BLACK ERR/OR

Instructors: Derrais Carter and Anya Wallace

Black Err/Or explores drafts, punctuation, revision, and black feminist poetics. In this class, we’ll discuss process, practice, and criticism as it pertains to the creative exploration of black interior life. Through “Err/Or” we immerse ourselves in worlds of our own, making and pursuing lines of thought with no discernable end, and wade in ambivalence.



DERRAIS (pronounced like Paris) CARTER is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist. Carter’s creative practice includes art books, experimental essays, and micro-essays. Guiding his creative process is a persistent desire to use archival texts and Black critical theory to narrate and engage Black life. He is currently completing black girls: an archive with Sharita Towne. This unbound art book is a 10in x 10in x 10in cube containing poems written from the imagined perspective of Black girls in the Moens Scandal.

ANYA WALLACE received a Dual Ph.D. in Art Education and Women's Studies in 2019. In addition to her scholarship, she is a visual artist – with a concentration in black and white photography and painting. She received a BA from Agnes Scott College in Studio Art and Spanish and studied Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work in photography is shaped by a desire to visually narrate the stories of Black girlhood. She has worked in the service of girls through program and curriculum development with the Girl Scouts of the USA (Savannah, GA) and recently as director of MOCA, North Miami’s Women on the Rise! Outreach program for girls.

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF ABSTRACTION 101

Instructor: manuel arturo abreu

By invitation from CASSANDRA PRESS, as a pedagogical expression of home school, in this ten-week course, Dominican poet and artist manuel arturo abreu situates abstraction in a wider historical lineage, rejecting European modernism’s origin myth. Modernism and contemporary art are colonizations of abstraction, which is always already Black and brown, non-autonomous, socially-embedded, and functional in social and spiritual ways.

The course weaves together various media and disciplinary approaches to consider not only specific examples, but also philosophical implications of the alternative history of abstraction.




manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet and artist from the Bronx. abreu works in text, moving image, ephemeral sculpture, and what is at hand in a process of magical thinking with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. They have written two books of poetry and one book of critical theory, and also compose club-feasible worship as Tabor Dark, with eleven releases to date.

SONG.PRAYER.SCREAM.

Instructors: Jessica Lynne and Yaniya Lee

Song. Prayer. Scream. A Praxis Of Looking is a writing workshop that asks us to consider the ways artists offer pathways of escape from everyday oppressions—sites of pleasure outside expected forms of work, gender, family and desire. Each week, critics Yaniya Lee and Jessica Lynne will post a pre-recorded conversation that traces their thinking and questions around Blackness & Modernity, Black Technologies, Sousveillance, Repair & Healing & Pleasure. Theory, visual art, poetry, literature and music guide them through considerations of art criticism and new expansive ways of seeing.

YANIYA LEE is a writer and editor interested in the ethics of aesthetics. She has written for Vogue, Flash, FADER, Vulture, and VICE Motherboard. With curator Denise Ryner, she guest-edited the fall 2020 issue of Canadian Art magazine, Chroma, dedicated entirely to Black arts practices. She teaches Art Criticism at the University of Toronto and works as senior editor-at-large at Canadian Art.

JESSICA LYNNE is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, BOMB Magazine, The Nation, Frieze, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation.

WHITENESS DISSONANCE AND HORROR

Instructor: Kandis Williams

This course looks at Whiteness and the psychology of dissonance and psychopathy bred out of white supremacist ideation via American Horror films. Theorizing that Horror as a literary genre is a product of the white supremacist cultural imaginary, this class will look at horror motifs as the recognition of/ means of coping with the implications of white Beings and peoples in the perpetuation of brutal racial — colonialism violence, genocide and class warfare. We will use a comparative reading and mixed-media approach and discuss texts from the past and emerging canon of white authors on the horror of identity, such as Norman Mailer, Ted Kaczynski, and Robin Di Angelo, alongside critical race studies thinkers like Cheryl Harris, Lisa Lowe, and Jonathan Holloway to be screened with films by Clive barker, Bram Stokers, George Romero, Ari Aster, wes craven, Sam Raimi and more. This class will be screening and text heavy.

KANDIS WILLIAMS is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher and founder of Cassandra Press. Williams has received critical acclaim for her collage art, performance art, and publishing work. Williams, lives and works in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

LECTURE PERFORMA

Instructor: Rhea Dillon

Lecture Performa invites artists from across the diaspora* to engage in natural inquiry and critical thought through the medium of lecture-performance, via a digital platform. *I use the term diaspora here to refer to the mass dispersion of a population from its indigenous territories e.g. the removal of Africans through slavery, and most recently the migration, exile, and refugees of the Middle East The series was built from my desire and intrigue to give space to artists I admire from across the diaspora to present themselves and work that they may not have shared through their primary medium, instead, seen through an experimental lecture as medium.

RHEA DILLON is an artist, writer and poet based in London. Using video, installation, photography, painting & olfaction she examines and abstracts her intrigue of the ‘rules of representation’ to undermine contemporary Western culture. She is particularly interested in the self coined phrase ‘humane afrofuturism’ as a practice of bringing forward the humane and equality-led perspectives on how we visualise Black bodies. Her work has been exhibited at The British Film Institute, London; Mimosa House, London; Blank 100, London; Red Hook Labs, New York; Aperture Gallery, New York; Red Bull Film Festival, Los Angeles; & Sanam Archive, Accra Ghana. She is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London.