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
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
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