A SENSE OF PLACE, A Three-Day Symposium About New York City, Begins March 12

In September 2019, a group of twelve graduate students in the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College traveled to Dakar, Senegal to study with curator Koyo Kouoh and her team at RAW Material Company, a non-profit art center offering research and residency programs for artists and curators alongside seasonal exhibitions, publications, and lectures.

The focus of their time in Dakar with Kouoh was how curatorial practice can make the presence of a place visible, or in her words: "How have actors, active in our local contexts and from across the creative disciplines, responded to and shaped their - our - environment? How do they collaborate? How do they tell stories and recall history? How do they create sites of possibility?" Returning to New York with these questions in mind, the students, in partnership with Kouoh, have organized a three-day symposium, "A Sense of Place," taking place from March 12-14th at various locations across the city, with a full schedule of events here.

The Artist's Institute invites you to two panel discussions and a film screening the students have organized, both of which are free and open to the public. Diamond Stingily, Howardena Pindell, Tourmaline, and Siona Wilson are among the artists and thinkers participating in these events.

Surveillance City: Examining the Urban Panopticon

Thursday, March 12th
7:00-8:30pm
205 Hudson Street (Hudson and Canal), Second Floor Gallery
Free and open to the public; ID required for building entry. Wheelchair accessible.

This panel discussion will focus on the local infrastructure of surveillance, tracking, and data collection in New York City. We will consider what it means to live under ever-present surveillance, how such an infrastructure infringes on basic human rights, and strategies for public resistance. Real-time facial recognition, location tracking, and biometric data collection in post-9/11 New York are among the topics we will discuss.

Panelists include Ingrid Burrington (artist and author of Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure); Allison Burtch (strategist and researcher); Albert Fox Cahn (Founder and Executive Director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project); and Diamond Stingily (artist and poet). Janus Rose (Senior Editor at Motherboard) will moderate.

Countering Erasures

Friday, March 13th
6:30-8:30pm
Roosevelt House, 47-49 E 65th Street
Free and open to the public. Wheelchair accessible.

This event will consider the role of place, or belonging, in how individuals and communities experience and resist structural violence and systemic erasure. The program is inspired by the resilience and creativity of the independent, community-driven artist initiatives encountered in Dakar, Senegal.

6:30-7:00 Reception

Refreshments in the Roosevelt House Four Freedoms Room.

7:00-7:30 Films by Tourmaline and Howardena Pindell
The evening begins with a screening of two films by artist, filmmaker, and activist Tourmaline: Salacia (2019), a fictional narrative built around Mary Jones, a Black transgender sex worker and outlaw in New York City in 1836, and Atlantic is a Sea of Bones (2017), a short starring Egyptt LaBeija and Fatima Jamal, who offer performance and self-expression as a form of resistance to the systematic violence perpetrated against Black queer and trans people. These will be followed by Howardena Pindell's pivotal work Free, White and 21 (1980), a performance video in which Pindell speaks directly to the camera describing the racism she experiences in professional, educational, and personal settings.

7:30-8:30

Conversation with Tourmaline, Howardena Pindell, and Ayesha Williams; moderated by Siona Wilson

Following the screening, art historian Siona Wilson, whose research probes issues of sexual difference, race and sexuality at the intersection of art and politics in the twentieth century, will moderate a discussion with Tourmaline, Howardena Pindell, and Ayesha Williams, Deputy Director of The Laundromat Project. The conversation will reflect on the films' treatment of structural power and self-determination, as well as how multigenerational, multiracial community networks -- like The Laundromat Project -- can be effective agents of social change.

These symposia are part of the Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Curatorial Workshop program at Hunter College.