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Mellon Sawyer Seminar

Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University hosted The Sawyer Seminar: “The Black Arts Archive: The Challenge of Translation,” during the academic year 2021-22. This convening highlighted a series of three two-day seminars, graduate courses, and a summer institute focusing on various archives of black arts across the African Diaspora. The project studied three regions including Chicago, the Caribbean (Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Haiti), and South Africa. With the goal of generating a sustained conversation over the course of the year, this seminar featured a series of visiting artists and scholars from the three regions, who engaged the theme of translation and the archive.

Seminars and Courses

Northwestern’s Sawyer Seminar will begin with the local: Chicago. This symposium will explore the deep histories, social and political artistic movements, and players by engaging the rich archive of black arts in Chicago from the nineteenth century to the present, hosting pioneers from an earlier generation as well as those artists who have taken up the mantle and carried it forward.

The corresponding graduate course, “Black Arts Chicago,” will be taught by Professor of Art History Rebecca Zorach, who has published a book about the history of the Wall of Respect mural on Chicago’s South Side and on the history of art in Chicago during the Black Arts Movement, and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Aymar Christian, whose OpenTV online network collaborates with Chicago-based queer artists to produce television programs. The course will take students on three field trips to various spaces in the city of Chicago, including to the South Side to the Wall of Respect and surrounding areas in Bronzeville; the DuSable Museum of African American Art; and Theaster Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank.

This second landing in the Sawyer Seminar will engage the various histories of cohabitation between African-American and Caribbean communities, and the tensions that animate this rich archive that includes Anglophone, Spanish, and French-speaking black and brown artists, constituting yet another component of translation.

The corresponding graduate course will be “Blackness Across Borders: Circum-Caribbean Art Practices” co-taught by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, who have previously taught a related course called “Blacktino Queer Performance” both as an undergraduate special topics course and a graduate course. “Blacktino Queer Performance” stages a conversation among blackness, Latinidad and sexuality by examining the work of black and brown artists in the black diaspora. Using “blacktino” as the framing device, the course highlights how these artists index the specificities of black and brown social and political relations, while also waging a broader queer-of-color critique of institutionalized racism and homophobia. For the purposes of the Sawyer Seminar, the course would be modified to include artists in the Anglophone and French-speaking Caribbean to include, for example, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, and Haiti; the focus expanded beyond sexuality as a key node, and art forms would include literature, film, visual art, and music. Chicago-based Caribbean artists will visit the course to share and discuss their art archives and the class will take a field trip to Chicago to experience live performances relevant to the topic.

 

The third stop in the Sawyer Seminar will examine how modes of anti-blackness and resistance to them continue to differentially inform the aims and ambitions of black artistic practices in the U.S. and South Africa, sites marked by shared yet divergent histories of slavery, segregation, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism. Thinking across geographical locations will not only enable a comparative method for understanding the structural limitations and possibilities informing black artistic practice globally, but also highlight extant historical links between Chicago and Cape Town that might otherwise be lost to the archive. Of particular focus will be the pan-Africanist ties forged between the cities from Bandung to FESTAC as well as how such connections continue to be shaped in the present. The seminar will thus engage practitioners from both locations.

The corresponding graduate course, “Contemporary Art and Public Culture in Post-Apartheid South Africa” will be co-taught by Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson as a revised version of a course they have previously taught in Cape Town as a part of the Myers Graduate Travel Seminar in the Department of Art History. This course will focus on how colonialism and white supremacy, and resistance to them, continue to shape Cape Town as a cultural complex more than 20 years after the official end of apartheid in South Africa. The seminar will include visits from Chicago-based scholars and artists with experience and expertise in South African arts. The students will explore visual culture’s complex role in the challenging process of democratic transition.

Summer Institute

This is the culminating event of our yearlong Sawyer Seminar on “The Black Arts Archive: The Challenge of Translation.” In this summer institute, as with all of our events, we sought to create models redressing concerns around archival access and translation for and by Black communities.The Institute took place online on Tuesday, June 22nd and featured engaging panels with interdisciplinary disciplinary artists and scholars.

Black Archives: Translating Across Media, Time, and Space 
Zakiya Collier
Ntome Edjabe
Christopher Harris
Tonia Sutherland
Lyneise Williams
Moderator: AJ Christian
 
Embodied Archives: Translating Black Art Archives through Performance
Javier Cardona
Athi Joja
Deborah Thomas
Tara Willis
Moderator: Krista Thompson
 

