Community

Theology and the Visual Arts

When: Summers 2024, 2025, 2026 || Where: King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK || What: Theology and the Visual Arts Symposia

I am participating in a multi-year project based in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at King’s College London. The project aims to strengthen Theology and the Visual Arts as a formal discipline within academia, particularly under the umbrella of Theology. Led by Professor Ben Quash working with Dr. Chloë Reddaway, this endeavor involves seventeen scholars who will meet over the course of the next three summers to explore, question, and sketch out the contours of the field.

Text from the project page:

“Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations is a five-year project, led by Professor Ben Quash, Chair of Christianity and the Arts, working with Dr Chloë Reddaway, and generously sponsored by the McDonald Agape Foundation. Based in the Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s and building on the success of a previous project—Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts (TMVA)—its purpose is to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future.”

“There have been significant advances in this field in recent years, making this an ideal time to consolidate the discipline’s emerging achievements, map its horizons, and propel it forward. We will offer a sustained exemplification of how the task of Christian theology can be pursued comprehensively, systematically, and fruitfully through engagement with visual art, creating a confident and established presence in the academy, and securing an influential role for such theological work in the best universities.”

“At the heart of the project will be the building of a worldwide scholarly community in a subject area whose specialists frequently work in isolation, and the preparation of a set of ground-breaking publications, thereby expanding the subject area’s canon of core texts. These will include the first sustained discussion of the sources, norms, and methods underpinning the discipline, which have never been thoroughly considered, and a pioneering study of Christian Systematic Theology in dialogue with the resources of visual art. These will be accompanied by an accessible introductory handbook to the discipline, and a monograph on contemporary art and theology. Throughout the project, we will seek to form, develop, and inspire scholars who are bilingual in Theology and the Visual Arts, whose imaginations draw on both disciplines, and whose scholarship transforms the traditional parameters of both. We will also showcase our work to a public audience through a series of major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.”

Black Feminist Roundtable

When: Spring 2023 to Fall 2024 || Where: Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY (and on Zoom) || What: Black Feminist Roundtable

From Spring 2023 to Fall 2024, I participated in a group of sixteen artists, scholars, and curators that met regularly to creatively and intellectually support the reinstallation of the Brooklyn Museum’s American Art wing. Spearheaded by Stephanie Sparling Williams, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, the Black Feminist Roundtable was a forum for interdisciplinary peer review as Dr. Sparling Williams and her team transformed the American Art wing through the lens of Black Feminist and BIPOC thought and praxis. Titled “Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art,” the reinstallation opened October 4, 2024.

Text from the Brooklyn Museum’s American art page:

“How might American art be experienced at this moment? In honor of our 200th anniversary this fall, a transformative reinstallation of the American Art galleries will reorient the ways that the Brooklyn Museum exhibits—and audiences rediscover—this acclaimed collection. A kaleidoscopic display will offer paradigm-shifting interactions with millennia of art.”

“Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives act as through lines in this vast presentation of more than 400 works. In each of eight galleries, you’ll find a thought-provoking framework inspired by the abundant contributions of historically marginalized cultural producers. Every space is a distinct encounter with the collection, from the bloom-covered walls in ‘To Give Flowers’ to the contemplative respite of ‘A Quiet Place,’ to the chance to strut the runway before an audience of seated portraits in ‘Several Seats.’”

“Featuring both collection highlights, such as Laura Wheeler Waring’s Woman with Bouquet, and brand-new acquisitions, such as works by Japanese American artist Hisako Hibi, the galleries will reflect the beauty, wonder, and complexity of American art through the ages. Myriad voices—of curators, artists, Brooklyn Botanic Garden staff, and NYC drag queens, to name a few—add to the many conversations and questions that the reinstallation surfaces. While grappling with heavy histories, the display emphasizes joy, celebrating American art and artists in all their forms. You’re invited to discover them anew and take a fresh look at a foundational collection.”

Teaching Art History at Community Colleges

I prioritize teaching at community colleges because they offer affordable tuition for working-class people. As the first person from a working-class, first-generation immigrant family to attend college, I identify with the socioeconomic backgrounds of many of the students who enroll in community college. Although I’ve had the privilege to attend elite private institutions, many of my family members and those in the immigrant community I’m a part of make their living as garment-factory workers, domestic workers, and restaurant cooks and servers. The practical logistics of affording and successfully completing a college education are at the forefront of my consciousness.

As an art history instructor at a community college, my primary aim is to spark students’ curiosity in the human and historical conditions of art production, including their own connections to and presence within it. I try to get to know my students through teaching and mentoring—to gain a sense of their day-to-day circumstances and both their immediate and long-term challenges and goals. My most ambitious objective is to help students develop an awareness of the global and historical contexts of their own positionalities in contemporary society, supporting them as they build or amend frameworks for living meaningful, sustainable, flourishing lives that align with their values.

