Finnegan Shannon is a multidisciplinary artist whose work experiments with access and ableist assumptions. At Wheaton this semester, they will explore Alt text as poetry in an ongoing collaborative project with students. After the artist’s talk, Beard and Weil Galleries will be open for students to talk to Finnegan and hear more about joining the project.
Presented by the Evelyn Danzig Haas ’39 Visiting Artists Program.
Over the last half century, hip hop has taken over the world. Its beginning is marked by Cindy and Clive Campbell’s (aka DJ Kool Herc) legendary back-to-school party held in the Bronx on August 11, 1973. Since that time, hip hop has spread around the globe, lending its influence to innumerable spaces. Style is one of the most pervasive and visible manifestations of the culture, and twenty- first century fashion, from luxury labels to everyday dress, owes a debt to hip hop. Join Associate Curator Elizabeth Way to discuss her recent exhibition celebrating hip hop style at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Ms. Way will also discuss her curatorial specializations, impactful Black designers in American fashion and the historical evolution of fashion systems rooted in American slavery.
Soloway is the creator of the groundbreaking Amazon series Transparent, a poignant comedy that artfully explores identity, love, sex, god, and boundaries through the lives of a complicated American family. Other contributions to American/Jewish/Feminist/Trans culture include the critical I Love Dick, adapted from the novel by Chris Kraus and the Sundance award winning film Afternoon Delight. Soloway will discuss their creative process and career in a Q&A style conversation.
Join us for a conversation with Museum founder Debra Britt and educator Beth Danesco. They will share the story of the creation of the National Black Doll Museum and the rich history of Black doll makers and collectors in the Massachusetts area.
Artist Shaquora R’ Bey will share her history as a doll maker and soft sculptor. Bey is an artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including textiles, crotchet, beads, and unique hair designs. She has been commissioned to make sculptures and dolls for television and films. She believes in the healing process of using craft as therapy and in using art to raise self-esteem and awareness. Her soft sculptures, which she describes as “the embodiment of femininity and masculinity,” are featured in What Only You Can Make in the Beard and Weil Galleries.
Writer Kim Adrian reads from her memoir “The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet” and discusses growing up with the confusion and chaos of mental illness and generational trauma. A brief Q&A will follow this lunchtime event.
Mourning in the abandoned industrial landscape, holding space in the detritus of capitalism: how can we turn symbols of death into the practice of life? Public Art at Wheaton (PAAW) invites you to hear from the artist behind its most recent addition. Zibby Jahns will introduce their work Reckoning Place, which was just installed in Everett Courtyard, and talk about their artistic practice.
The Center for Social Justice and Community Impact, in partnership with Safe Zone at Wheaton, invites you to join Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, authors of the book “LOVING: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s” in a discussion and Q&A-style program.
In-person seating is first come, first served. Register on Engage here. You can register for the live Zoom here!
“In the late 1990’s Neal & Hugh started collecting photographs purely by accident. The first photograph came from an antique store in Dallas. The photograph was of two men in a loving embrace mixed within random photos of a Dallas neighborhood from the 1920s. [Their] collection of over 2800 vintage photos of romantic couples spanning the 100 years between the 1850s and 1950s is the basis for [their] book.
LOVING: A Photographic History shines a new light on the most written about, dramatized, or filmed emotions — love. The pages of our book portray love, but also courage — the courage that it took to memorialize that unmistakable look that occurs between two people in love. LOVING: A Photographic History celebrates a loving past. A past that points towards the future. It’s message is for everyone. It’s universal.”
Feel free to send questions, comments, or accessibility concerns to [email protected].
Patricia Encarnación and Crys Yin will share their artwork and discuss how their art practice connects with their activist work. Yin’s paintings, drawings and sculptures deal with cultural misconnections and embrace the comedic side of personal experiences. Encarnación is an Afro-Dominican artist who explores perceptions of being Caribbean through quotidian objects, landscapes, and the aesthetics she was exposed to growing up in her homeland, the Dominican Republic. Both artists have work currently on display in To Scatter or Sow: Diaspora in Contemporary Art in the Beard and Weil Galleries. Join us on zoom for the virtual presentation and conversation.
Join us for a conversation with artists Jessica Fuquay, Kara Güt, and jazsalyn from the 2021 Wheaton Biennial, an open-call exhibition focused on new media and juried by author and curator, Legacy Russell. Presented virtually, this exhibition includes artists whose work challenges and celebrates new media. As with past Biennials, our definition is boundary-pushing and inclusive, seeking a diverse range of experimental work, collectively evoking an open-ended conversation.
Jessica Fuquay is a Colombian American interdisciplinary artist, composer, and DJ currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. She makes videos, performances, and sound compositions that activate the embedded histories of specific sites and events through sustained observation, listening, and sometimes intervention. She is currently a second-year MFA Candidate at Carnegie Mellon School of Art in Pittsburgh, PA and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME and Project Row Houses in Houston, TX.
Kara Güt‘s work investigates the new shape of human intimacy formed by internet lifestyle, constructed detachment from reality, and the power dynamics of the virtual. Using image and screen-based media, she questions ownership of digital spaces and how they mirror or perpetuate oppressive systems. The resulting pieces are subversions of power: at times manifesting as imperfect relics attempting to perform a hidden and ineffable magic, or long-form video essays haunting the devices they inhabit. Employing tropes of absurdist humor mixed with existential dread, her work pokes at the underpinnings of internet culture by appropriating the subgenres of the post-digital patriarchal industrial complex.
jazsalyn (she/her), work begins where fiction and reality collide. As an anti-disciplinary artist, she weaves together new media and activism as methodology to decolonize and re-indigenize the future of art, design, and social practices.
As the Creative Director of black beyond, a radical platform for artists and activists to define alternate realities for Blackness, jazsalyn collaborates with BIPOC and non-BIPOC co-liberators to reconstruct, reclaim and reimagine Black (Indigineous) narratives.
Her work has been featured in publications such as CULTURED Magazine, Vogue.com, The New Yorker, and Huffington Post. Exhibitions and panels such as TEDx Durham and Textiles as a Second Skin at MoogFest.