EventsCommon Ground

Curatorial Activism: A Conversation with Maura Reilly & Friends

Featuring Patricia Cronin, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Nur Sobers-Khan, and Jasmine Wahi

Thursday, September 17, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Weekly conversations with social justice practitioners, changemakers, and activists.

In this Talk

Please join us for our third installment of Common Ground featuring artist Patricia Cronin, and curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Nur Sobers-Khan, and Jasmine Wahi with Maura Reilly for a conversation on Curatorial Activism. We will close with a poetry reading by Camilo Roldán.

At the start of quarantine, the Brooklyn Rail asked how might we stay connected to each other in a time of self-isolation? Now we ask: How can we stay involved and engaged in upholding our civic responsibility to one another across communities? How can we deploy this community we have built through the New Social Environment—through hundreds of conversations and meals shared over the past six months—to mobilize daily action for grassroots movements, social justice and equity projects, and for the political good of our most marginalized communities across the nation? Common Ground will be taking over the New Social Environment Thursday 1pm slot—beginning immediately and continuing up to the presidential election—and will convene weekly on Thursdays at 1pm Eastern from Sept 3rd through Nov 5th.

We will close with a poetry reading by Camilo Roldán.

Maura Reilly

Photo by Rochelle S. Paris

Curator and arts writer who has organized dozens of exhibitions internationally with a focus on marginalized artists. She has written extensively on global contemporary art and curatorial practice, including, most recently Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. Her next book, The Ethical Museum, is forthcoming in 2022, followed by a textbook on Feminist Art. Reilly is the Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the US devoted to feminist art. She is a founding member of The Feminist Art Project and Feminist Curators United. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail and Associate Professor of Art History & Museum Studies at ASU.

https://www.maurareilly.com/

Patricia Cronin

Photo by Grace Roselle, Pandora’s Box

Patricia Cronin is a New York-based cross-disciplinary artist. Since the early-1990s, Cronin has garnered international attention for her photographs, paintings and sculptures that address contemporary human rights issues.

http://www.patriciacronin.net/

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a British/ Venezuelan art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art, specializing on Latin American art, currently based in Southern California and New York. Fajardo-Hill holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th Century Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England.

Nur Sobers-Khan

is the Lead Curator for South Asian Collections at the British Library, London, where she is responsible for curating a collection of books and manuscripts on the history of Islam in South Asia.

Jasmine Wahi

Photo by Dario Calmese

Jasmine Wahi is a Curator, Activist, TEDx Speaker, and a Founder and Co-Director of Project for Empty Space. Her practice predominantly focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multipositional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