I want to teach in an educational community with a predominantly immigrant, working-class, lower-income, and first-generation student body so that I can stay connected to my roots. My current thinking and approach to teaching art history in community colleges is reflected in Olivia Chiang’s essay, “Seeing ‘Me’ in Art History: Taking on the Canon at the Community College,” available at the Art History Teaching Resources website. Chiang is Professor of Art History at Connecticut State Community College (Manchester campus), where I adjunct. Chiang is also Project Director of “Not your grandfather’s art history: a BIPOC Reader,” available at Smarthistory, an open-resource website for teaching and learning art history. My teaching philosophy is further embodied in my role as the art history professor at the Harlem branch of the Clemente Course in the Humanities.

Annual Waterlow Conference

When: Saturday, November 16—Sunday, November 17, 2024 || Where: Boston Nature Center, 500 Walk Hill Street, Boston, Massachussetts 02126 (and on Zoom) || What: The 11th Annual Waterlow Conference

This annual conference honors Charlotte Waterlow (1915-2011): World Federalist, history teacher, and service member of the Foreign Office in the Middle East. In the foreword to The Hinge of History (1995), Charlotte wrote, “The fate of the world depends on balancing the development of the mind, so powerfully promoted by science, with the development of the heart—the capacity to experience the higher emotions, the capacity to love.” In The Federalist Debate (March 2003), she wrote, “[T]he crisis point is dawning: grow up or blow up! What does ‘growing up’ involve? First, to feel and express love, compassion and concern for others.” Charlotte wrote an article that was influential to me: “A Classroom Experiment in Teaching for Peace: Solutions to Global Problems,” Harvard Educational Review 54:3 (September 1984). For a brief biography and reflection about Charlotte, read Diana Clift’s article in Network Review (Spring 2013). I have been participating in the Waterlow Conference annually. My contribution to this year’s gathering was a presentation of my poem, “Summer Reunion” (2014).

Thinking Critically about Museums

My understanding of museums and the museum ecosystem continues to evolve; so does my stance towards their role in contemporary society. My current thinking has been informed by my experience working in and with museums, as well as the following scholars and books on history, theory, and practice:

Dr. Kelli Morgan, “How Can Museums Truly Shake Off Their Colonial Legacy?,” Hyperallergic (March 8, 2023)

Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (2022)

Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums and Why We Need to Talk About It (2020)

Jane Henderson, “Beyond Lifetimes: Who Do We Exclude When We Keep Things for the Future?” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 43:3 (2020)

Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995)

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (1992)

Listen to my conversation with Eve Solano on the podcast Museum Talks, regarding my experience of DEI efforts in art museums (March 2022)

Affective Histories Exhibition

When: Saturday, November 20, 2021 at 4pm || Where: Hesse Flatow, 508 West 26 Street, Suite 5G, New York City, New York 10001 || What: Poetry reading and panel discussion in conjunction with Affective Histories exhibition, November 18—December 18, 2021 at Hesse Flatow

This event features a poetry reading by S. Erin Batiste and Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, followed by a panel discussion that I’ll moderate among S. Erin Batiste, Christina P. Day, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, Cate Richards, Julia Rooney, and Kelsey Tynik.

Text from the exhibition:

“ ‘The tinsmith came to help and made me a body of tin, fastening my tin arms and legs and head to it, by means of joins, so that I could move around as well as ever’ (L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900)”

“In 1900, L. Frank Baum invented the Tin Woodman, a character whose body of flesh is taken apart by his own enchanted ax, and reassembled in tin, limb by limb. Morbid as it is, the story raises the age-old, metaphorical question: If an object’s parts are replaced entirely by new parts, is it still the same object? This question emerges centrally for the writers and visual artists in Affective Histories. Using a range of materials and textual sources, each artist transforms “the original” into something other through the gestures of disassembling, replacing and reconstructing. Records, remnants, archive, anachronisms, nostalgia, inheritance: the work exhibited in Affective Histories draws affective or haptic relationships to particular slices of time. Local, communal, and personal histories are invoked through the use of found material and borrowed forms. Together, these pieces form an archive out of that which is not typically considered worth keeping or recording, in many cases discarded domestic objects. Juxtaposition and collage are recurring strategies: soft/hard sculptures, erasure poetry and documentary poetics, found objects in which patterns are inscribed to match found patterns, handmade brooms (analog tools) in the context of the digital age, and the duplication of abstract forms. The work in Affective Histories disrupts normative linear time by folding foreign or unlike time into the present, creating affective linkages through such juxtapositions.”