Rape, Representation, and Radicality |TFAP@CAA: The Feminist Art Project Day of Panels at the Annual College Art Association Conference 2019

RAPE, REPRESENTATION, AND RADICALITY
Intersectional feminist art has long dealt with the oppressions and violations stemming from colonialism, slavery, and couverture. Rape, Representation, and Radicality is a full-day symposium that will explore sex, power, and justice through intersectional art and activism, academics, and healing. The forum brings academic study, intellectual discourse, and visceral candor together to create a shared space and to demand bodily autonomy.

Rape, Representation, and Radicality will address how sexual assault has affected feminist art practices, and who has power and why. What institutional changes are needed to work towards sexual justice, and how do race and gender impact the experiences and responses within the context of contemporary feminist discourse? The hidden legacy of Women of Color, within the conversation about sexual violence, sexual empowerment, artistic praxis, and art history, must be re-contextualized and revised to be included accurately. The current cultural narrative around sexual violence necessitates re-orientation to include those who are left out of the conversation. This forum will present strategies to understand, rectify, reclaim and move forward towards healing.

Symposium Chairs:
Christen Clifford (Independent Artist; The New School) and Jasmine Wahi (School of Visual Arts; Project for Empty Space)

SCHEDULE:

8:30am – 10am
Welcome and Introductory remarks:
Connie Tell, The Feminist Art Project, Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities, Rutgers University 
Christen Clifford, Independent Artist, and The New School; and Jasmine Wahi, School of Visual Arts, and Project for Empty Space

The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.
Presenter: Monika Fabijanska, (Independent Curator)

Sexing the Canvas: The Rape of the Black Female Body in Art
Presenter: Indira Bailey (Penn State School of Visual Arts)

10:30am – 12pm
Gender, Sexuality, and Power: Social Activist Art Practices
Panelists: María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Vanderbilt University), Emma Sulkowicz (Independent Artist; Resident Artist, Museum of Arts and Design), Prerecorded: Suzanne Lacy (University of Southern California) and Leslie Labowitz (Independent Artist; Entrepreneur), Moderator: Vivien G. Fryd (Vanderbilt University)

12pm – 12:30pm    LUNCH BREAK

12:30pm – 2:00pm
Taking Back the Narrative Conversation between Jaishri Abichandani (Independent Artist) and Christen Clifford, (Independent Artist; The New School)

Performances
Bad Woman Katya Grokhovsky
Action IV Castellanos
Operation Catsuit Ayana Evans

2pm – 3:30pm
Rewriting Narratives in the #MeToo Moment
Panelists: Natalie Frank (Independent Artist), Carmen Hermo (Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art), Naima Ramos-Chapman (Writer/Director, Random Acts of Flyness!)

4pm – 5:30pm
Looking for Sexual Justice – Representing Sexual Violence Across Film and Video Art
Presenters: Kalliopi Minioudaki (Independent Scholar) What Rape Has to Do with Nanas? Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Daddy.”, and Talia Lugacy (The New School) Silence in Descent

Visible Invisibility: WoC in the Context of the #MeToo Movement
Presenters: Maria Hupfield (Independent Artist), Viva Ruiz (Independent Artist), Scheherazade Tillet (A Long Walk Home), Jasmine Wahi (School of Visual Arts; Project for Empty Space)

Healing Exercise and Finale
Christen Clifford and Jasmine Wahi

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Content Warning: Representatives from the Rutgers University Office of Violence Prevention & Victim Assistance will be present throughout the day.

As part of the Day of Panels, there will be an installation by Liliana Dirks-Goodman, House 1, 2, 3.
and…
What Rape Has to Do with Nanas? Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Daddy.”
Can be watched in entirety on Vimeo February 10 – 25, 2019
vimeo.com/148549795 (Pswd:NdSP) Courtesy of the Niki Charitable Art Foundation

Follow the digital exhibition on IG @rapeandrepresentation #TFAPatCAA #CAA2019 #RapeRepresentationRadicality / Make art about rape and representation? Submit to tfap2019@gmail.com

For more information contact:
Connie Tell
Director, The Feminist Art Project
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
640 Bartholomew Road #125a
Piscataway, NJ 08854
Phone: 848-932-3726
tfap@cwah.rutgers.edu

