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Aruna D’Souza, Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Spring 2022, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art

In this lecture, Aruna D’Souza will consider fundamental questions about the power dynamics inherent in writing about art. How might art historians and critics write about the art of others—of artists who are dealing with histories of and creating work for racialized, minoritized, colonized communities of which one might not be a part—without resorting to extractive models of writing? How might one pursue curiosities without treading on what poet and theorist Édouard Glissant calls “the right to opacity” of our objects of study?

D’Souza’s talk will draw on lessons from artists and writers who challenge us to sit with silence, secrecy, and invisibility.

Feminist Solidarities and Kinships
The Feminist Art Project’s Day(s) of Panels at the College Art Association 110th Conference
Zoom | Free and open to the public

WEBINAR REGISTRATION

Collective feminist work and activism in support of Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement and, more recently, against anti-Asian violence and hate has brought outpourings of solidarity from artists and other cultural workers across the globe. Along with protests against restrictive legislation of transgender rights and women’s reproductive health, this activism has also initiated important debates over what form such solidarities should take to demand justice and to best serve and sustain artistic and political mobilizations. The Feminist Art Project’s 2022 Day(s) of Panels addresses the possibilities and limitations of coalition building in current and historical feminist solidarity practices. It asks: what are the strategies posed and challenges faced by such practices, how have their affiliated kinships formed, developed, and shifted over time, and what role do visual arts and cultural work play in these processes?

History has demonstrated that solidarity is a complex and, at times, paradoxical term, the intentions and actions of which risk replicating rather than dismantling longstanding systems of power and knowledge, of reaffirming rather than dismantling fixed identity categories. Still, in its interrogation of the inevitable challenges of feminist solidarity practices, TFAP’s Day(s) of Panels does not abandon the possibilities afforded by togetherness whole cloth. Instead, it draws inspiration from Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s contention that solidarity “is always an active achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences” (2004). The process comes about through the collective pursuit of justice while standing with others.

To that end, this Day(s) of Panels explores feminist solidarities and kinships in the arts that have been formed through cross-cultural and transnational alliances and via collectives, communities, and institutions. Through papers and performances, it considers how visual artists and cultural workers, past and present, have sought to balance the universal and the particular in order to galvanize around pressing global issues, including but not limited to sexual rights, economic inequity and precarity, resurgent patriarchy, antiracist alliances, and decolonial imperatives regarding Indigenous rights and sovereignties. Presentations focus on informal artist networks and grassroots endeavors as well as the role played by art institutions and exhibitions in fostering or, conversely, inhibiting connections. Through these multiple and layered iterations, TFAP’s Day(s) of Panels considers feminist solidarities and kinships in all their intricacies and imperfections so as to suggest how a more reflexive and capacious understanding of their possibilities and predicaments will lead to a fuller understanding of their future values.

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Schedule

PRESENTER ABSTRACTS AND BIOS

FRIDAY 5:00 – 6:30pm EST | FRIDAY WEBINAR REGISTRATION
TFAP Feminist Solidarities and Kinships, Panel 1 – Collectives and Communities
Opening with introductory remarks, this panel explores how art collectives and communities build feminist solidarity and kinships and what strategies, especially related to collaboration and reciprocity, these affiliations offer for feminist solidarity organizing in the arts.
Gabrielle Moser, Assistant Professor, York University
Feminist Killjoys and Symbolic Mothers: Strategies for Intergenerational Collaboration in the Arts
Patricia Nguyen, Visiting Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
Mutual Aid Aesthetics and Imaging the Commons
Imani A. Wadud, Ph.D. candidate, University of Kansas
“Dark Adaptations”: Community of Color Makers and the Politics of Black Feminist Praxis

FRIDAY 6:30 – 8:00pm EST | FRIDAY WEBINAR REGISTRATION
TFAP Feminist Solidarities and Kinships, Panel 2 – Global Sisterhoods
This panel considers how global “sisterhoods” are conceptualized through art and visual culture practices and some of the pressing issues facing feminist art formations of intersectional and global sisterhoods. Keynote by Nicole Marroquin.
Josely Carvalho, Independent artist
The Bridge
Paloma Checa-Gismero, Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College 
A Solidarity-Oriented Analytical Framework
Nicole Marroquin, Associate Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Fighting as Form: Tracing Liberation Roadmaps

