Center for Arts + Social Justice Panel: Working within and Against the Archives

In this panel, we will hear from artists whose work engages with documentation, public records, history, and other archives that present incomplete, inaccurate, and oppressive representations of individual and collective experience. Artists will discuss their approaches to archival gaps and silences and share alternative practices and strategies for community-based research.

This panel is presented as part of the 2024 CASJ Fellows Programming. CASJ Fellows meet monthly to share work and to engage with topics of relevance and urgency for socially-engaged artists. For more information about Center programming, or to be added to the Center mailing list, please email [email protected].

PANELISTS:

Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY, and lead artist and founder of the non-profit Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc. on the Shinnecock Reservation. In his work, he explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Jeremy Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. He lives and works in Southampton, New York, on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation. Photo credit: Simon Howell

Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, https://technesound.org/, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland and Providence RI on the lands of the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Algonquian, and Narragansett. Photo credit: Bradford Bailey

Janaya Kizzie is an artist, writer and historian working in Providence, Rhode Island. Kizzie considers each work a binding of some kind, in the literal and esoteric sense. Often invoking the tropes of the horror genre, Kizzie experiments with narrative, worldbuilding, and non-linear time. Kizzie’s work has been exhibited by the RISD Museum, the Jamestown Arts Center, and the New Bedford Art Museum. In addition, working in archives, Kizzie processed the AS220 Collection, documenting the history of arts and place-making, at the Providence Public Library in 2016 and was named the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities Rhode Island Public Humanities Scholar in 2020. Kizzie served on the board of feminist arts collective, the Dirt Palace, from 2018-2020, and is currently on the board of Homosaurus, an international linked data vocabulary of LGBTQ terms. Photo credit: Matt Ferrera

Matthew Lawrence is an archivist, writer, and editor currently living in Providence, Rhode Island. He and his partner Jason Tranchida are founding editors of the queer art journal Headmaster, which recently released its tenth issue, and they are currently working on Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza, a multichannel documentary musical about the 1919 Newport Sex Scandal. The Scandalous Conduct project has received funding from Brown Arts Institute and Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, and has been featured in the Boston Globe.

Lawrence previously edited Law and Order Party, a curated email-based guide to art events happening in Rhode Island. The newsletter included 262 weekly issues from 2015 – 2020. In 2019, Lawrence’s hybrid fiction/video essay was part of the digital catalog Raid the Icebox Now with Nicole Eisenman: Tonight we are going out and we are all getting hammered, which accompanied Eisenman’s exhibition at the RISD Museum. His writing has also appeared in a number of regional art publications as well as The New Inquiry, The Guardian, and Salon. He was a 2021 finalist for the Rabkin Prize for Visual Art Journalism.

Jason Tranchida‘s creative practice is a multi-disciplinary intersection of art, design, and curatorial projects. Born in Detroit and living in Providence, Rhode Island, his project- based art practice includes objects, installations, video, and digital explorations. His creative agency LLAMA product specializes in graphic and exhibit design, creative direction, and event production. His work draws heavily on his foundation in architecture and stage design.

Most of Jason’s curatorial work is in collaboration with partner Matthew Lawrence. Their collaborative practice is interdisciplinary and centers around curatorial projects and performance events that amplify the work of queer artists and forgotten LGBTQIA+ histories. Artists featured in their assignment based publication, Headmaster explore themes of gender, queerness, and masculinity. As creative director of the publication, Tranchida has received two Print Merit Awards from the Society of Publication Designers.

Tranchida and Lawrence’s current collaboration entitled Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza, is a multimedia documentary-musical retelling of the events of the Newport Navy Sex Scandal – a Navy-sanctioned raid on homosexual activity that sparked national scandal shortly after the end of World War I. Scandalous Conduct is currently in production and will premiere in September 2024.
www.scandalousconduct.com
www.headmastermagazine.com

Photo credit: Nelson Villarreal