Thursday, January 16, 4pm
Taft Research Center 

Learn how the Celebrate People’s History poster series, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and Interference Archive began and what you can do to build your own counter-institutions.

Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY. MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People's History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade . His most recent book is An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production.

Wednesday, January 22, noon
virtual via Zoom  

What happens when a seed library stops being a metaphor, when ecological thinking is exercised not only exhibited, when the outside is invited in and it refuses to leave? Not only does it not leave: it germinates, grows, reproduces, gets sick, is eaten, rots and ferments, lives again. It “is an expansion; it runs and grows. It in­vades and occupies” (Serres 2007). In this virtual lecture, Rowan Lear will discuss seedwork in the context of institutions and art practices, drawing on their work with the Glasgow Seed Library, ongoing contestations, and broader collaborations within the global north seed community.

Dr Rowan Lear (they/she) is an artist and writer, based in Scotland. Colluding with photography, writing, vegetation, clay and other lively materials, Rowan traces the sticky and entangled histories of sensation, labour, agriculture and ecology. Since 2019, they have worked as a Seed Librarian, co-cultivating a living community of seeds and stories at Glasgow Seed Library, a project initiated and hosted by Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. They also work at University of Dundee as a researcher on ENERGY: A (Philosophy of) Practice, a project exploring marginalised cultures and practices of energy. Rowan currently co-organises Un/Nature, a monthly queer ecologies reading group at Glasgow Zine Library, is developing The Sentient Garden, a multispecies and multisensory commission at Forgan Arts Centre, Fife, and is preparing a publication about tree grafting and queer life for Attunements, a book series published by Errant Bodies Press, Berlin.

Wednesday, February 5, 12–2:30pm
Taft Research Center 
RSVP

Join Dr. Felicia Denaud for a seminar on Black Power politics across the revolutionary 1960s. Black Power remains a vital context of 20th century struggle and argument, summarizing a range of global activity and thinking linked by a fundamental critique of the West, racial/ colonial rule, and capitalism. Black Power networks prioritized self-determination and militant struggle though differed widely in the forms of political community toward which they advanced.

This seminar will travel the 1960s with emphasis on Freedom Summer and Black Power through key organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). We will think historically but with an eye on the experimental forms of power and violence in development today. Expect music, poetry, film, visual art, and open discussion.

REQUIRED READING

While you are encouraged to read as much of Kwame Ture and Charles V . Hamilton’s Black Power : The Politics of Liberation in America as possible, please prioritize Chapter 2 “Black Power: Its Need and Substance” if you are short on time.

Thursday, March 13, 4pm
Taft Research Center

In a Cambodian minefield, working amid hidden bombs, former war combatants use explosive-sniffing rats to clear mines from the land. In total, an estimated four to six million landmines in Cambodia have been left behind by wars that ended decades ago. This has created the conditions for a flourishing mine-clearance industry, where workers who were once enemy combatants may now be employed on the same clearance teams.

Zeroing in on two distinct sets of feelings, Darcie DeAngelo paints a portrait of the love experienced between humans and rats and the suspicions felt between former adversaries turned coworkers. In doing so, she points to how human-animal relationships in the minefield produce models for relationality among people from opposing sides of war. The ways the deminers love the rats mediate both the traumatic violence of the past and the uncertain dangers of the minefield. The book's stories depict an transformative postwar ecology emerging through human-nonhuman relationships, including those shared between humans and rats, landmines, and spirits.

Darcie DeAngelo is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. She explores the unexpected relations between humans and nonhumans amid war and other environmental disasters.

Wednesday, March 26, 3:30–5pm
Taft Research Center 

Taxonomía is a translingual performance art piece crafted by Javier Cardona Otero. His presentation of body-self becomes a receptacle of and for emerging narratives. Thus, as a sociocultural artifact and responsive tool, this (human) body becomes a unified place and space to, as a decolonial and antiracist tactic, reunite diverse people to disrupt capitalist imaginaries of Black and Caribbean Otherness as commodities for marketable consumption. 

Thursday, April 3, 12:30–2pm
Taft Research Center 

Learn about curatorial approaches to worldbuilding through exhibition planning and design of Notations on Ritual on view at The Carnegie. 

Sso-Rha Kang is an educator and curator based in Cincinnati, OH. She is the Curator for The Carnegie (Covington, KY). From 2021-2023 she served as the Director of Galleries and Outreach at Northern Kentucky University where she curated exhibitions, performances, and organized events with an emphasis on cross disciplinary collaboration. Her research interests delve into areas of institutional critique, blankness, and aesthetic experience. She has taught from 2017-2023 at institutions such as, The University of Cincinnati, The Art Academy of Cincinnati, and Northern Kentucky University. Additionally, she has curated exhibitions for Wave Pool, Pearlman Gallery, Third Space Gallery, The Weston, and The Contemporary Arts Center. She was one of two Consulting Curators for the state of Ohio in the exhibition New Worlds: Women to Watch (2024) for the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.