationally they recognize the interconnected character of traditions of resistance that have often been seen as isolated, such as the Free Palestine Movement, indigenous struggle, Black liberation, global wage workers, and de-gentrification. Formed during a residency at the New York nonprofit institution Artists Space, DTP uses cultural institutions as platforms and amplifiers for demands, while not being confined to those institutions. Demonstrations by DTP include a multi week protest during the 2019 Whitney Biennial demanding the ousting of the Whitney Museum’s vice-chair Warren B. Kanders, a demonstration at the Brooklyn Museum over objects acquired through imperialist conquests, and, most recently, city-wide “FTP” demonstrations (seen as both “Free The People” and “Fuck The Police”).
WHERE
All presentations, talks, and Q&As will be held virtually via zoom, available to stream live via youtube, and posted to the website shortly afterwards.
Register via the link bellow to receive the unique access codes, links, and any updates about the sessions you wish to attend.
Have questions? Fill out the form below or email us directly at csulb.soa.mcsgrad@gmail.com
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