EventsCommon Ground

A Conversation with Elena del Rivero, Alanah Odoms, Kara Tucina Olidge, & Andrea Andersson

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

Thursday, November 12, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Please join us for a conversation on the storied history of the 19th Amendment and universal suffrage in this country.

In this Talk

Please join us for the eleventh installment in our Common Ground series, for a conversation with visual artist Elena del Rivero, civil rights leader and Director of the ACLU of Louisiana Alanah Odoms, and scholar and Director of the Amistad Research Center Kara Tucina Olidge in dialogue with Andrea Andersson, Director and Chief Curator of Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thoughtin New Orleans. They will be discussing the ongoing history of the 19th Amendment and universal suffrage in the wake of the recent presidential election and our contested Supreme Court.

Bringing together voices from the archive, visual art, and social activism, this hourlong conversation will kick off with a discussion of the nationwide art initiative Elena del Rivero: Home Address (Oct 2020–Feb 2021) to consider the local, national, and global implications of universal suffrage on the heels of one election and in anticipation of the Georgia Senate Runoff in January, as well as the virtual exhibition* Justice Can't Wait: Oppression and Resistance - Slavery to Mass Incarceration in Louisiana* co-curated by the Amistad Research Center and the ACLU of Louisiana.

This conversation will be moderated by Malvika Jolly, and will close with a performance and recitation of "Register," a poem and sound composition by Laura Mullen and Nathan Davis, developed in collaboration with the Voting Rights Archives at the Amistad Research Center.

Andrea Andersson

Writer and curator Andrea Andersson serves as Founding Director and Chief Curator of Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, a non-profit institute for research, publishing, and exhibitions, committing to art informed by diasporic experience. She has organized exhibitions with artists including Troy Montes-Michie, Yto Barrada, Sanford Biggers, Cecilia Vicuña, Zarouhie Abdalian, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, and Adam Pendleton, among others; she co-edits a series of artists’ books with Siglio Press including Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension and most recently, Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye. She also recently co-edited Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale UP).

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought

Kara Tucina Olidge

Kara Tucina Olidge, Ph.D. is a scholar, arts and educational administrator and the Executive Director of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. She is the former Deputy Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library based in Harlem. Prior to joining the Schomburg in 2012, Olidge was the Director of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a nonprofit organization serving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in Newark, New Jersey. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersection of art, critical cosmopolitanism and community activism.

Alanah Odoms

is a civil rights leader, mother, and a professional and spiritual support to countless activists across Louisiana and beyond. As the first Black woman to lead the ACLU of Louisiana in its 65 year history, she has answered the call to defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by challenging systemic racial and gender injustice – vestiges of slavery displayed most prominently in Louisiana’s epidemic of mass incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation, and racist policing across the state.

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 🌈✨