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Symposium Chair BIOS
Christen Clifford is a feminist performance artist, professor, curator, writer and mother currently working on her first film. She is a 2018 Feminist-in-Residence at Project for Empty Space, and 2018 Screen Forward Lab Fellow at the Independent Film Project.  She has presented work at The New Museum, Panoply Performance Lab, ArtshareLA, Grace Exhibition Space, Vox Populii, PS 122, Westbeth Gallery, Mesto Zensk, Art in Odd Places, SoHo20, Postmasters Gallery, Root Division, and Dixon Place, where she co-curates Experiments and Disorders. Her writing is published in The Guardian, Broadly, Filmmaker Magazine, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Culturebot and The Brooklyn Rail. Her essay “Mother Daughter Mustache” was in the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes and read by Molly Ringwald at Symphony Space on National Public Radio. She was a mainstage storyteller for The Moth at The National Arts Club and is a performer in Laura Parnes’ Tour Without End.  Clifford received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University and her Master of Fine Arts from The New School. She teaches at The New School where she focuses on Rape Culture, Sexual Justice, Contemporary Feminisms, and The Body in Performance Art. Clifford previously taught at SUNY Purchase and has been a visiting artist at MIT, NYU, American University. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Refinery 29, Mashable, Art in America, Artforum, and Bookforum. New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Ragdale, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts fellowships. She lives and works in Queens and online @cd_clifford, more info at christenclifford.info

Jasmine Wahi is a Curator, Activist, and a Founder and Co-Director of Project for Empty Space.  Her Practice predominantly focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multipositional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism.  In 2010, Ms. Wahi Co-Founded Project For Empty Space, a not-for-profit nomadic organization that creates multidisciplinary art exhibitions and programming that encourage social dialogue, education, and systematic change through the support of both artists and communities.  In 2015, Ms. Wahi joined Rebecca Jampol to open a brick and mortar gallery for PES Newark, NJ.  Though she does not consider herself to be an artist, Ms. Wahi has organized numerous interventions and happenings as part of her social activist work.  She will be serving as the Co-Chair for the College Art Association’s “Day of Panels” for The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) in 2018, organizing a day of intersectional feminist based performances, films, and conversations.  In addition to her work, Ms. Wahi a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts: MFA Fine Arts dpartment, where she teaches Intersectional Feminism and Art Making Praxis, and is a thesis advisor.  She has been a Master Class teacher for YoungArts, is a former board member of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC), and a volunteer instructor for the Girls Education Mentoring Service (GEMS) group.  Ms. Wahi’s curatorial work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Vogue India, Hyperallergic, VICE Impact, Whitewall Magazine, and ArtNet, to name a few.  For more information visit www.jasminewahi.com and/or www.projectforemptyspace.org, or on Instagram at @browngirlcurator.

Presenter BIOS
Monika Fabijanska is New York City-based art historian and independent curator specializing in women’s art and feminist art. She is the curator of critically acclaimed exhibition The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.at Shiva Gallery, John Jay College CUNY (2018). This concentrated survey of works by a diverse roster of women artists representing three generations, including Jenny Holzer, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, and Kara Walker, aimed to fill a gap in the history of art, where the subject is represented by countless historical depictions by male artists. Fabijanska’s research shows that rape constitutes one of central themes in women’s art, and the exhibition analyzed its rich iconography in all mediums. Fabijanska originated the idea and provided curatorial consulting and institutional support for The Museum of Modern Art acquisition and retrospective exhibition of the feminist sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (2012). She consulted on WACK! Art in the Feminist Revolution with curator Connie Butler (MoCA LA, 2007);and Global Feminisms with Maura Reilly (Brooklyn Museum, 2007). She produced and co-organized Architectures of Gender. Contemporary Women’s Art in Poland (SculptureCenter, 2003) with Aneta Szylak and Mary Ceruti.She holds Master of Arts degree in History of Art from the University of Warsaw.

