Huda at the Station Nada Shalaby: An image exists of Huda Shaarawi stepping off the train in 1923, having just returned from Italy. An image exists of her with her arm extending upwards as she looks toward the gathered crowd in the foreground and on the left side of the frame. Her face is…
In some measure, all collections are violent and all things are anxious. The act of collecting–of separating something from its context (culture, time, or place) indexes a mastery over another body/thing. Whether the material demonstrates some resilience to time or to being taken (often coded within the language of conservation and preservation), the anxious nature…
Cleaning people hold the world together, but our labor falls short of the recognition it deserves. Without us, nations, communities, and social orders would fall into complete disrepair. The people who maintain order through maintaining cleanliness are underpaid and undervalued. Janitors, maids, and sanitation workers ensure that the world everyone is used to gets to…
1. Discuss Wendy S. Walters’ essay, “Lonely in America,” about the slave trade in New England with a group of undergraduate English majors. Watch one of their faces transform into a wide-eyed fire stare. 2. Talk to a student after class next to a dumpster about how she didn’t realize that it was an option…
There’s this ancient, trite and ongoing notion that art/poetry is for the good. The good of the people, the good of the country, the good of progress (who the people are, for which countries, what good: these are side conversations brought forth by pessimists and unbelievers). For this reason, Artists and Writers do good by…
Part 2 When we think about Cauleen Smith and our Los Angeles-San Diego-Chicago connecting Skype call, we remember that we would have probably all been sitting somewhere having coffee and chatting, had things “turned out” a different way. We remember that we could have had Cauleen in Southern California as an artist and as a…
Our second feature is one effort to undo the rationale of permanent collections. The majority of permanent museums’ collections are categorized by region and attributed to their mysterious donors, whereas the rest of the museum’s exhibitions are often curated “conceptually” and/or chronologically and/or under the banner of aesthetic movements. One could easily make an argument that area studies, and colonial geographies situate the collection development logic of the museum. Let’s tear this apart. We asked writers and artists to create a “petty materialist” “fuck this origin” “did you know about this other provenance” guide to a collection. Or to…