Book Launch at the New Museum: An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art
Panel Discussion with mayfield brooks, Avram Finkelstein, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, moderated by Vivian Crockett
Thursday, October 13, 2022
6:30pm
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
Cover Image: Exterior shot of “An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art.” Courtesy of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation.
The New Museum in New York will host the first in a series of nationwide launch events for An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art, a book published by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. Moderated by New Museum curator Vivian Crockett, the event will focus on a conversation between artists mayfield brooks, Avram Finkelstein, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, whose practices engage with community building and organizing, pedagogy, and resistance. The publication will be available for purchase at the New Museum Store, and is also available online from The University of Chicago Press and Amazon. Learn more about the publication here.
Public programs at the New Museum require tickets: $10 for general admission, $8 for members, and free for students. Tickets can be purchased at the Museum’s event page here.
Email us with any inquiries. The New Museum’s accessibility information can be found here. Review the New Museum’s COVID guidelines in advance of your visit.
Video recording available below:
mayfield brooks (they/them) is a movement based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer based in Lenapehoking also known as Brooklyn, New York. They are the 2021 recipient of the Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2021 Bessie Award nominee for their experimental dance film Whale Fall. Currently, brooks is a 2022-23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. brooks finds joy in teaching and traveling internationally and going off the grid from time to time. brooks' entire body of work arises from their life/art/movement practice, Improvising While Black. You can find out more about their work at improvisingwhileblack.com.
Vivian Crockett (b. 1983, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a New Museum curator and Brazilian-American scholar focusing largely on modern and contemporary art of the African and Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. Crockett previously worked at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), where she curated “Guadalupe Rosales: Drifting on a Memory” among other exhibitions. Prior to the DMA, Crockett was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and an Andrew W. Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art. While in New York, she also worked on independent curatorial projects with various arts organizations, including Visual AIDS, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Queer | Art. A graduate of Stanford University, Crockett is currently completing her Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University. Her scholarly contributions can be found in publications from a variety of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, among others.
Avram Finkelstein (b. 1952, Brooklyn, New York) is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, and he is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. His book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was nominated for an International Center Of Photography Infinity Award in Critical Writing And Research. He has been interviewed by The New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, the New Yorker, and Interview, and spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU. He is currently in residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.
Guadalupe Maravilla (b.1976 San Salvador, El Salvador) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented and cancer communities. Maravilla has exhibited in major museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and is a 2019 recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA; she/they) is a learner who grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. They are a recipient of a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019), No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019), and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer.
Image description: Two hardcover books both with large white text on the covers: “An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art”. The book in the foreground features a photo of a person in a gray dress and red heels throwing a brick toward the viewer. The other book features a painting of a dark figure, covered in colorful splotches and gazing at the viewer over a light green background.