SATURDAY 12:30 – 2:00pm EST | SATURDAY WEBINAR REGISTRATION
TFAP Feminist Solidarities and Kinships, Panel 3 – Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces 
This panel explores how exhibitions and curatorial spaces have functioned as sites of feminist coalition and kinship building as well as how these sites have worked (or not) to reconfigure global power relations and identity formations.
Claire Kovacs, Curator of Collections + Exhibitions, Binghamton University Art Museum
Hiss on Passivity, Hiss on Patriarchy: The Curatorial Praxis of the SisterSerpents
Rebecca Uchill, UMass Darthmouth
Connecting the Threads: Nancy Holt’s Massachusetts
Sadia Shirazi, ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow, Johns Hopkins University
Slow Curating
Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Associate Professor, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
Curating Queer, Feminist, Asian Archipelagos

SATURDAY 2:00 – 3:30pm EST | SATURDAY WEBINAR REGISTRATION
TFAP Feminist Solidarities and Kinships, Panel 4 – Labor
This panel takes up how feminist scholars, cultural workers, and artists have worked collectively to challenge histories of labor exploitation and attending concerns around social, economic, and environmental abuses.
Emily Hanako Momohara, Associate Professor, Art Academy of Cincinnati
Fruits of Labor: Migration and Agriculture
Shannan L. Hayes, Visiting Assistant Professor, Haverford College
Art and Social Reproduction
Nicole Archer, Assistant Professor, Montclair State University
All Stitched Up: Gendered Labor and the Flagging of Empire
Melissa Potter, Associate Professor, Columbia College Chicago
Labors Lost: Missing Histories of Women Creatives and Changemakers

SATURDAY 4:00 – 5:30pm EST | SATURDAY WEBINAR REGISTRATION
TFAP Feminist Solidarities and Kinships, Panel 5 – Anti-Imperialist and Decolonial Solidarities
This panel examines how decolonial and anti-imperialist imperatives, especially as they relate to memory and knowledge formation as well as self-determination and sovereignty, have shaped feminist solidarity practices in the arts as well as some of the benefits and limitations of seeing these struggles in interconnected terms. Keynote by Aruna D’Souza.

Andrea Carlson, Independent artist
The Long Knives: Towards Ending Indigenous Displacement
Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Professor, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY, and Yajaira Saavedra, La Morada Mutual-Aid Kitchen
Archives in Common: Building a Situated Account of Mutual Aid Organizing and a Demand for Accountability
Aruna D’Souza, Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
But what if the tower got built?: The Political Possibilities of Misunderstanding

Free registration here

Contemporary artist and educator Zoë Charlton and art historian and critic Aruna D’Souza will be in conversation discussing social themes.

About this event

Contemporary artist and educator Zoë Charlton and art historian and critic Aruna D’Souza will be in conversation discussing the social themes throughout Zoë’s artistic practice and her current projects as well as both speakers’ experiences engaging the ethics of institutions within specific communities and audiences.

The Black Studies Project at UC San Diego has invited Andrea Chung to be their Artist in Residence. As part of the residency, Andrea has invited Zoë Charlton and Aruna D'Souza to participate in a discussion, co-sponsored by the Department of Visual Arts.

https://visarts.ucsd.edu/news-events/index.html

Register for on-site or virtual attendance at the link

In the 50 years since the publication of Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” the art world—and the world itself—has changed in dramatic ways. This talk will explore what a text published in 1971 might teach us still, in the wake of Black Lives Matter; global protests against deepening inequalities, especially those tied to gender; and the influence of Black feminist thought and intersectional analysis.

This special Forum on Contemporary Photography, will take place via Zoom on Wednesday, April 21, from 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada). This event is dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the pioneering art historian Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ARTnews, 1971). Recognized as a keystone of feminist art theory, this incisive essay along with its 2001 follow-up reappraisal, “Thirty Years Later,” a text highlighting the development of intersectional feminisms during the 1990s, changed the makeup of art history by exposing the institutional barriers to the visual arts that women have historically faced. As a scholar and pedagogue, Nochlin perceptively expressed how art criticism and social activism could inform the struggles against systemic inequality and exclusion.

We would like to celebrate the occasion as it also historicizes and illuminates more recent shifts in the world (#MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements) and the discipline of feminist critical theory that have made possible the understanding of Nochlin’s prescient interventions. This event will salute Nochlin and her contributions to feminism as well as her profound impact on the history of modernism. 

