Charles Edward Williams is a contemporary visual artist from South Carolina. He holds a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia and an MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG). Williams has attended summer artist residencies at Otis College of Art and Design (CA), SOMA (Mexico City, Mexico), the Gibbes Museum (SC), and the McColl Center for Art and Innovation (NC). Solo traveling exhibits include “Sun + Light,” “Warm Water,” and “Swim.” “Sun + Light” has been on view at Polk Museum of Art (FL), Gibbes Museum of Art (SC), and Residency Art gallery (LA). “Warm Water” has been on view at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (MI), SECCA (NC), and Weber State University (UT). “Swim” was displayed at Morton Fine Art (DC). His work was also recently exhibited at Aqua and Scope Art Fart / Art Basel (FL) and Texas Contemporary Art Fair (TX).
Elisabeth Houston is a multidisciplinary artist and poet who is touring with a new book, Standard American English which brings readers deep into the world of baby, a persona she has been developing in performance contexts for nearly a decade. The poems in this debut collection emerge from the abject dialectic of baby’s psyche—where a self in formation staggers under the weight of sexual abuse, body image dysmorphia, rapacious materialism, fame obsession, and racial fetishism. What is witnessed here is the way late capitalism unfolds brutal games of power, affecting all dimensions of life, with the potential to consume and ravage individual actors, as well as entire communities and cultures. — Khadijah Queen
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 Aguilera Skvirsky lives in New York City and works between New York and Ecuador. She 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 multichannel video installation and live performances. The multichannel video premiered at the Cuenca Biennial XV (2021) curated by Blanca de la Torre in Cuenca, Ecuador. Recent solo exhibitions include: Sacred Geometry at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico and Ponce + Robles Gallery in Madrid, Spain. Other important international exhibitions include her participation in Africamericanos at Centro de la imagen in CDMX (2019) and There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2010). Skvirsky is an Associate Professor at Lafayette College.
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).
Wednesday, November 17, Nancy Hwang, Born in Seoul and based in New York, Nancy Hwang has been producing audience-participatory projects spanning more than two decades in North America, Europe, and Asia. Always possessing a sense of open-endedness, chance, and spontaneity, her practice involves making connections and building relationships. Hwang’s solo projects have been hosted by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Project Space Sarubia, Seoul; and White Columns, New York. Her projects have been included in group exhibitions at apexart, Artists Space, El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, The Kitchen, Museum of the City of New York, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, SculptureCenter and more! She has realized projects in the public realm with the support of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York City Parks & Recreation and Storefront for Art & Architecture. Hwang’s ongoing project Somewhere in America invites proposals for traveling with her within the US.
Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (Solid Objects, 2021); The Instead, a book-length dialogue with Emily Abendroth (Carville Annex, 2016); The Quarry (Trafficker Press, 2013); The Spokes (Solid Objects, 2012); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2012); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007).
Her stories and essays have appeared in various publications including Harper’s, The Believer, Conjunctions, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to The Believer. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony. She was a co-founding editor of The Encyclopedia Project with Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz and currently teaches at The Evergreen State College.
Simone Savannah is a writer, performer and teacher, born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Uses of My Body (Barrow Street 2020) and Like Kansas (Big Lucks 2018). Simone earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas, her M.Ed. and B.A. from Ohio University.
Use this link to join Simone’s Zoom talk – https://zoom.us/j/92320967393
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” James Baldwin
Gilda Sheppard is currently a member of the faculty in Sociology, Cultural and Media Studies at Evergreen State College in Tacoma, Washington. From 1995-96 Sheppard was a visiting lecturer at University of Cape Coast in the Sociology, Anthropology and Demography Department, and in 2018 she was a visiting lecturer at Ashesi University in Ghana, West Africa.
Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, West Africa, at the Festival Afrique 360 in Cannes, France, and in Berlin Germany at the International Black Film Festival. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film and a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship.
Her documentaries include stories of resilience of Liberian women and children refugees in Ghana; three generations of Black families in an urban neighborhood in Buffalo, New York; and a film ethnography of stories from folklore started by Zora Neale Hurston in Alabama’s AfricaTown.