Indira Bailey is an Art Education and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, PhD Candidate. Her research is on how K-12 Black women art educators’ recognize, negotiate, and/or challenge an outsider-within positionality in K-12 schools and in what ways to they collect and teach information about Black women artists. In March 2018, Bailey received the Africana Research Center Grant to travel and interview Ghanaian women art educators and how they implement their culture into their teaching and artist practice. She is currently serves as the Vice President of the Graduate Art Education Association (GAEdA) and was the former Vice President of the Graduates in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (GWGSS). Indira’s recent article, “Teaching while Black: The construction of race, class, and gender,” was published in the Spring/Summer 2018 edition of International Journal of Africana Studies, as the winner of the Terry Kershaw Student Essay Competition of the National Council ofBlack Studies. Prior to attending PSU, Indira taught commercial illustration and computer graphics in a Career Technical Education (CTE) high school in New Jersey for sixteen years. Indira received her B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Illustration and M.A. from Kean University in Educational Leadership & Supervision. She is also an accomplished artist, exhibiting her artwork throughout the New York City Tri-State Area. Currently is enjoying her newfound love of stain glass art. Bailey received several Fulbright-Hayes Fellowships to South Africa, Morocco and Japan Memorial Fellowship. She was the finalist for New Jersey Teacher of the Year, and national teacher fellowships. Academic Teaching Experience at PSU WMNST 106: Women & Gender in Literature, Art, and Popular Culture; INART 062: West African and African American Arts: From the 1960’s to the Present; ART 20, Introduction to Drawing; ART 122Y, Commentary on Art; and, Art Teacher Internship at the Restorative Justice Initiative (RJI) State Correctional Institution (SCI) Benner Township Prison, Bellefonte, PA.

Emma Sulkowicz is gender non-binary and uses the gender-neutralpronoun “they.” They are an American artist of Japanese-Chinese-Jewish descent who lives and makes art in their hometown, New York City. They earned a BFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2015, studied studio art in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and were the recipient of the 2018 Museum of Arts and Design Van Lier Fellowship. They are perhaps best known for their senior thesis at Columbia University –“Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)” –an endurance performance artwork in which they carried a dorm mattress everywhere on Columbia’s campus for as long as they attended the same school as their attacker. Their awards include the National Organization for Women’s Woman of Courage Award (2016) and Susan B. Anthony Award (2014), the United States Student Association’s National Student Movement Builder of the Year Award (2015), and the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine’s Ms. Wonder Award (2015).

María Magdalena Campos-Pons– not available

Vivien G. Fryd is a Professor in the History of Art Department at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the U.S. Capitol, 1815-1860 (1992);Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper (2003); and Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970 (2019). She has published articles on a variety of topics and artists, including nineteenth-century American sculpture, such as Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (1841-47) and Edmonia Lewis’ Beatrice Cenci (1855), Benjamin West, Thomas Hart Benton, Faith Ringgold, and Kara Walker. She was the Terra Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität, Berlin, fall 2012, where she began research for another book about her uncle who left Germany because of the Holocaust and became a photojournalist: A Berlin Flâneur: Henry Ries’ Photographs of Berlin, 1946-2004. She was awarded a Getty Foundation Grantfor an exhibition, The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, resulting in an exhibition catalogue; used the Spence and Rebecca Webb Wilson Fellowship to serve as the Director of the “Trauma Studies” program at The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University (2009-2010); and served as a Juror for Smithsonian’s Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art (2010-2012).

Jaishri Abichandani was born 1969 in Bombay, India, and immigrated to New York City in 1984. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, founding the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, http://www.sawcc.org/ , in New York (1997) and London (2004). Abichandani has exhibited her work internationally including at MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum, the IVAM in Valencia, House of World Cultures in Berlin, the Guangzhou Triennial etc. Jaishri served as the Founding Director of Public Events and Projects from 2003-6 at the Queens Museum. She organized Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, Queens International 2006 Everything All at Once and curated Her Stories:Fifteen Years of SAWCC. Abichandani has curated a trilogy of feminist science fiction based exhibitions at Rossi and Rossi in London along with several other projects. In 2017 Abichandani engineered a collaboration between the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Asia Society and the Queens Museum to organize a three day national convening of South Asian American artists, academics and curators; along with the exhibition “Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions”. She is currently curating the inaugural exhibitions for the new Ford Foundation Gallery, due to open March 2019. Abichandani‘s work is in the Burger Collection, Asia Art Archive Collection. She has been a resident of LMCC’s Process Space residency and honored by the Brooklyn Arts Council.

