Contemporary Art Galleries at the University of Connecticut is proud to host the Radical Black Art and Performance Series. The series is a twenty-day digital program spanning the entirety of Black History Month 2021, featuring queer Black and brown artists, scholars and allies who make work, practice or who’s discipline interconnects, interlocks, and makes legible “Négritude: The affirmation or consciousness of the value of Black or African culture, heritage, and identity in art and education.” The goal of this curated programming is to raise awareness of, and cultivate, Black and queer consciousness through rigorous dialogue, film screenings, and guest presentations and workshops from practicing artists and academics in the field. Artist and Performer Arien Wilkerson will lead the series and serve as guest curator/programmer for the project.
UConn Contemporary Art Galleries received generous funding from the President’s Commitment to Community Initiative through the UConn Office of Diversity and Inclusion to make the programming possible. This initiative aims to reduce bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination and to foster respect and understanding among the UConn community.
For more information about the series, including upcoming events and registrations please visit CAG's website: https://contemporaryartgalleries.uconn.edu - the next event is listed below, we look forward to seeing you on Zoom!
2/2/2021
Vault Day 2
Vault Mixtape
5:00pm - 7:00pm
Event Registration
Vault is a collaboration between Hartford and Philadelphia-based artists Marisa Williamson, Nicholas Serrambana, Arien Wilkerson, and Kevin Hernández Rosa. Vault is a lifetime work, an educational tool, an intervention resource, a way to build a park, sound an alarm; Vault is not composed of distinct healers but rather folks asking for us all to try healing together, as a code of ethics that refuses to leave anyone behind. Vault is a radical new program development that, for its own sake, stimulates the release of toxic stress for artists and community members. Vault proposes a new standard for wellness-- by creating locations for community engagement that outlast the performance.
Event Description: a 35min video performance piece created by the Vault team released with a digital score composed by Nicholas Serrambana, sound designer of Vault. The psychoacoustic video mixtape sculpted for UConn is the subconscious imprint of an abandoned institution. Ambience and the intelligible are unraveled by the epistemology of an object that is permanently closed, where time and memory bypass song form for stagnation. Hissing, popping, percolation, and the sigh of a permanently silent structure are expressed seemingly via ghost sounds of children, as shrieking, and as erosion. Cumulatively the project sonically and visually addresses the ethics of commodified urban decay, the blatant segregation and environmental racism of city space, the question of "poverty porn," the jurisprudential/budgetary schisms that prevent the explicitly illegal conditions in these buildings from being properly persecuted, and, more philosophically, the idea of architectures that do not have the privilege of being brutalist by choice. The video consists of choreography and performance by Arien Wilkerson with video from David Norori, image/text by Marsia Willamson, Kevin Hernandez Rosa and Nicholas Serrambana.
For more information, contact: Luke Seward at luke.seward@uconn.edu