Fluent Essays

The purpose of the Reading Journal is to engage intellectually and personally with the topics presented in each assigned article/video. You will need to use your skills at critical thinking, analysis on both personal and broader levels, and drawing connections between specific delivered content and your own experiences/studies/thoughts/observations/impressions, etc. A reading journal is not your first impression about the text, nor a summary of its content. It is a layout of your experience reading the text and your personal reactions to and analysis of it. If you just summarize what the text was about or tell me what you liked or disliked you have given insufficient proof of your engagement with the content. So, do not only summarize what happened in the reading: tell me what happened inside of your head when you read the text. Importantly, you must be specific about what ideas or sections of the reading/video you are responding to. Though I don’t want a summary, I do want specific references to content in the reading so that I know you have actually read and engaged with it. Remember to always ground your analysis in relation to the actual content of the reading/video (ex: avoid long tangents that are unrelated).Total two readings, each reading write at least 250 words. Total at least 500 words. Reading 1: https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s9/robin-rhode-in-johannesburg-segment/Reading 2: See attached file How to Avoid Plagiarism in Your Writing for This Class:PLEASE REMEMBER TO PROPERLY QUOTE AND ATTRIBUTE ANYONE ELSE’S WORDS IF YOU WISH TO REFER TO THEM THROUGH EITHER DIRECT QUOTES OR PARAPHRASE IN YOUR WRITING (more information about the consequences of plagiarism are below in the Academic Misconduct / Plagiarism Policy section).if you are paraphrasing (summarizing in your own words) what someone else has said/written, please give their full name before doing so and make sure you have restated their ideas in your own words (Example: I was intrigued when Eureka Gilkey explained the meaning of Social Sculpture as the idea that a communitys activities together can be thought of as a way to sculpt society and that this can be considered an art form.)if you are going to quote someone directly (represent their exact words in your writing) please give their full name before quoting them the first time, and thereafter you can refer to them by their last name or a parenthetical citation with their name. Make sure that ANY words that come directly from someone elses writing or speech are encapsulated in quotations. Failure to do so constitutes plagiarism (representing someone elses ideas/words as your own) and is a serious academic misdemeanor. (Example: In her article about Project Row Houses titled Commentary: Project Row Houses: Arts, Culture, and Collective Creative Action, Eureka Gilkey describes Joseph Beuys idea of Social Sculpture as the idea that art is about how individuals shape the world around them, and went on to describe ways that PRHs founders were applying these ideas to their community work in the 3rd Ward. This reminded me of.....)Give the full title of the article or video if you are referring broadly to its content (as shown in the above example)A Works Cited List or Bibliography is not needed for these assignments. It is sufficient that you name people properly and quote and paraphrase accurately in your own writing. You are very welcome to apply whatever citation system you are most familiar with, but again, its not a requirement.Here is the basic layout you should follow when composing your RJ submissions:Your NameART 111 - RJ #____Entry 1: Full Title of the Article or Video, by Authors Full Name(s)Body of your written response to Entry 1(Word Count)Entry 2: Full Title of the Article or Video, by Authors Full Name(s)Body of your written response to Entry 2(Word Count) reading_2.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Reading Journal 5 – Entry #2 Please note: there are two articles combined for the this entry, so your 250 word response for entry 2 should address the content of these articles combined. Both articles introduce an artist-run space called Recess in NYC and a few of the projects they have supported. Recess uses a public art-meets-artist residency model to host artists to make publicly-available projects, which ties in with the lecture theme for Week 5. Here is the website for Recess, in case you are curious to learn more: https://www.recessart.org/about/ Please read both articles below, but you only need to write ONE response that covers both of them. You should also be submitting a singular response to Entry 1, which is the video about Robin Rhodes. Thank you, Sonja 11/16/2018 Recess Founder Allison Freedman Weisberg Is Transforming the Discourse Around Public Art A R T RECESS FOUNDER ALLISON FREEDMAN WEISBERG IS TRANSFORMING THE DISCOURSE AROUND PUBLIC ART SARA ROFFINO PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIFFANY SMITH ARE YOU CULTURED? EMAIL FIRST NAME L AST NAME C O M PA N Y CITY S TAT E COUNTRY SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SHOP https://www.culturedmag.com/recess-allison-freedman-weisberg/ 1/9 11/16/2018 Recess Founder Allison Freedman Weisberg Is Transforming the Discourse Around Public Art D I R EC T O R S , L E A D E R S , E D U C AT O R S A N D A R T I S T S AT A S S E M B LY A N D R EC E S S F R O M L E F T T O R I G H T: G E E W E S L E Y, M A N U E L M O L I N A M A R TA G O N , S H A U N LEONARDO, ALLISON FREEDMAN WE I S B E RG, X AVI E R A S I M M O N S A N D KERRY CARRIER. Last year, art-world matriarch Agnes Gund made waves when she donated $100 million from the sale of a Roy Lichtenstein painting as seed money for the Art for Justice Fund—the sole mission of which is to end mass incarceration. She explained at the time that a realization about inequality in the United States prompted her decision, and at