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 and session moderators to think out loud together about the challenges and possibilities of imagining, visualizing, writing, practicing abolition now.
Bio:
Dawn Weleski co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the US government is in conflict. Their art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Previous work includes City Council Wrestling, a series of public wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters, and their most recent work, Refuse Refuse: Radio, is a speculative fiction radio series that dramatizes current and impending climate catastrophe throughout rural New York State. Broadcast from a mutual aid ambulance, Refuse Refuse will record and transmit survival skill share workshops and participatory climate collapse drama and is supported by a 2023 Anonymous was a Woman Environmental Art Grant, a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts Grant, and the Harpo Foundation.
Weleski has worked in hospitality and food service for over twenty-five years, and their current wage work as bartender/baker/line cook, house cleaner, landscaper, adjunct professor, and Emergency Medical Technician, among other gigs, informs their collective stewardship of emergentCNY, a Central New York mutual aid network that exchanges goods and services during times of ever-present crisis through reciprocal care, rest, repair and regeneration. emergentCNY links people across geography, time and systematized difference through its repurposed ambulance that archives and transmits stories of historical and contemporary mutual aid in CNY and around the world. Weleski is currently is University of Michigan Student Life Sustainability Artist in Residence where they co-initiated Noon at Night, a global solidarity network of transgressive learners during this crisis and the next that acknowledge interdependence across difference, utilizing food as a binder. A collaboration of University of Michigan students, Southeast Michigan cultural organizers and educators, and experiential learning hubs around the world, Noon at Night will ultimately take the form of a mobile classroom and pay-what-you-can cafe connected to other transgressive educators and learners around the world, opening when it is noon in the partner location each weekend.
They have exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Hammer Museum; San Jose Museum of Art; Anyang Public Art Project; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art; Project Row Houses; Townhouse Gallery (Cairo); Festival Belluard Bollwerk International; Contemporary Calgary; The Mattress Factory Museum; Arts House (Melbourne); and 91mQ (Berlin); have been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; was a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2019 to 2020 NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University and Upstate Institute Fellow; was a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow nominee, a 2023 New York State Traditional and Rural Artist Fellow, and a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Finalist; and holds a BFA in Visual Art with a concentration in Contextual Practice from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University.
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.
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).
Laurie Beth Clark is Professor in the Art Department where she teaches studio courses as well as graduate seminars on topics in Visual Culture and Performance Studies. Clark’s career merges theory and practice. Her creative projects have been shown in theatres, galleries, museums, gardens, forests, and public and private spaces in more than 150 shows in 35 countries on six continents. Extensive documentation of her creative work can be found at lauriebethclark.art. Clark’s writing has been published in journals (AJS Perspectives, Ecosystems and People, Encounters: Journal of Tourism and Transnational Studies, Global Performance Studies, High Performance, , Lateral, Performance Paradigm, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Topics, Tourism and Transnational Studies, Visual Culture) and anthologies (A Performance Cosmology, Blaze: Discourse on Art, Companion to Site-Specific Performance, Companion to Visual Culture, Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, Estudos Performantivos: Global Performance, Guerilla Performance and Multimedia, Intermediality, Marketing Memory in Latin America, Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Past as Violence, MISperformance: essays in shifting perspectives, Performance and the Public Sphere, Performing the Edible, Place and Performance, Political Performance, The Art of Truthtelling After Authoritarian Rule, The Object Reader, Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma, What’s Cooking? Food, Art and Counterculture).
Michael Peterson is an artist and a scholar of performance and popular cultures. He is Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a founding faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies graduate program. His teaching includes studio courses in performance making and art-life, a Gender and Women’s Studies course in feminist theatre, seminars in performance studies, and a course for first-year non-arts majors called “How to Live? Art and Politics in the Everyday.” His scholarship includes Straight White Male Performance Art Monologues (Mississippi UP), as well as articles on performance, food, animals, cruelty, human rights, and activism published in journals such as TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies and Performance Research.
Peterson is co-founder, with Laurie Beth Clark, of the internationally-known art group Spatuala&Barcode. Their social-practice, participatory arts projects have been commissioned around the world; their publications on participatory art, food studies, and memorial culture have appeared in diverse journals and collections; they have co-edited special issues of Performance Research “On Generosity” and “On Hunger” (with Jazmin Llana).Peterson also continues to make “solo” performances that are in fact collaborations with individual participants or small groups of spectators.