Featured speakers:

Farah Al Qasimi, artist and musician
Myriam Ben Salah, Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
Aruna D'Souza, writer and curator
John Edmonds, artist
Jennifer Higgie, Editor at Large, frieze magazine
Zoe Leonard, artist
Wanda Nanibush, Curator, Indigenous Art, Art Gallery of Ontario
Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art on the Mary Conover Mellon Chair, Vassar College
Catherine Opie, artist 
Legacy Russell, Associate Curator of Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem
Ming Smith, artist
Lanka Tattersall, Curator of Drawings and Prints, MoMA
Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA
Julia Trotta, filmmaker, curator, and writer
Hulleah J Tsinhnahjinnie, artist and Professor, Department of Native American Studies, UC Davis

Please click the link below to join the webinar on April 21, 2021:
https://moma.zoom.us/j/97448232038

This Forum is co-organized by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator of Photography, MoMA, and filmmaker, curator, and writer Julia Trotta.

For more information click here.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first full-career retrospective of an artist who has been at the heart of developments in performance, conceptual photography, and feminist art since 1980. Co-curator Aruna D’Souza will discuss the importance of O’Grady’s work and the implications of the show for those thinking about Black subjectivity, the entrenched segregation of the art world, the relationship between self and history, and a politics of engagement in contemporary art.

Zoom Meeting ID: 928 8428 6647
Passcode: UOHAA

For more information click here.

Aruna D'Souza, writer, critic, and co-curator of the Brooklyn Museum’s special exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, hosts an evening of readings and conversation in honor of the publication of Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019. Explore the entwined practices of art and writing as artists Chloë Bass, Jarrett Ernest, Nayland Blake, and Anais Duplan on the writings of conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, who for more than forty years has explored the complex relationship between text and image. Each participant focuses on a different text in the anthology, which includes statements, scripts, interviews, and previously unpublished notes spanning the evolution of O’Grady’s performance work and conceptual photography, as well as her many published critical essays on art, music, and culture.

This program is free, but please RSVP; a Zoom link will be emailed upon confirmation. Add a copy of the book at checkout.

Captioning for this program is available on Zoom. To request additional accommodations, such as American Sign Language interpretation, email us at access@brooklynmuseum.org.

6PM ET | 5PM CT | 3PM PT
For more information and to register click here.

ArtTable’s Curatorial Perspective program series invites curators to present and discuss timely exhibitions and initiatives. Please join us for a discussion with Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and writer and co-curator of the exhibiton, Aruna D’Souza, for a discussion of the Lorraine O’Grady retrospective currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum.

Image: Lorraine O’Grady (American, born 1934). Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in White eats coconut and looks away from the action, 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slides in 48 parts, 16 × 20 in. (40.64 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8, plus 2 AP. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

6:30–7:30 PM EST
Thursday, February 25
Livestream available at https://pmvabf.org/Programs

Editors Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam will lead a conversation with Mel Chin, Aruna D’Souza, Hyperlink Press, and Patrick Jaojoco, all contributors to Paper Monument’s new anthology, Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts. Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, the seventy three letters collected in Best! ignite new ways of being and modes of creating at a moment of racial reckoning. The panelists will read from their letters, discuss Best!‘s origins, and touch on topics such as how the project shifted throughout 2020, the intimacy and complexity of the epistolary form, and the urgency of moving beyond and exploding open the model-minority myth.

Thursday, February 18 at 4-5PM EST
St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia PA
Register here.

A discussion between gallerist Aisha Khan and Critic Aruna D’Souza on how looking at diaspora artists, including Lorraine O’Grady and Baseera Khan, can offer ideas for negotiating anti-Blackness in the US, and create possibilities for solidarity and visibility among communities of color. Moderated by St. Joseph’s University professor Martha Easton.

College Art Association Annual Conference
Friday, February 12, at 2PM EST
Panelists: Rebecca Uchill, Caitlin Cherry, Dee Marie Hamilton, Ana María León, Dushko Petrovich; Discussants: Aruna D’Souza, Paul Chan

ALT-CAA Q&A
Friday, February 12, at 2:45PM EST

Join panelists from the CAA panel “Whitewalling: 3 Years Later” for an open Q and A. View the panel recording here: https://ruchill.wistia.com/medias/qeucvceith. Join conversation here: https://umassd.zoom.us/j/96313579786?pwd=L1lhTzFTc2lGem5BVFdRcFEyVUhqZz09.

Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, authored by critical arts writer Aruna D’Souza, takes on one of the most memorable exhibition controversies of recent years. The inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Whitney Biennial sparked protests and conversations about race-based power dynamics and institutional conditions. Whitewalling places these events into historical context by examining two significant precedent “acts” from New York City exhibition history. The book has been in avid, urgent public conversation since its 2018 publication by artist Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited press. Whitewalling was a radical act of publication and a consequential catalyst for dialogue across many spheres of contemporary art discourse. 

This panel invites reflections on Whitewalling in form and content. How, if at all, have landscapes of exhibitions and representations of racial identity and positionality changed in the brief but active timeframe since its publication? How does the book figure into broader shifts in the historiography of the long “contemporary,” including reconsiderations of avant-garde exhibition venues and the problematics of poststructuralism? What lessons can we learn about writing about—and for—the contemporary era, in looking at the quick production timeline for this project, its use of social media citations as primary sources, and the publication of art criticism by an artist-run press? The panel invites artists, art historians, curators, publishers and others to discuss Whitewalling and its themes of protest, public culture, and structural racism in American museums, canons, and society. Aruna D’Souza and Paul Chan will be featured discussants.

The Visual Representation, Materiality, and the Medium Seminar at Harvard's Mahindra Center for the Humanities is excited to host art critic and scholar Aruna D'Souza for her lecture, "Lorraine O'Grady: Self and History."

REGISTER HERE

Ulrich Museum of Art
Tuesday, February 9 at 6PM CST/7PM EST
Register for the webinar here.

REGISTER HERE

In recent years, reports of toxic personal behavior have led to the reconsideration—and sometimes outright “canceling”—of the work of many artists, from living filmmakers to long-deceased painters. For some, these reckonings are necessary to develop a supportive and accountable community. For others, it conflates the art with the artist and represents inappropriate censorship. 

What are the responsibilities of museums when dealing with archives of deceased artists who behaved badly? Should there be a scale for bad behavior—from misdemeanor to atrocity—that factors into decision making? This panel will continue the conversation about the feasibility of separating the art from the artist and discuss how museums navigate moral challenges in assessing their collections.

Panelists

Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminism and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her most recent book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts, was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times.

Erich Hatala Matthes is associate professor of philosophy at Wellesley College. His research deals with the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of cultural heritage and the environment.

Bill T. Jones is a Tony-award winning dancer, choreographer, and author. He is artistic director of New York Live Arts.

Martha Lucy is deputy director for research, interpretation and education at the Barnes Foundation. She has written extensively about the Barnes’s Renoir collection.

Moderator

Paula Marantz Cohen is dean of the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. She is also a distinguished professor of English and coeditor of the Journal of Modern Literature.

This online event will be recorded for later broadcast as an episode of the PBS-distributed series The Civil Discourse.

This annual program supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art is Feminism in American Art History, a two-part symposium consisting of eight prerecorded lectures and a live panel discussion moderated by Steven Nelson, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The speakers—Kirsten Pai Buick, Aruna D’Souza, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Lisa Farrington, Jessica Horton, Jenny Lin, Helen Molesworth, and Jennifer Van Horn—reveal the latest thinking in the history and historiography of feminism and gender in American art. The symposium is held in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Linda Nochlin’s landmark essay of 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” and in honor of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

This symposium is organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The Trustees of the National Gallery of Art are grateful to the Wyeth Foundation for American Art for making this symposium possible.

VIEW VIDEO PRESENTATIONS

Available here.

ONLINE EVENT
Live Panel Discussion
December 11, 3:30 p.m.

Join us for a discussion with all eight symposium presenters (Kirsten Pai Buick, Aruna D’Souza, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Lisa Farrington, Jessica Horton, Jenny Lin, Helen Molesworth, and Jennifer Van Horn), moderated by Steven Nelson, dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

REGISTER HERE

Forms of Reparations: The Museum & Restorative Justice is a virtual symposium presented by the Museum & Curatorial Studies students of CSULB

About:

Pressure is mounting for museums to become self-critical about the ways in which they perpetuate institutional trauma on historically excluded communities. Activist groups and artist collectives, as well as intellectuals, scholars, and community members are demanding more tangible acts of restitution. But, how are the institutions themselves responding?