her encouragement more than a dozen other collectors also offered resources to the initiative. Meanwhile, in Soho, a young non-profit founder was also thinking about mass incarceration, the public and how such issues were related to her storefront artist residency. Allison Freedman Weisberg established Recess in 2009, with the goal of creating a “flexible framework that was built to fit each artist’s individual goals” as opposed to a museum which requires artists to shape their ideas to an institutional structure. “I wanted to create a space where anyone could walk in and understand it as theirs. The mission has always been to create points of access and to build a more inclusive creative community,” says Weisberg, who—as the granddaughter of the late Public Art Fund founder Doris Freedman—knows a thing or two about public art. “We’ve been able to offer access to different groups through facilitating organic moments of connectivity between artists who are working and visitors who are coming into the space from very varied backgrounds.” ARE YOU CULTURED? EMAIL The organization’s multilayered platform is centered around a program called Session, where artists are invited to spend roughly two months making new work within Recess’s space (which F I R S Tremains N A M E open to the public through the process). L A SAlumni T N A M Einclude Sondra Perry, Sara Magenheimer, Abigail Deville, Liz Magic Laser and Jacolby Satterwhite, among many others. Earlier this year, Recess moved from a modest SoHo storefront to a relatively expansive building in Brooklyn. C O M PA N Y CITY “Almost every new initiative at Recess grows out of something that our artists are already thinking and talking about,” Weisberg explains of Recess’s Assembly branch, which launched in early 2017 lead educator. A partnership between S TAT Ewith artist and educator Shaun Leonardo as the C Oprogram’s UNTRY Recess and Brooklyn Justice Initiatives, Assembly offers young adults who are involved with the justice system an alternative to punitive measures. After participants finish what Weisberg describes as a “visual storytelling and performance workshop,” prosecutors may close and seal their cases. “The justice system is one of the great failures of our time, and at a certain point it felt S U B S then C R I Bwhat’s E like if we weren’t fighting against the grain, the point?” says Weisberg. Leonardo’s work as an artist deals with issues of gender and racial identity. For Assembly, he has developed a curriculum that offers both creative development as well as a path to paid employment for participants. “To transition from an obligation to free-form creative work is very difficult in the mind of a young person who has never been validated for their creative work,” he says, noting that around a dozen Assembly participants have stayed at Recess as paid employees after their official SUBSCRIBE SHOP assisting artists in residence, working on their own projects, and learning program has ended, https://www.culturedmag.com/recess-allison-freedman-weisberg/ 2/9 11/16/2018 Recess Founder Allison Freedman Weisberg Is Transforming the Discourse Around Public Art about installation and art handling. “We want them to embrace their creative capabilities and to let them know that creative work is worthy of payment,” he says. Fundamental to all of Recess’s programming is Weisberg’s insistence on challenging the art-world binary that separates socially-engaged practice from museum art. “There is absolutely no reason why the audience that participates in community-engaged art isn’t considered as meaningful a public as that which visits museums and institutions, and likewise that the museum public doesn’t have a place in a more community-based context,” she says. “I’m interested in reshaping the way we think about what the public does to inform creative practice.” MORE ON ART ARE YOU CULTURED? EMAIL FIRST NAME L AST NAME C O M PA N Y CITY S TAT E COUNTRY SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SHOP https://www.culturedmag.com/recess-allison-freedman-weisberg/ 3/9 ARTICLES An Indigenous Artist Collective that Raises the Bar By o ering a space for projects like R.I.S.E, Recess vitally promotes the idea of creation as a necessarily social process. In a social media landscape overflowing with brands that co-opt the language of social movements to appeal to hyperconscious consumers, R.I.S.E. offers a heartening alternative: dissident cultural activism that leverages the immediacy of online sharing culture to give voice to Indigenous resistance. R.I.S.E., which stands for Radical Indigenous Survivance and Empowerment, is an initiative founded by Demian DinéYazhi´, an Indigenous Diné transdisciplinary artist and poet, and “dedicated to the education, dissemination, and evolution of Indigenous art and culture.” After initially gaining momentum on Tumblr, R.I.S.E. now makes use of an active Instagram account that posts decolonial agitprop for the digital age, promotes the work of Indigenous creators and activists, and advertises t-shirts and tote bags sold through their Etsy page. R.I.S.E. has been given the opportunity to inhabit a physical space during a fiveweek long session at Recess called R.I.S.E.: COLLECTIVE FURY, “explor[ing] how outrage and anger can be mobilized not as tools of division, but as a means to solidarity and empowerment.” Recess’s sessions are process-oriented residencies that invite artists to come in and use the nonprofit’s space to create work, while also keeping the doors open for the public to view and participate in the artist’s process through workshops and events. The space doesn’t look like a typical art exhibition or even a studio housing works-in-progress, and when I first arrived, to attend “People Like Us,” a conversation between DinéYazhi´ and the multimedia artist Jeffrey Gibson, attendees were drinking “Indian Love” tea from mugs that read “RESPECT INDIGENOUS