January 26, 2025, 2 pm. The event is free but space is limited so RSVP at Sherrill Roland Ackland Talk

Using Roland’s piece Processing Systems: Bonding as a jumping-off point, this artist talk and panel will explore artistic expression, the American carceral system, and the visualization of data. After a discussion of Roland’s monumental numerical portraits on view at the Ackland, Roland will be joined by panelists Bharati Zvara, Associate Professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health (MCH) in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Kylie Seltzer, art historian and Carolina Public Humanities Zietlow Postdoctoral Fellow. The program will be moderated by Lauren Turner, associate curator for contemporary art and special projects at the Ackland.

Hello My Friend,
It has been a while and I have been busy behind the scenes with screenings, publications, and a new exciting piece headed to SFMOMA next month. Read announcements below for details.

The news feels so grim these days, I thought I would offer something to distract you. Consider this an art exercise for the weary. Grab your closest paints and follow along.

I plan to start up monthly tutorials again that I will share with my subscribers. Also, I am slowly building watercolor classes in the background. I will be looking for folks to beta-test these in the spring for free access to the content!

LINK HERE for free tutorial. Guaranteed to relax you. If you try it please let me know if it helped.

xo xo

joy tirade

 

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I hope this newsletter finds you as well as one can be during these challenging times.  I am still digesting the U.S. election results and the break-up of the coalition in Germany.  Hopefully, we will find a way to get through this together.

In the meantime, I keep myself occupied with exhibitions and book preparations.  Join me for the opening reception of my solo show, The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall, at Deutsches Haus this Thursday, November 14, from 6-8 pm.

Moreover, I am continuing to work on my book and can now announce that it will be published in a German and English edition by DISTANZ (Berlin) in Spring 2025, which I am very excited about. In December, I will launch a fundraising campaign.

I wish you all the best. Stay strong!

Warmest wishes, Gesche

Solo Show at Deutsches Haus NYU

The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall will be exhibited in a solo exhibition at Deutsches Haus NYU from November 14, 2024, through February 7, 2025.

Please join me for the opening reception this Thursday, November 14, from 6-8 pm.  You may RSVP here. Address: Deutsches Haus NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003.

Neue Landschaft 2 / New Landscape 2 (2024)
Collaged archival pigment prints, acid-free tape, bookbinding glue
7.67 x 10.43 inches
Quelle/Source: BArch MfS+HA_I+-Fo+349+Bild_0063+mast (and 0097, 0058, 0064, 0083, 0035)

You may wonder about what’s happening in this image.  The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) (“Stasi”) documented the Wall and Death Strip in great detail since its inception in 1961.  I received copies of 160 panorama images from the Bundesarchiv and cut out the Wall and the Death Strip.  I then collaged the remains of the images to envision 23 new landscapes without the Berlin Wall.

NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship – Book

DISTANZ will publish The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall in German and English editions in the spring of 2025.  In December 2024, I will run a fundraising campaign where you can pre-order a copy of the book

If you are already interested in supporting the relatively expensive book production, you may make a fully tax-deductible donation (this only applies to U.S. taxpayers) through my NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship page.  Thank you in advance if you decide to do so.  I genuinely appreciate your help.

Deans’ Faculty Research Grant

I am grateful that I was awarded an NYU Tisch Dean’s Faculty Research Grant for my upcoming book, “The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall,” which will be published by DISTANZ in Spring 2025.

Neue Landschaft 8 / New Landscape 8 (2024)
Collaged archival pigment prints, acid-free tape, bookbinding glue
3.7 x 10.5 inches
Quelle/Source: BArch MfS+HA_I+Fo+1+Bild_0043+mast, MfS+HA_I+Fo+349+Bild_0023+mast (and 0065, 0073, 0090, 0092)

Oppressive Architecture (ICE Detention Centers)

I started thinking about this project during the 45th U.S. presidency, and with the current migrant crisis and deportation plans of the incoming administration, the topic is even more relevant.  With support from the NYU Undergraduate Research Assistants Program, Vallery Orr and I used Google Street View to document the hundreds of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facilities across the U.S.  According to the Border Report, roughly 40,000 migrants are currently held in ICE detention centers.  Screenshots from each facility will be compiled into a photographic installation to show the vastness of the inhumane system of housing thousands of migrants.  This project is a work in progress.

Art & Incarceration: Frameworks for Freedom, A Community Conversation

Artist Panel featuring Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, Sherrill Roland, and Sue Etheridge. Moderated by Michael Williams.

12 noon Thursday, Nov 21 at Dix Chapel

Register to attend for free

How art can break down barriers and empower those impacted by incarceration?

Creative catalyst Mike Williams will moderate a discussion with curator and scholar Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, formerly incarcerated artist Sherrill Roland, and Sue Etheridge, who worked as an art therapist in the NC prison system for over 25 years.

Examining art-making as behavior, and the art piece as a record of behavior, panelists will explore the role of art in restorative processes for prisoners and, more broadly, the potential of art-making to genuinely propel society toward new ways of being and fresh perspectives on equity, liberation, and connection.

Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, a MacArthur Fellow,  is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also the curator of the  exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration, which was listed as “one of the most important art moments in 2020” by The New York Times and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker and Hyperallergic.

Sherrill Roland’s interdisciplinary practice deals with concepts of innocence, identity, and community; reimagining their social and political implications in the context of the American criminal justice system. For more than three years, Roland’s right to self-determination was lost to wrongful incarceration. After spending ten months in prison for a crime he was later exonerated for, he returned to his artistic practice, which he now uses as a vehicle for self-reflection and an outlet for emotional release. Converting the haunting nuances of his experiences into drawings, sculptures, multimedia objects, performances, and participatory activities, Roland shares his story and creates space for others to do the same, illuminating the invisible costs, damages, and burdens of incarceration.

Sue Etheridge has had a career working in prisons as an art therapist for twenty-five years. She has a deep belief that creativity and beauty are basic human needs. As art therapist, she has been responsible for providing art therapy assessment and treatment services to incarcerated psychiatric patients through art. Her work with inmates also serves to enhance the therapeutic environment of the prison hospital. She facilitates opportunities for inmates to have creative self-expression and contribute to aesthetic improvements in their lives. Etheridge has been accustomed to working entirely behind closed doors until recent requests for interviews have made her work better known by the public, largely since having been chosen as an Unsung Hero of Compassion by the Dalai Lama Foundation. This recognition came about because of her involvement in “The Missing Peace,” a major art exhibit honoring the peacemaking efforts of His Holiness. Following that honor, she has been interviewed by radio and print media and has been named Alumnus of the Year by her alma mater, California Baptist University. In addition, Etheridge is a long-time participant in the Lucy Daniels Foundation, which works at the crossroads of creativity and psychoanalysis. She is also a volunteer at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Michael S. Williams fosters community engagement and organizational change through art and dialogue as both a consultant and founder of Black On Black Project. Williams connects people across spaces and experiences to explore and respond to the challenges shaping our communities. Williams graduated from North Carolina Central University and spent 16 years in media with roles centered on content creation and community building. He has curated more than 30 art projects and programs across the state in partnership with municipalities, local businesses, and nonprofits and is the executive producer of ten short films. Across projects, settings, and North Carolina, he introduces new ways of thinking and problem solving. This work is grounded in his belief that through creativity, cultural empathy can transform communities.

Small School is a partner with Dix Park Conservancy on this and many other events.

AT FOURTEENFIFTEEN

Mixed Blessings
Bella Maria Varela, Dominique Muñoz, hazel batrezchavez, Martín Wannam, Marlene Tafoya, Roman Gabriel

Opening reception: Friday October 11, 5-8pm

Mixed Blessings is a group exhibition exploring our relationship with domestic spaces and how they relate to forming our identities. Exhibiting artists were invited to critique, redefine, and explore intergenerational tools of resistance, joy, healing, or rituals inherited from the domestic spaces they have navigated throughout their lifetimes.

Congratulations to PhD alumna Carlee Forbes, who recently started her new position as Associate Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art!

Yun-Dong Nam
Balanced Warmth

September 26 – October 26, 2024
Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 2, 2024, 2-4 p.m. 

The UNCP A.D. Gallery presents Balanced Warmth, an exhibition featuring ceramics and painting by Yun-Dong Nam. 

Yun-Dong Nam, born in Seoul, Korea, earned his M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He has taught at Rutgers University, California State University at Long Beach, and Bennington College, and held an artist residency at the Bemis Foundation in Omaha, Nebraska. Since 1995, he has been a Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2000. 

A renowned ceramic artist, Yun-Dong has exhibited his work widely, both in the U.S. and internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Asian American Artist Exhibition at the Kentucky Museum of Arts & Design in Louisville and 6595 Miles (10614 KM) at the Network Gallery of the Cranbrook Museum of Art in Michigan. He frequently showcases his work abroad, including a solo exhibition at Tho-Art Space Gallery in Seoul, Korea.

Yun-Dong’s work has been featured in publications such as the Los Angeles Times and Ceramic Art Monthly, and he received first prize from the Korean Arts Foundation of America in 1992. 

More information about the exhibition and UNCP A.D. Gallery can be found at https://www.uncp.edu/departments/art/ad-gallery.

 

Processing Systems: Numbers by Sherrill Roland opens at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University on September 19, 2024, and runs through January 12, 2025.

The exhibition features artworks, works in progress, and research materials by Sherrill Roland (b. 1984, Asheville, NC) from his ongoing exploration of the criminal justice system. The works are part of a cross-disciplinary project that critically examines United States Federal and State Correctional Identification Numbers, which are assigned to inmates upon incarceration and historically have been used to reduce individuals to a series of digits. Roland, who was wrongfully incarcerated in 2013, uses this numeric system to generate artworks that follow specific rules, like the sudoku puzzles that helped him pass time while he was in prison.

Accompanying the exhibition is an installation in the Trent A. Carmichael Academic Focus Gallery, curated by Roland. It features selections from the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection that depict prison architecture and the criminal justice system throughout history. A related installation, Processing Systems: Bonding by Sherrill Roland, is also on view at the Ackland Art Museum until July 13, 2025.