A Sense of Place

January 12-13, 2021 

In September 2019, our group of twelve graduate students in the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College traveled to Dakar, Senegal to study with curator Koyo Kouoh and her team at RAW Material Company, a non-profit art center offering research and residency programs for artists and curators alongside seasonal exhibitions, publications, and lectures. The focus of our time in Dakar with Kouoh was how curatorial practice can make the presence of a place visible, or in her words: “How have actors, active in our local contexts and from across the creative disciplines, responded to and shaped their – our – environment? How do they collaborate? How do they tell stories and recall history? How do they create sites of possibility?”

We returned to New York with these questions in mind, and, in partnership with Kouoh, organized a symposium of programming in response, originally scheduled for March 2020, then postponed due to the global pandemic. Since that time, the question of place seems more relevant than ever. Presented now, in an online format, our symposium considers gentrification and displacement, infrastructures of surveillance, and sustainability as they relate to how artists see themselves shaping, and being shaped by, their immediate environments.

 All events are online and open to the public by RSVP except where otherwise noted.

This symposium grew out of a graduate seminar with students Chris Berntsen, Beatrice Johnson, Simon Benjamin, Renate Prancane, Leonardo Madriz, D’Arcy Blake, Malanya Graham, Alison Dillulio, Sydney Shavers, Sarah McCaffery, Daniela Mayer, and Christina Barrera

Full Schedule of Events: https://huntercollegeart.org/sop/

 

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