UPRISING,” and flipping through some of the books and zines displayed in the infoshop set up by DinéYazhi´. There, you can find poetry by Joy Harjo and Luci Tapahonso, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (a book on Indigenous plant science), and radical leftist texts like the Mary Nardini Gang’s Toward the Queerest Insurrection reprinted as zines. The abundant selection of women and queer authors on display is revealing of R.I.S.E.’s intersectional approach, one that insists on the necessity of enfolding a queer feminist critique of heteropatriarchy within a total project of resisting settler-colonial oppression — and in doing so, shows how these struggles have been linked for centuries. A rack of R.I.S.E merchandise (sales of which help fund their efforts) is available for purchase as well. Two of the shirts are displayed on the wall: one has the text “Decolonize Feminism” and an image of an Indigenous woman. The other starkly states in bright red letters, “Your freedom is dependent on genocide and settler violence.” The confrontational messages — in the latter example especially — are the antithesis of a now well-known genre of easily digestible consumer feminist visibility, à la “The Future is Female.” DinéYazhi´ considers the shirts to be the equivalent of “walking billboards” intended to interrupt the flow of public space: instead of invoking hope, they provoke discomfort. I wondered who the intended wearer of such a shirt was — what would it be like to go about your day broadcasting a visual reminder of the atrocities embedded within the foundation of American culture? Seen by the wrong person at the wrong time, could it even be dangerous? This is not a shirt one is able to casually throw on — but that’s the point. “You can’t wear it in the same way you’d wear a Keith Haring shirt,” DinéYazhi´ says. “I try my very best to help the person purchasing the shirt understand that when they’re buying this t-shirt, they’re also willing to engage in that conversation, in that discourse. If a white woman’s going to buy a ‘Decolonize Feminism’ poster or t-shirt, she’s making it her duty and obligation to learn about Indigenous feminism, hold space for Indigenous womxn, and more importantly, to have those conversations within her community.” During the “People Like Us” event, a tunic piece made by Gibson rested on the ground — it had just been used in a photoshoot where DinéYazhi´ had modeled some of Gibson’s garments, which are often made using Indigenous handcraft techniques. The two artists had set up the conversation as a “listening party,” taking turns playing a selection of records by Indigenous artists while Gibson projected images from the photoshoot. There was a tenderness to this exchange, which also felt notably unscripted — the two shared that they had not met in person before that day, though they had previously been in touch via the internet. Both artists address the intersection of their queer and Indigenous identities in their work, and allowing the audience to view the just-shot photos of DinéYazhi´ wearing Gibson’s garments felt like a radical offering of intimacy and trust, in which we see DinéYazhi´ not only model these wearable sculptures but perform through them. The two shared songs from veteran folk singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, explaining how her music had been blacklisted in the US in the 1970s, and they introduced the audience to a recently released album by the new experimental rock project Black Belt Eagle Scout. The event, like the infoshop, strongly conveyed R.I.S.E.’s dual mission to illuminate Indigenous cultural heritage, while also highlighting contemporary creators expressing Indigenous identities in new ways. The following week, a collaborative performance between DinéYazhi´ and musician Laura Ortman took place in the space, and Gibson’s tunic, which had since been properly hung for display, asserted its own presence as a backdrop. Seeing the piece, called “Speak To Me So That I Can Understand” (2018), hanging giant and heavy on a tipi pole, it was easy to forget that it had actually been worn by DinéYazhi the week prior. In this inactive state, the queer exuberance of the tunic had quieted, but it was easier to see how Gibson’s chosen materials — electric blue nylon fringe, digitally printed polyester, vintage Seminole patchwork, metal jingles — fuse traditional artistry with an effusively kitschy kind of craft experimentation that happily confuses the garment’s classification as ceremonial or celebratory dress. R.I.S.E.: COLLECTIVE FURY is a perfect example of how Recess’s uniquely open-ended sessions support artists whose practices center on community engagement and resist easy categorization within the art world. R.I.S.E. is unlike a typical ‘artist collective,’ and is more accurately described as a highly adaptable network of individual Indigenous creators, with DinéYazhi´ serving as an organizing locus. The creative practices of the people involved are incredibly diverse, as are their geographic locations, and while some (like Gibson) live in cities and exhibit artwork at galleries and museums, others are based throughout the wider US, producing podcasts, publishing poetry, and composing music. R.I.S.E.: COLLECTIVE FURY is also a testament to social media as a resource for politically-engaged network-building that’s able to make real impacts beyond the screen. By offering a space for projects like R.I.S.E, Recess vitally promotes the idea of creation as a necessarily social process, and of audience interventions and engagement as critically important resources for contemporary art production. R.I.S.E.: COLLECTIVE FURY runs until February 9 at Recess (46 Washington Avenue, Navy Yard, Brooklyn), when there will be a closing event with a zine fair, panel discussion, and screening at Recess’s space. MORE FROM HYPERALLERGIC ... Purchase answer to see full attachment