Katya Grokhovsky is an NYC based artist, independent curator, educator and a Founding Artistic Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) and Feminist Urgent (FU). Grokhovsky holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, Australia and a BA (Honors) in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. Grokhovsky has received support through numerous residencies and fellowships including Art and Law Fellowship, NYC, The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) Studios Program Residency, NYC, BRICworkspace Residency, NYC, Ox-BOW School of Art Residency, MI, Wassaic Artist Residency, NYC, BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, NYC, VOX Populi AUX Curatorial Fellowship, PA, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, NE, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, NY, NARS (New York Residency and Studio Foundation), NYC, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, NM, Watermill Center International Summer Residency, NY, and more. She has been awarded the Brooklyn Art Council Grant, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship, ArtSlant 2017 Prize, Asylum Arts Grant, Dame Joan Sutherland Fund, Australia Council for the Arts ArtSlant Grant, NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Freedman Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artist, Australia, and others.

Ayana Evans is a NYC based artist who was raised in Chicago. Evans received her MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her BA inVisual Arts from Brown University. In 2015 she received the Jerome Foundation’s Theater and Travel & Study Grant for artistic research abroad. During the summer of 2016 Evans completed her installment of the residency, “Back in Five Minutes” at El Museo Del Barrio in NYC. The next year she completed a 10 hour endurance based, citywide performance and 100 person performative dinner party in the Barnes Foundation museum (free and open to the public) during the Spring of 2017 for “A Person of the Crowd” whichwas a major performance art survey featuring artists such as, Marina Abramovic, Tania Bruguera and William Pope L. in Philadelphia, PA. Her international work includes FIAP, a performance festival in Martinique and Ghana’a Chale Wote festival which drew 30,000 people. Evans was a 2018 Fellow in the Studio Immersion Program at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, as well as, a 2018 resident and grant recipient at Artists Alliance Inc (NYC), and a 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art. Recently she completed her first solo exhibition at Medium Tings Gallery in Brooklyn, which featured two solo performances, interactive works and a talk with professor and scholar Uri McMillan. Evans is also a 2018 NYFA Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts. Her recent press includes articles on New York Magazine’s The Cut, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, BBC and CNN. She is currently a professor at Brown University.

IV Castellanos is a sculptor and abstract performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. IV is the founder of the of IV Soldiers Gallery 2014 and Founder in collaboration with Esther Neff of the Feminist Art Group. IV additionally has created work with the No Wave Performance Task Force, Social Health Performance Club and is in an ongoing performance collaboration with Amanda Hunt. Castellanos and Hunt are opening a new performance space named Parallel in February 2019.

Natalie Frank is an independent artist who explores contemporary discourse on feminism, sexuality, and violence. Recent drawings and books The Story of O;The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and a forthcoming, The Island of Happiness, the Tales of Mdm d’Aulnoy. Frank uses literature as a basis for her drawing and painting.Her gouache and chalk pastel drawings of the unsanitized Brothers Grimm tales, brings back, with Jack Zipes’ translations, aspects of incest,rape and physical violence left out of our familiar stories. The 2015 exhibition at the New York’s Drawing Center traveled to Blanton Museum, Austin and University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, accompanied by,Natalie Frank. Tales of the Brothers Grimm, published by Damiani, 2015. Frank earned BA from Yale University, 2002, and MFA from Columbia University, 2006.She is a Fulbright Scholar, Oslo, Norway.Her work isin the collections of the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum in NYC; Art Institute of Chicago; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and Yale University Art Museum, amongst others. In March 2019, a full length ballet based on Frank’s Grimm’s Tales drawings will open with Ballet Austin—she has collaborated on set, costume and textile design.

