Remembering and forgetting are rituals of our everyday lives that shape our social, political, and spiritual worlds. An archive can be seen as an accumulation of memory and forgetfulness. Join artist and black feminist scholar Tia-Simone Gardner (Juxtaposition Arts) in conversation with Jovan C. Speller as they discuss archives across the Twin Cities, particularly in relation to the lives of African Americans, people of color, and Indigenous individuals, and talk about the joys and conflicts that emerge from the desire to document, organize, and collect the past. Presented in conjunction with Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall.
Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Her creative and scholarly practice are interested interdisciplinary strategies and engage ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a studio fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She has also been awarded a number of fellowships for her work including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship.
Jovan C. Speller is a Minnesota–based artist, curator, and arts administrator originally from Los Angeles. For more than 15 years Speller has had a dedicated career in the arts. Her research-based practice—in visual, textual, and performative mediums—is centered around elevating, complicating, and inventing stories that explore ancestry, identity, and spatial memory. She is a recipient of a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a 2018 Next Step Fund Grant, and a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, and she us currently an artist resident at Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul.
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