Critical Bounds Podcast Nicole Bearden

Conversation with Berette S. Macaulay, a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer from Jamaica and Sierra Leone. Her research and visual arts practice engage themes of belonging, identity-performance, illegibility, love, memory, and mythmaking. We discuss living a multiplicitous life, and the institutional lie that you must focus on One Thing, or be branded a failure. Interrogating the process of critical dialogue. What populations are still being overlooked in the art world? The influence of the Black Portlanders project. Working with artists who are creating work to, “...speak to some of the traumas, but not define ourselves by these traumas.” How institutional racism creates a challenge in even putting together a show that is about Black people. Tokenism in cultural institutions. The invisibility of power. Interrogating terms like “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, to unroot the mythologies of “Whiteness”. And so much more.

Conversation our conversation with arts advocate and curator Eva Mayhabal Davis (B. Toluca, Mexico). We talk about our mutual disdain for Picasso, Davis' art journey, her project El Salón, the prospect of gathering together again, our mutual anxiety at onscreen crowds (and the 80s and early 90s lack of cellphones), how she advocates for community through the arts, and what old hobbies became new again during the pandemic.

Davis is a the Intake Paralegal at UnLocal, Inc, a non-profit organization that provides direct immigration legal representation, legal consultations, and community education to New York City’s undocumented immigrant communities. She is also a founding member of El Salón, Director of Transmitter NYC, curator for NYC Crit Club, and her writing has been featured in many publications such as Foundwork, Arte Fuse, Art Spiel, the Hemispheric Institute’s Cuadernos, Nueva Luz: Photographic Journal, Guggenheim Museum Blog, and Cultureworks Magazine.