Heather Hart and Jina Valentine:
The Black Lunch Table Roundtable
Saturday, December 9, 2017
1 to 3pm
[Image Description: Five people sit around a table deep into conversation. One woman in the middle left is speaking with her hands in mid gesture. Three of them can be seen wearing red and white nametags. On the table are cups and glasses of coffee, tea, soda, and water with pizza, salad, and sandwiches on white plates. A zoom recorder is located on the middle right of the table with a small sign that says RESERVED.]
Supper Club artist Heather Hart and Jina Valentine hosted an edition of The Black Lunch Table (BLT), their ongoing collaborative oral-history archiving project, that brings together black diaspora artists and cultural producers in a discursive site where they can engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues. If you identify within this group, BLT invites you to participate in their roundtable discussion for visual artists, curators, and art workers of the African Diaspora.
Bios
The Black Lunch Table (BLT) is an ongoing collaboration between artist and UNC Assistant Professor of Art Jina Valentine and New York-based, public artist Heather Hart. The project was first staged in 2005 at the preeminent artist residency Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The BLT has since taken the form of oral archiving sessions, salons, peer teaching workshops, meet ups, and Wikipediaedit-a-thons. BLT has been hosted by Theaster Gates’ Dorchester Projects in Chicago, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, the Creative Time in Brooklyn, UNC Chapel Hill, Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, and the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, The Tarble Art Center at Eastern Illinois University, and Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, among others. BLT was awarded a 2016 Creative Capital Grant, a Digital Innovation Lab Fellowship from Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill, and an Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Foundation. BLT has been featured in Hyperallergic, Yes!Weekly, ArtFCity, Burnaway, Artsy, and the Skowhegan Journal. Hart received her MFA from Rutgers University with studies at Princeton University and Valentine received her MFA from Stanford University.
theblacklunchtable.com / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Black_Lunch_Table
Based in Brooklyn, NY, Heather Hart was an Artist-in-Residence at Joan Mitchell Center, McColl Center of Art + Innovation, Bemis Center for Art, LMCC Workspace, Skowhegan, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Santa Fe Art Institute, Fine Arts Work Center, and at the Whitney ISP. She is interested in creating site-specific liminal spaces for personal reclamation, in questioning dominant narratives and proposing alternatives to them. Hart received grants from Joan Mitchell Foundation, Harpo Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and a fellowship from NYFA. Her work has been included in a variety of publications and exhibited worldwide including at Socrates Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, The Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Philadelphia, Art in General, The Drawing Center, PS1 MoMA, Museum of Arts and Craft in Itami, Portland Art Center, and The Brooklyn Museum. She studied at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Princeton University in New Jersey, and received her MFA from Rutgers University. heather-hart.com
Jina Valentine was born in Pennsylvania and is currently based in North Carolina. Her interdisciplinary practice is informed by the intuitive strategies of American folk artists and traditional craft techniques, and interweaves histories latent within found texts, objects, narratives, and spaces. She has exhibited at venues including The Drawing Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the CUE Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation, the DiRosa Preserve, Southern Exposure, Marlborough Gallery. She has participated in residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, Sculpture Space, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She was in residence last year at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Banff Centre in Alberta, and Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. She is a 2016 recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council Grant, a Creative Capital Emerging Genres Grant, and a UNC Institute for Arts and Humanities fellowship. Jina received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Stanford University. jinavalentine.com