Roundtable on Abolition Now (Room 121)
Maria Gaspar, Detail from the series Disappearance Jail. 2021-Ongoing, Hundreds of perforated Archival Inkjet prints on rice paper. States so far include IL, CA, VA, OH, and WA.
5” x 7”, Photo documentation: Clare Britt
Abstract: We gather with our keynote presenters to think out loud together about the challenges and possibilities of imagining, visualizing, writing, practicing abolition now.
Bio:
Jill Casid is Professor in the Art History Department and she is also an artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the position of Professor of Visual Studies with a cross-appointment in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Casid pursues a research practice across writing, photography, and film that is dedicated to queer, crip, trans*feminist, and decolonial interventions. Casid exhibits their artwork nationally and internationally, including in recent exhibitions at Signs and Symbols and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York and Documenta fifteen. Casid’s current projects concern the question of doing things with being undone in the Necrocene and what aesthetics can do in confronting the political problem of form in the situation of crisis ordinary.
Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005) which received the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss award and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) — now in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022). Casid also co-edited the collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014).
Recent essays and articles have appeared in journals ranging from Texte zur Kunst, Art in America, and Panorama to Photography and Culture, Women and Performance, TDR, and the Journal of Visual Culture, among others. Casid has contributed chapters to, among other collections, Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape (Diaphanes/Johns Hopkins, 2018), Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean (Oxford, 2018), The Philosophical Salon (Open Humanities Press, 2017), and Architecture is All Over (Columbia, 2017). A widely published art writer and theorist, Casid dedicates a significant part of their practice to thinking with and writing on crip, queer, and trans*feminist art and aesthetics.
Casid was the Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Humanities Center at Williams College (2018–19). Casid serves on the governing board of the International Association of Visual Culture and on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. Casid is the honored recipient of numerous awards for research and teaching, including the Kellett Mid-Career Award (2023), the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Award (2015), the Vilas Research Investigator Award (2014), the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2011), and the Hamel Faculty Fellowship (2009).
Che Gossett is a Black non binary femme writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought and black study. They are the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at the Initiative for a Just Society, Columbia Law School, and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, in the Animal Law and Policy Program. Che received their doctorate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, New Brunswick in May 2021. They received a BA in African American Studies from Morehouse College, an MAT in Social Studies from Brown University, an MA in History from the University of Pennsylvania and were a 2019-2020 Helena Rubenstein Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Che received a Ruth Stephan Fellowship from Beinecke Library at Yale University for the summer of 2022, to research the papers of queer feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Gossett has been a fellow at the Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford University, as well as the Centre for Visual Culture and Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge.
Currently, Gosset is finishing two manuscripts for Duke University Press–the first being a political biography of AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and the second emerging out of their dissertation, theorizing the ways in which abolition is activated in Black contemporary art. Gossett has co-edited a special issue of TSQ “Trans in a Time of HIV/AIDS” with Professor Eva Hayward, and their syllabus on trans and non-binary methods for art and art history co-authored with Professor David Getsy won the College Art Journal Award for Distinction. For the fall semester of 2023, they are in residence as assistant professor/visiting scholar at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Gossett will be presenting advance work from the manuscript in progress on the activation of abolition in Black contemporary art.
Jenna Loyd is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on racism and state violence. One thread of her research focuses on health and the social production of health inequities. This focus can be seen in Health Rights Are Civil Rights on US-based health activism and more recent research and teaching on how health concepts and practices intersect with international migration governance. A second main thread of research focuses on theorizing the content and scope of the US carceral state, evident with Beyond Walls and Cages and Boats, Borders, and Bases. Much of her work has examined migration detention and deterrence as interrelated parts of the criminal legal system, work which has implications for movements migrant and racial justice.
Jennifer González is Patricia and Rowland Rebele Chair and Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a faculty member in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. Her research engages theoretical discourses of feminism, diaspora, and decoloniality in contemporary art. Her publications appear in journals such as, Camera Obscura, Art Journal, Bomb, and Aztlán and her books include Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art and Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology which was included in the top art books of the decade in 2020 by ArtNews magazine.