She currently completed her documentary Since I Been Down on education, organizing and healing developed and led by incarcerated women and men in Washington State’s prisons. Since I Been Down has been accepted at over10 film festivals in USA and Canada and won the Gold Prize at the Social Justice Film Festival and recognized among “Best of the Fest” at DOC NYC the largest documentary film festival in USA. Since I Been Down has been praised by Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of CA, Santa Cruz Angela Davis, at a DOCNYC 2020 Facebook Live Event with Director Gilda Sheppard, King County (WA) Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, and Executive Director of Abolitionist Law Center Robert Saleem Holbrook. Seattle Met named Since I Been Down as “What to Watch” in 2020.
For over a decade Sheppard has taught sociology classes in Washington State prisons, Sheppard is a sponsor for the Black Prisoner’s Caucus in Washington State, and is a co-founder and faculty for FEPPS- Freedom Education for Puget Sound an organization offering college credited courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women.
Sheppard is the author of several publications including Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (2013)
SINCE I BEEN DOWN streaming 2/5-2/10
You are invited one and all to a rare opportunity to watch our Evergreen-Tacoma colleague Dr. Gilda Sheppard’s long-awaited new documentary film SINCE I BEEN DOWN
This timely work of art has been accumulating an avalanche of accolades: DOCNYC 2020 Audience Favorite. Winner of the 2020 Social Justice Film Feature Documentary Gold Prize. One of Seattle Met’s top movies not to miss. Seattle Times feature by Evergreen alumn Naomi Ishisaka. Please see below for a poster with a lovely quote from Gilda.
Starting this Friday 2/5 at noon and ending Wednesday 2/10 at 5pm, the film will be exclusively available to the Evergreen community for asynchronous streaming in the “virtual screening room” that we have created for “Reimagining Community Safety.” (Please note: no recording of any type will be allowed.)
Patte Loper is an interdisciplinary artist based in painting who experiments with sculpture and video to explore a range of subject matter including feminist utopianism, new materialism, and the ecological imaginary. She was born in Colorado and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, a subtropical college town where she first developed an appreciation for the ways nature and culture can overlap. She currently lives and works in New York City and Boston, MA where she is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Her practice began exclusively with conceptually based figurative painting and the work morphed over time into an experimental practice that utilizes painting, drawing, video, installation, and performance. Her early work involved re-creating masterworks with an eye towards feminist re-interpretation. Deeply rooted in painting’s discourse, her current practice uses painterly logic to create three dimensional structures that evoke landscape and still life and link mid century formalism, architectural theory and utopian idealism. Recent exhibitions have considered the ethics of architecture, the relationship between social justice and climate change, sustainable energy technology, and intersectionality in Arab and Western identity.
She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (New York, NY), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Licini Museum (Ascoli Piceno, Italy), LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island (New York, NY), the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences (Charleston, WV), the PalaentologicalMuseum (Cortina, Italy), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Suyama Space (Seattle, WA), and the Zuckerman Museum (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been reviewed in the Italian edition of Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and is in the collections of the Rene diRosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Hirshhorn Museum.
She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, and was a participant in the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program 2014-2016. She is currently a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program.
Thea Quiray Tagle, is a curator, writer, and an assistant professor of ethnic studies and gender & sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Throughout her various research and creative projects, Thea remains interested in the following questions: how can socially engaged art and performance move us, collectively and individually, to inhabit the world and relate to each other in ways that are non-extractive, anti-capitalist, and queer? Her exhibition AFTER LIFE (we survive) at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which Dr. Quiray Tagle will be discussing for the Evergreen lecture, is the second of a series of research-based curatorial projects about creative modes of surviving climate collapse and political violence practiced by LGBTQ and BIPOC peoples; the first, AFTER LIFE (what remains), ran from June-July 2018 at The Alice, an independent gallery in Seattle run by a collective of femme and queer artists that Thea was proud to be a member of from 2018 through its closure in 2019. Thea’s writing on Filipinx American contemporary art, visual cultures of violence, urban redevelopment in the Bay Area, and grassroots activism and speculative futures in the expanded Pacific Rim can be found in scholarly and popular venues including ASAP/J, American Quarterly, and Hyperallergic. During the COVID-19 crisis, Thea is a visitor on occupied Ohlone territory. For more about her writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, visit her website: www.theaquiraytagle.com
