Featured Event
Coat Drive Benefitting The Bowery Mission
01/04/2024
11AM
Conversations
Book Launch: “An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art”
Presented with The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation
Cover Image:
(Top row from left) mayfield brooks, Photo: Brett Davis; Avram Finkelstein, Photo: Alina Oswald; Guadalupe Maravilla, Photo: Steve Benisty; (Bottom row from left) Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Photo: Grant Delin; Vivian Crockett, Photo: Ciara Elle Bryant
The New Museum and The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation invite you to a book launch and celebratory conversation on An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art (The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, 2022). Join New Museum curator Vivian Crockett for a panel discussion featuring artists mayfield brooks, Avram Finkelstein, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, whose practices engage community building, organizing, pedagogy, and resistance.
TICKETS
Students can reserve complimentary tickets for public programs by following the general admissions ticketing link below. Student tickets require valid identification onsite.
This program will be presented onsite at the New Museum. All attendees are required to wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. Speakers may be un-masked and will be socially distanced from the audience. Review the New Museum’s COVID guidelines in advance of your visit.
Accessibility
We strive to make our programs as accessible as possible. Review the New Museum’s accessibility information here, including services available by request.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
mayfield brooks (b. 1970, Hartford, CT; 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’s entire body of work arises from their life/art/movement practice, Improvising While Black (IWB). They received a B.A. from Trinity College, an M.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis.
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 African diasporas, 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 the Leslie-Lohman Museum, Queer | Art and Visual AIDS, for whom she co-curated the 2017 “Day With(out) Art: Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings.” A PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University, she holds a BA in art history from Stanford University and an MA and MPhil in art history from Columbia. Her scholarly contributions can be found in publications from several institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Leslie-Lohman Museum; and Museu de Arte de São Paulo; among others.
Avram Finkelstein (b. 1952, Brooklyn, New York; he/him) is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death Project and Gran Fury collectives. He has work in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum and Brooklyn Museum. He is also included in the Oral History Project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images (UC Press, 2017) 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. He has had speaking engagements 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; he/him) 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 Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American 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.