Carmen Hermo-not available

Naima Ramos-Chapman is from Brooklyn, New York. Currently a Writer & Director on the critically acclaimed HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness, Ramos-Chapman makes movement with body, word, image, silence, sound, and technology, that tell stories of transformation and understated bravery. Her stories stem from true events, incorporate magical realism, and seek to render psycho-spiritual realities we cannot see and juxtapose them alongside the brutal mundanities of everyday life. Her first short, AND NOTHING HAPPENED, explores the psychological aftermath of sexualized violence and premiered at the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival and screened in both national and international competitions. She was awarded Best Director of a Short Narrative at the Tacoma Film Festival, was a Sundance Institute 2017 Fellow, was an Artist-in-Residence for a Narrative Filmmaking Lab at Reel Works Teen Filmmaking for at-risk youth living in New York City, and co-facilitated a Virtual Reality Intensive for the School of Making Thinking. Her second short film, PIU PIU, is a surrealist thriller making its film festival rounds. It premiered at Blackstar Film Festival in 2018, won its first award—for best cinematography—at Tacoma Film Festival, and screening at Slamdance Film Festival in 2019 so far.

Kalliopi Minioudaki is an independent scholar and curator based in Athens and New York. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and specializes in post-war art from a feminist perspective. Her research has appeared in several publications and exhibition catalogues in Europe and the US, such as Teresa Burga: Aleatory Structures (Migros Museum, Zurich, 2018); Rosalyn Drexler: Who does she think she is? (Rose Art Museum, 2016); The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern, London, 2015). Minioudaki is author of “Unmasking and Reimag(in)ing the Feminine: Niki de Saint Phalle’s Mothers (in Niki de Saint Phalle, Grand Palais, 2014), Bejeweled Reveries: Niki de Saint Phalle’s Outdoor Wonders(Chicago, 2007.) and coeditor of Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 (University of the Arts and Brooklyn Museum, 2010). Recent projects include the special volume On the Cusp of Feminism: Women Artists in the Sixties (Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 2014); Carolee Schneemann: Infinity Kisses (The Merchant House, Amsterdam, 2015); Eleni Panouklia: Its Luminous Saying must be Left a Conjecture(Aisxylia, Eleysina 2016) and Sophia Petrides: No Hope For Death(Art Cinema Aavora, Athens 2017). Between 2015 and 2018 she was co-curator of the international video and performance art program of theStavros Niarchos Foundation annual summer festival Nostos at SNFCC, Athens.

Talia Lugacy-not available

Maria Hupfield is a multidisciplinary artist working across craft, digital arts and performance, and a citizen of the Anishinaabek Nation from Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. In January 2019 she completed a tour of her first major institutional solo exhibition with monograph The One Who Keeps on Giving, a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, in partnership with Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax; and Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris. Her work has shown in New York at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Bronx Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016), and travelled with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14); with recent performance projects in 2018 at Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Gibney Dance, and Vera List Center for Arts and Politics. Together with artist Jason Lujan, she co-owns Native Art Department International in New York. She is the recipient of the 2018 Hnatyshyn Foundation award for outstanding achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist and is currently working on a solo exhibition of her collaborative performance work at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, for December 2019. Presenter Maria Hupfield will contextualize Indigenous Women within the ongoing violence, sexism and racism of colonization in the Americas, and the necessity for awaken solidarity building with Indigenous people through visual arts.

Viva Ruiz is the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants and a community and nightlife educated advocate and artist. Ruiz’s original telenovelas have been shown at festivals and art spaces such as Mix NYC, Outfest LA, Deitch Projects, MoMA PS1, and Futura, Prague. As a musician Ruiz has collaborated with artists including Desi Santiago, Gavin Rayna Russom, The Carry Nation, Lauren Flax, and BEARCAT. Ruiz worked for many years as a dancer in nightclubs and also as a support among others for Debbie Harry and Danzig. She was a core member of hedonist guerrilla dance group The Dazzle Dancers. As an actor and performance artist Ruiz has collaborated with forces like THE BIG ART GROUP and Bruce La Bruce, most recently starring in Michelle Handelman’s film and live performance piece Hustlers & Empires (SF MoMA 2018). Viva is a part of the Caribbean/POC/queer centered collective RAGGA NYC with performances including at the New Museum and BRIC. #thankgodforabortion

Scheherazade Tillet-not available