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Upcoming Engagements + Announcements
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Tuesday, February 18th
Part of Film series Happy Birthday, Toni! A Celebration of Black Women
Programmer: Ayanna Dozier
“The pursuit of vulnerability—the effort to remain open to at-risk bodies while possessing an at-risk body—is always marked by the certainty of death from exposure. And yet, it is a line of pursuit that we, as Black women, must maintain. What my interest in Ms. Morrison and Ms. Lorde’s words aims to examine is their very determined pursuits towards emotional and spiritual vulnerability as Black women in a world that reaps profit from the neglect, harm, and death of their at-risk bodies.”—Ayanna Dozier
A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde
Dirs. Ada Gay Griffin & Michelle Parkerson
1995, 80min
All That is Left Unsaid
Dir. Michele Pearson Clarke
2014, 4min
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Ayanna Dozier on Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (2019) via Artforum
THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT IS A NOISY FILM, full of music, yelling, screaming, crying, scratching, wailing, and laughter. But the most deafening moments unfold in silence, when viewers are left to assess what is missing, what cannot be represented. Consider the deep pauses and puzzled faces of the Black women and girls standing on the corner of 116th Street and Malcom X Boulevard in Harlem, thinking of how to answer filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary’s question, the one that structures this movie: “Do you feel safe in your body, in the world?” …
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Intertextuality: Performance/Subjectivity in Experimental Shorts
March 11th, 7:30PM
In dialogue with Hammer Projects: Ja’Tovia Gary, which features THE GIVERNY SUITE, this screening of short films situates Gary’s work in the context of Black women’s experimental films across a 25-year period. By gathering video, photos, sound clips, and printed media, these filmmakers give an account of what gendered blackness feels like in North America and the UK. Artist and scholar Ayanna Dozier joins Gary for a post-screening discussion and Q&A.
Intersections: Race and Gender in Artists' Practices
February 28th, 7:30PM
This drop-in tour led by Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow Ayanna Dozier examines the social frameworks of identity. Specifically, viewers will focus on the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality as they are conveyed through artists' practices. The tour will examine select works from the Whitney's sixth floor permanent collection exhibition, Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019.
Learning Series Lecture:
Stirring to Struggle—Art from the 1920s to the 1940s
February 29th, 12:30PM
For the upcoming exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, teaching fellow Ayanna Dozier will discuss artists associated with Mexican muralism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Deal’s art programs. The conversation will illuminate how artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and others engaged the momentous cultural and political changes of their time. Focusing on this historical period, the talk will consider art’s social potential when it becomes public and collective.
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My 2017 essay, "Black Women and the Edit of Shame" in cléo's Shorts issue (Vol. 5, Issue 2) was republished as part of their paperback reader. Copies of it can be purchased via the link below.
https://cleojournal.bigcartel.com/product/the-cleo-reader-2013-2019
"cléo journal was a publication dedicated to film and film culture and informed by intersectional feminist perspectives, which was published three times a year from 2013 to 2019 …"
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Betye Saar conjures a new mythology at MoMA
via The Art Newspaper
AYANNA DOZIER
A black face pressed against the window peers out; her gaze through glued-on recycled eyes confronts and troubles us. Above the silhouette of her head with tight curls is a series of vignettes laid out behind the window frame: a lion eating the sun, a brown head and brain riddled with symbols in colour-coded blocking, a daguerreotype, and in the center a pair of skeletons, one white and one black. Betye Saar uses such symbolism in her work, Black Girl’s Window (1969), to manifest an emerging political consciousness with cosmological order—the face pressed against the window has her palms and mind open to evaluate the world and its symbolic meanings …
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Lastly, Preorders are now live for Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope as part of Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Series. Tentative release date is September 3rd, 2020. If you pre-order the book via Bloomsbury, you will receive a 10% discount.
"… Dozier's book examines Velvet Rope, the promotion, the tour, and its accompanying music videos to suggest that it demonstrates the power of healing through a strictly Black feminist poetics."
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/janet-jacksons-the-velvet-rope-9781501355028/
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