11:30- 1:00 PM  Zoom link: https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/89462123483

Negarra A. Kudumu is an interlocutrice working at the intersection of art and healing with a focus on contemporary art from the Pacific Northwest, Africa, South Asia, and their respective diasporas. She holds the title of Yayi Nkisi Malongo in the Brama Con Brama lineage of Palo Mayombe; she is a lay person in the Pimienta lineage of the Lukumi spiritual tradition; a practitioner of Muerterismo, Espiritismo Cruzado, Conjure, and also a level II Reiki practitioner. Her curatorial expertise includes a group exhibition for the Lisbon-based gallery MOVART for the 2021 ARCO Madrid art fair and three exhibitions during her tenure as curator at CoCA. She is currently focused on client facing work in art and healing as a coach, teacher, content producer, contemporary art curator, independent scholar, and healer.

11:30- 1:00 PM  Zoom link: https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/89462123483

Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by cultivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma’s Ghost collaborated artistically on Abstract Futures Tarot exhibited at The Armory Show 2021 and has a solo exhibition, Radical Spirits up at Hill-Stead Museum until November 1. The collective has worked to create a growing online community of 6K individuals through exhibitions, curating, and online programming which connects artists with professional healers through workshops. To date, they have run a dozen such online programs on subjects ranging from automatic drawing to sigil-making.

Week 6, Wednesday, February 9,  Lauren Alyssa Bierly  is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY with over ten years experience in contemporary art, design and fashion exhibition management. Her artwork is rooted in phenomenology and informed by ecology, language and architecture. As a synaesthete, Bierly is interested in the intersection of sensory languages—like color perception, sound recognition, and time sensing—and how these sensory vocabularies shape one’s subjective experience of identity and place. She’s exhibited in New York City, Oregon, Kolkata, India and Moscow, Russia. She was artist-in-residence at Playa Art + Science (2020); chaNorth Residency (2018); Starry Night (2017); Panoply Performance Lab (2016) and Trestle Art Space (2015). She was a member of collective Incredible Witness from 2015 – 2017, and a participant of the Universityof Sussex’s ongoing synaesthesia research since 2013. In 2021, Bierly joined Brooklyn Museum as Exhibition Project Manager following prior exhibition management roles with the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture and minor in Art History from Pennsylvania State University (2009) and Masters of Art in Modern Art, Connoisseurship, and History of the Art Market from Christie’s Education (2010).

Week 8, Wednesday, February 23: Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

“In the late 1970s I lived in Guayaquil (Ecuador), the city where my mother was born. The contrast between my memories and experiences in Ecuador with my life in the US has been central to my practice, which uses personal narratives as a gateway to explore broader questions of place, identity and nationhood.”- Karina

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky (b.Providence, RI) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital to produce How to build a wall and other ruins, a project that includes a series of sculptural photographs, a multi-channel video installation and live performances. She has exhibited the project in solo exhibitions at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico and Ponce + Robles Gallery in Madrid, Spain. Other important international exhibitions include her participation in Impermanence, the XIII Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) curated by Dan Cameron in 2016 and There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2010).