Participants
Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, author of the bookOpen TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television(NYU Press, 2018) among numerous articles and essays in academic and popular books and journals, and the co-founder of both OTV | Open Television and OTV Studio. For links to Dr. Christian’s CV, research, creative portfolio and links to interviews in the press, visit:http://ajchristian.org 
Javier Cardona Otero is a performing artist, critical educator, and facilitator of art experiences as education. His artistic scholarship, which has been presented throughout the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States, seeks to critically investigate sociocultural capitals particularly regarded to issues of race, gender, and the environment. His research interest in the arts and in education is interdisciplinary and intersectional, focusing on art-making and the creation of embodied artwork as research and pedagogy. As a specialist in the use of the arts as an aesthetic form and as a dialogical medium for critical enjoyment and social action, Javier crafts original arts performances within and outside traditional spaces for arts re-presentation and education. Currently, Javier is a Curriculum and Instruction PhD student in the Arts Education Program at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Zakiya Collier is the Digital Archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where she uses web archiving tools to expand the nature of archival collections to reflect 21st-century Black life and experiences. Both in her research and in her work as a Black queer memory worker, Zakiya explores the archival labor, methods, and poetics that are often necessary to render perceptible both the material and immaterial artifacts of quotidian Black life. She holds an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, an MLIS from Long Island University, and a BA in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina. Zakiya is an affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies (CR+DS) at New York University, an Interim Board Member of the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI), and a guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of The Black Scholar on Black Archival Practice.
Ntone Edjabe is a writer, editor and DJ who works through Chimurenga – a project-based mutable object, workspace, and pan African platform for editorial activities. Founded by Edjabe in Cape Town in 2002 as a space for collaborative reflection and action, Chimurenga’s toolkit includes: a broadsheet titled The Chronic; The Chimurenga Library – an ongoing exploration on the writing of history in the absence of documentary archives, and re-imagining of the library; the African Cities Reader – a biennial publication of urban life, Africa-style; and the Pan African Space Station (PASS) – an online radio and pop-up studio.
Christopher Harris’ award-winning 16mm experimental films and moving image installations have screened at the Locarno Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Arsenal Berlin, and many other festivals and exhibition venues. He is a 2020-2021 Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow/David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a 2015 Creative Capital grant awardee. Writing about his work has appeared in numerous books and periodicals including Film Comment, BOMB Magazine, and Film Quarterly. Harris is the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of Film and Video Production in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa.
Athi Mongezeleli Joja is an art critic and theorist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has an MFA from Wits University in Johannesburg, His research interests are in modern and contemporary South African art, anti-apartheid cultural movements, art criticism and critical race theory. Athi is also a member of the arts collective Gugulective, and he is also a member of Azanian Philosophical Society. He has written for magazines and journals including Africanah, Theoria, ASAP, Artforum, Art South Africa and the Mail & Guardian. He was Andrew W. Mellon fellow at Northwestern University in 2018, where he collaborated with the art historian and critic Huey Copeland on a project to devise undergraduate and graduate courses – called ‘Appropriation and its Discontents’.
Tonia Sutherland is assistant professor and Director of the SOURCE Hawaiʻi research lab at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Global in scope, Suther­land’s research focuses on entanglements of technology and culture, with particular emphases on critical and liberatory work in the fields of archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies. Sutherland is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU, a member of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Scholar Council at UCLA, and a visiting scholar at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC) at the University of Toronto. Sutherland is the author of the forthcoming monograph Digital Remains: Race and the Digital Afterlife (University of California Press).
Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (2006) and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (2015), recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Award for distinguished book in the history of art from the College Art Association (2016). She and Huey Copeland are co-editors of an ongoing series of articles on Afrotropes published by Art Journal. Thompson is currently working on the manuscript The Evidence of Things Not Captured, which examines notions of photographic absence, fugitivity, and disappearance in archives in Jamaica (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She is also writing Black Light, a manuscript about electronic light, archival recovery, and the artist Tom Lloyd.
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Research Associate with the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. Her recent book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, was awarded the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020, and was also the runner-up for the Gregory Bateson Prize in the same year. She is also the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004), and is co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race (2006). Thomas co-directed and co-produced the documentary films Bad Friday, and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which opened at the Penn Museum in November 2017. From 2016-2020, Thomas was the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. Prior to Thomas’s life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women. 
Lyneise Williams is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD Yale 2004). She is the author of Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932, (February 2019, Bloomsbury Academic Publishers). Williams is the founder and director of VERA (Visual Electronic Representations in the Archive) Collaborative an interdisciplinary center advocates for culturally-responsible archival practices that address the significant erasures in visual, material, and historical representation disproportionately affecting communities of color. Williams presented her VERA Collaborative research at the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, The British Library, The National Archives (UK), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and The Alan Turing Institute. VERA Collaborative is one of the founding co-partners of the Advanced Information Collaboratory (AIC). In addition, VERA partners with the National Park Services, the UNC Libraries, the Maryland State Archives, and Kings College London’s Digital Humanities Department. 
Tara Aisha Willis is a dancer, PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University, and Associate Curator in Performance & Public Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Willis performed in a collaboration between Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine and in the “Bessie” award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture. She has held a NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship, is an editorial collective member of Women & Performance, and former co-managing editor for TDR/The Drama Review. She co-edited the first dance-focused special issue of The Black Scholar with Thomas F. DeFrantz (2016) and the performance writing book, Marking the Occasion (Wendy’s Subway, 2020), with Jaime Shearn Coan. She was the founding administrator of Movement Research’s Artists of Color Council and a member of the phase 1 working group for “Creating New Futures,” the COVID-19 responsive guidelines for ethical dance presenting.