Friday, November 12, 2021
3:30pm EST
Working Group: 90 min
Open Call Session
Presenters: Kanyinsola Anifowoshe, Mikki Janower
*Capacity Limited to 25 Participants. The waitlist for this session is closed.*
How can collaborative creative practice reshape relationships across communities, species, and places? How can these relationships serve as foundations for surviving in and transforming our world? Inspired by adrienne maree brown’s proclamation that “species only survive if they learn to be in community,” 2020’s A Community is a Garden is a toolkit for reimagining community-driven practice through interviews, exercises, and prompts generated in conversation with communities and artists. It asks, how might collaborations exist without authorship? How might they honor the pre-existing knowledge and networks? How might they hold space for dissonance within dynamic, multivocal communities?
Through discussion, meditation, and creative play, participants in this working group will engage and build upon the toolkit by reflecting on their work and generating frameworks with which to assess their own creative practices. The working group will engage experiential and embodied knowledge to collaboratively challenge dynamics of knowledge, community, and power.
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Kanyinsola Anifowoshe is a curator and writer currently pursuing a BA in History of Art at Yale College. She is committed to collaborations between artists and communities that transform relationships, build power, and re-imagine our world. Over the past year, that has led her to sustained investigation of the creative practices and communities of incarcerated artists (through work with the Justice Art Coalition) and of regenerative agricultural practices. Kanyinsola was curator of In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden (2019), an exhibition and series of public programs honoring the intergenerational and historically marginalized creative legacies of Black women. Her work has also been featured in programming at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry, and she has been a youth fellow at the Monument Lab Foundation.
Mikki Janower (she/her) is an interdisciplinary designer and researcher logging on from Brooklyn, New York currently designing and writing at The Creative Independent. She has worked with organizations across culture and the arts, among them The Undocumented Migration Project, NARS Foundation, ACOMPI, and Jewish Currents. Through her practice, she builds platforms for artists, writers, and thinkers in pursuit of better worlds; and indulges a lifelong interest in open inquiry through creative play. She received her BFA in Communication Design and Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, where her work explored gender and sexuality studies, material culture, conditional practice, decolonial theory, and demonstration in the digital sphere. She has previously researched sustainable futures through a practicum facilitated by the Guggenheim Museum, guided by artists, organizers, and community leaders.