Forms of Reparations: The Museum and Restorative Justice, is a speaker series focusing on the present state of decolonization within museums, identifying and articulating the many subtle ways by which cultural institutions sustain white supremacy, imperialism, and exploitation.

This series invites leading scholars, activists, and artists to present lectures, workshops, and participate in panel discussions, addressing questions such as: What exactly does it mean to decolonize the museum? Has the recent currency awarded to the term decolonization taken away its original revolutionary intent? Can institutions and activists work together, or are they doomed to occupy opposing sides? Is it possible to genuinely decolonize museums?

Registration:

All talks and presentations will take place via Zoom & offered via a youtube livestream. Zoom meeting capacity is limited & requires registration, Youtube livestream will be avaiable for all overflow and asynchronous viewing. 

To receive Zoom meeting and youtube livestream links, please, register via eventbrite ticketing.

Schedule: 

Dates and times for presentation by Decolonize This Place and panel discussion with Kimberli Meyer & lauren woods TBA.

• Wednesday, September 23rd, 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST: Chaédria LaBouvier, Intellectual Labor and Institutional Violence 

• Monday, September 28th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST: Dr. Atreyee Gupta, Non-alignment and Decolonization

• Wednesday, September 30th 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST: Alma Ruiz, The Potential of Los Angeles Art Museums

• Monday, October 5th 5:00 - 6:30 PM PST: Edgar Heap of Birds, Visiting Artist Talk

• Wednesday, October 7th 1:00 - 2:30 PM PST: La Tanya S Autry, Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, & Laura Raicovich in Conversation, Dismantling the Master’s House and Collective Perseverance. Moderated by Dr. Nizan Shaked

For More Information:

Visit www.wedemandreparations.com

Email: csulb.soa.mcsgrad@gmail.com

Tuesday, October 6 / 7-8:15pm CT (8-9.30pm ET)
Presented virtually - free and open to everyone

We are very excited to announce that the author of "Whitewalling: Art Race and Protest in 3 Acts", Aruna D'Souza, will be joining us virtually on October 6th at 7pm to present her research, followed by a relevant discussion with the artists Sami Ismat, Aram Han Sifuentes and Jeanette Arellano and curator Danielle Paswaters to discuss the UWM Union Art Gallery exhibition Here to Stay: Braving Barriers Through Performance.

Sign up here.

Clarice Smith Lecture Series: Aruna D’Souza
Smithsonian Museum of American Art
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2020
6:30 – 7:30PM EDT

Join author and art historian Aruna D’Souza for an online lecture about modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminisms, and how museums shape our views of each other and our world. This program is part of our annual Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art series which highlights excellence and innovation in American art with outstanding artists, critics, and scholars. Log in and learn more from D’Souza whose most recent book Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited) was named one of the best art books of 2018. The Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art series is made possible by the generosity of Clarice Smith.

REGISTER HERE.

Hungry Listening: A conversation between Aruna D’Souza and Dylan Robinson
Monday, September 14 at 1pm EST
ICI Online
Register for this Online event here
FREE and open to the public

Join us to listen to a conversation between Aruna D’Souza, writer and curator, and Dylan Robinson, author of Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies and Co-Curator of ICI’s Traveling Exhibition, Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts. A previously recorded conversation on Robinson’s new book, Hungry Listening, will be followed by a live Q&A. 

Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives, and a critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies.” In addition examples of how decolonial practices of listening emerge from an increased awareness of listening positionality, Hungry Listening includes a series of event scores, dialogic improvisations, and forms of poetic response and refusal that demand a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening.

This program is co-presented with the Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, where Soundings is on view September 8 - December 6, 2020. The exhibition will be activated by a series of performances throughout the fall, so please click here to stay up to date on all Soundings programs at the Belkin.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

D’Souza will present a public conversation, “Against Empathy: The Value of Mistranslation in Art and Life,” which will be followed by a discussion with Edinboro professor Dr. Charlotte H. Wellman with Erie educator Cheryl Rush Dix.

Edinboro faculty members Dr. Leslie C. Sotomayor (art education) and Dr. Rhonda Matthews (political science) will also lend their expertise during this free event, which will be available for livestream on Edinboro’s YouTube channel.

