Renewing the World charlesreeve

Season 2: Maternal Politics or Rethinking Systems 

Maternal labour is invisible and we need more than ever artist-designed strategies for change and initiatives that propose alternative ways of being with/without children; intervening in systems and institutions. Join us for this season, to discuss this in dialogue with some of the most prominent thinkers in the field!

Rachel Epp Buller discusses her artistic practices of listening with co-host Charles Reeve, particularly in light of her 2021-22 Fulbright fellowship at the University of Alberta’s CoLaboratory for Research-Creation and Social Justice.

What are the generative possibilities of being an artist, a parent, and an academic? In this episode with Maria Velasco, we address both the challenges and the promises of those intersections in her own life and work while also touching on issues of migration, displacement, parent-child collaboration, and curatorial practice.
 
María Velasco is a Spanish-born artist who has been living and working in the US since 1991. She creates site-specific installations, public art and participatory projects about displacement, gender identity, vulnerability, and the structures of authority that govern our lives. She has exhibited at The Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; ARC gallery, Chicago; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence; H&R Block Artspace; Avenue of the Arts, Kansas City; Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Saint Joseph; Paula Cooper gallery and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NYC; Salón Tentaciones (Madrid, Spain); Museo Del Barro (Asunción, Paraguay); Paradise Gardens Biennial VI (Darmstadt, Germany), Mexico, Argentina and Morocco. Her work appears in Art In America and Sculpture Magazine. Among her numerous accomplishments is a Rocket Grant of the Kansas City Charlotte Street Foundation, and an Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation Emerging Artists Grant. In the summer of 2019, she attended her first-ever family-friendly residency at Elsewhere Studios, in Paonia, CO, where she began filming her award-winning documentary All of Me: Artists+Mothers. The film has since screened in more than 10 Film Festivals, and been awarded Best Female Representation Award at WIFTA (Women in Film and Television Atlanta), Honorable Mention at Screen Power Film Festival in London, UK, and semi-finalist at Dumbo Film Festival in NY and at Boden International Film Festival, in Sweden. Velasco was the first art student to obtain a scholarship to further her studies in the U.S. through the Madrid-California Education Abroad program at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she received her B.F.A. and completed her doctoral courses. She obtained an M.F.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. 
She is a Professor of Visual Art at the University of Kansas and lives in Lawrence with her twelve-year old son, Alex, who loves to read, write, draw, play music and make art. 
 

The performance From Me to Us is conceived as a letter to a future child from their future father. But also, asks some difficult personal and ethical questions. How do you travel down this untrodden path? Who guides you, when no one knows the way? And what comes along with the hope? We discussed this and much more with Wayne last month, and we hope his perspective will offer many listeners a fresh outlook at constantly shifting ground of parenting.

“Are friends electric?" Gary Numan asked, anticipating a near-future in which menacing machine networks manufacture our thoughts for us. But this conversation with Alicia Harris (Assiniboine) considers the opposite possibility, drawing on Dr. Harris' interest in Indigenous art, Native feminisms and curatorial representations of Indigenous peoples to consider a model of community and support that goes beyond the human...including whether we can contemplate less antagonistic and instrumentalized relationships to artificial intelligence.
 
Alicia Harris is an assistant professor of Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma, which is where she received her PhD. She is invested in studying the various ways Native American artists represent their relationships with the land in visual form. Her research areas also include Native American women, Native feminisms, Native political activism, curatorial representation of Indigenous peoples, and photography. Alicia is Assiniboine and isan Associate Member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes.

Mirror balls, port-a-janes and breast milk tasting bars: hear about all this and more in Jess Dobkin’s conversation with Charles Reeve, recorded on the occasion of Dobkin’s Fall 2021 exhibition “Wetrospective.”