June 28, 2014

Hemispheric Institute’s 9th Encuentro, held at Concordia University in Montréal, has come to an end. Encuentro, which is part academic conference, part performance festival, is an amazing place to share work, learn, and be inspired. This year my contributions included an instillation, a performance art piece, and participation in a round table.

I had the privilege of participating in an Artist Round Table for visual artists facilitated by Lorie Novak with David Widgington, Julio Pantoja, Emory Douglas (Black Panthers), Eve Mia Rollow & Saul Kak (EDELO).

I spoke about my video installation work, digShift, my performance Lifting Stone, and my relationship with land and stone as a queer feminist settler living under white supremacist heteronormative patriarchy.

You can watch my talk online (15:35-25:40) and visit my blog post about Lifting Stone.

 

David Widgington recently completed an MA Media Studies at Concordia University. He has had 3 protest banner exhibits over the past year and co-edited À force d’imagination: affiches & artéfacts du mouvement étudiant au Québec 1958-2013. He is creating an interactive web archive of artefacts from Québec’s historic 2012 protest movement.

Julio Pantoja is a documentary photographer, journalist and professor at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Director of the Documentary Photography Biennale in Argentina. Founding member of the cooperative agency SudacaPhotos, which specializes in Latin America. He is the director of the Infoto agency.

Zapantera Negra—a presentation of the Zapatista/Black Panther project by Emory Douglas, Mia Eve Rollow, and Saul Kak—is the result of a series of meetings between Emory, the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, and Indigenous activists from Chiapas, Mexico. Staged between 2012-2014, these meetings between Emory, and Zapatista  painters and embroidery collectives resulted in a slew of textile and visual works that are housed within a large canvas tent within the gallery.

Emory Douglas, Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the 1980s, created the visual identity for the Black Panther Party. His iconic ‘Militant Chic’ images came to symbolize the struggles of the movement. Douglas continues to create art with social and political concerns transcending borders.

 

Lorie Novak is an artist and Professor of Photography and Imaging at NYU Tisch School of Arts. Her photographs, installations, and Internet projects have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her ongoing Collected Visions project, exploring how family photographs shape our memory, was one of the earliest interactive storytelling sites when it launched in 1996. She also initiated and co-directs the Photography & Imaging department’s community collaboration program, www.photoandimaging.net/coco, where P&I students teach photography and digital imaging to NYC high school students, and is Chair of the Visual Arts Steering Committee at NYU.