Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Reading Group
Thursday, April 20, 2017
6 to 8pm
Image courtesy of Kameelah Janan Rasheed. [Image Description: A large black print with the word “GOING” repeated three times. The word “GOING” is cut from a photocopy of a magazine and or a book. The top cut out is shaped like a trapezoid while the two towards the bottom are mirrored and connected at their mirroring. Where they are connected also mimics the crease of a book.]
Following her December 2016 performative lecture A More Convenient Season at The 8th Floor, Kameelah Janan Rasheed launched a reading group based on texts that inform and inspire her own artistic practice. In addition to being a visual and performance artist, Rasheed is a former public school social studies teacher. Those who attended the event were encouraged to look over the readings and listen to the songs below, which were referenced in the discussion:
“won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton, 1991 [poem]
“Microwave Popcorn,” Harmony Holiday, 2015 [poem]
"Elliptical," Harryette Mullen, 2002
”Positive Obsession," Octavia Butler, 1995 [essay]
"Stuart Hall on David Scott," Stuart Hall, 2005 [interview]
"Winter in America," Gil Scott-Heron, 1975 [song]
"Mississippi Goddamn," Nina Simone, 1964 [song]
Bio
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, former high school public school teacher, and writer. Through immersive text-based installations, large-scale public pieces, publications, sound projects, and discursive programming, her work engages with both figurative and literal language to explore how we narrate the relationships between the past, present, and future. Currently, she is an Artist-in-Residence at Smack Mellon, on the faculty of the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts, and works full-time as a social studies curriculum developer for New York public schools. She has exhibited her work at Jack Shainman Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Project Row Houses, among others. Recently shortlisted for the FutureGeneration Art Prize, she is the recipient of several other awards and honors including the Harpo Foundation Grant (2016), Magnum Foundation Grant (2016), Creative Exchange Lab at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art Residency (2016), Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop (2015), Triple Canopy Commission at New York Public Library Labs (2015), Artadia Grant (2015), Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship (2015), Art Matters Grant (2014), and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2014), among others. She has spoken and facilitated discursive programming at a number of institutions such as the New Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, Montclair Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts, Creative Time, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Interference Archive, Northwestern University, Maryland Institute of College of Art, Hampshire College, School of Visual Arts, Parsons, The New School, New York University, Columbia University, Barnard, and the University of Illinois. Her writing has been published in The New Inquiry, Gawker, The Guardian, Creative Time Reports, Hyperallergic, MoMA Blog, and Walker Art Center Blog, among others. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, she earned her BA in Public Policy at Pomona College and her Ed.M at Stanford University in Secondary Education. Learn more about her at www.kameelahr.com