Newark Museum
July 12, 2020
2:00 pm

Join writer Arruna D’Souza as we explore the intersections of social justice and the art world.  In her work, D'Souza focuses on modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics,  and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her most recent book Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts” was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times.This session will be accessible on Zoom and Facebook Live. 

Stream the talk here.

MFA Art Practice kicks off its summer residency with a lecture from writer and critic Aruna D'Souza. Join on Zoom.

D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics, and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her most recent book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts(Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by The New York Times. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, ArtNews, Garage, Bookforum, Momus, Art in America and Art Practical, among other places. 

Free and open to the public

Aruna D’Souza’s recent book Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts and Steven Nelson’s forthcoming On the Underground Railroad, for all their differences of subject matter and approach, share a common desire to move beyond academic prose in order to find new modes of writing about history and understanding audience in their explorations of the historic and contemporary complexities of race, race relations, and racism in the United States. 
 
Steven Nelson’s forthcoming book On the Underground Railroad traces the author’s roadtrip from Mobile, Alabama to St. Catharines, Ontario during summer 2009. It explores Underground Railroad locales and lore, extant escape narratives, archives, and interviews. Sometimes with intellectual distance; often without it, this book, is part art historical treatise, part historical study, part literary work, part travelogue, and part memoir. Residing in the murkiness of fact, fiction and the making of myth, this book considers the centrality of the Underground Railroad and the complicated nature of race in American life. 
 
Aruna D’Souza’s Whitewalling addresses three moments in the history of Black protest of art institutions in the US, from 1969 to 2017: the first, the controversy around Dana Schutz’s contribution to the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a painting of Emmett Till that was decried by many for its irresponsible appropriation of an image of violence and pain; the second, a 1969 exhibition at the independent gallery Artist’s Space whose title incorporated the most incendiary racist epithet in the English language; and the third, the 1969 show “Harlem on My Mind” at the Metropolitan Museum. In its form, the book makes a case for a form of writing in which history and advocacy are inextricably linked.

Aruna D’Souza is a writer based in Western Massachusetts whose work focuses on art, intersectional forms of politics, and museums. Her most recent book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts was published in 2018. She is a regular contributor to 4Columns, and serves on its advisory board. She is editor of the forthcoming volumes Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973-2019 and Linda Nochlin: Making it Modern, and co-curator of a Lorraine O’Grady retrospective that will open at the Brooklyn Museum in November 2020. 
 
Steven Nelson, professor of art history at UCLA, is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and tresurer of the National Committee for the History of Art. In addition to his award-winning 2007 book, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa, his writings attend to the arts and architecture of Africa and it diasporas. He is completing two books titled,  “Structural Adjustment: Mapping, Geography, and the Visual Cultures of Blackness,” and “On The Underground Railroad.”
 

Against Empathy: The Value of Mistranslation in Art and in Life

The Decolonial Teaching in Action program of the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion welcomes Aruna D’Souza.

In our increasingly fragmented and political sphere, many people embrace the idea that empathy is a vital tool to achieve understanding each other, and by turn a more just society. But what if misunderstanding - the mistranslation that exists at the heart of all communication - enriches our experience of the world? What if, instead of seeking to understand each other, we were better off learning to accept that we might never understand - and work for justice regardless?

Starting with Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies and touching on the work of a number of artists, including Raqs Media Collective, Nina Katchadourian, and others, this talk will explore the possibilities that are offered when we allow the frictions of mistranslation to frame out view of the world and structure our institutions.

Aruna D’Souza, author of Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Actsfor its inaugural public lecture. D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Momus, Art in Americ, and Art Practical, among other places. She is currently editing two forthcoming volumes, Making It Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader and Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space 1973–2018. She is co-curator of the upcoming retrospective of Lorraine O’Grady’s work, Both/And, which will open in November 2020 at the Brooklyn Museum

February 3 2020
6 – 7:30 PM
Sony Square NYC

Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and writer and critic Aruna D’Souza discuss Wodiczko’s process of creating Monument.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is not required but appreciated. To RSVP, click here.

January 16 2020
6:00pm to 9:00pm
Pérez Art Museum Miami

New members are invited to attend an artful evening celebrating the best that Pérez Art Museum Miami has to offer, including a members-only conversation between writer Aruna D'Souza and featured special exhibition artist Teresita Fernández. Enjoy complimentary beer and wine, mingle with other art-lovers, and celebrate your support with PAMM staff.