Tuesday, July 30 | 6:30–8:00pm
No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá
No tengo edad, ni porvenir
Y ser feliz es mi color
De identidad
–Facundo Cabral
The concept of Doikayt, the Yiddish word which means hereness was central to the Jewish Bundist ideology, expressing its focus on solving the challenges confronting Jews in Europe where they lived, versus the "thereness" of the Zionist movement which sought to consolidate a Jewish diaspora in a colonized Palestine. For the descendants of the Transatlantic slave trade and those people who live under the weight of colonialisms past and present, hereness is the political reality created by the conditions of capitalism, settler colonialism and imperialism which continues to uproot the peoples and animals of the world while capturing and extracting from the land. Unable to return, we form a collective body of dispossessed diasporas, "arrivants" on the peripheries of empire in stolen indigenous land.
Please join Shellyne Rodriguez in conversation with Molly Crabapple, moderated by Andreas Petrossiants as we think about the ways we come together over and against the crisis of global fascism. The times are urgent.
The event will be streamed live on Wave Farm Radio and broadcast at a later date on Montez Press Radio as a part of a series of broadcasts called Airhead– Faculty Meetings at P·P·O·W
Shellyne Rodriguez (b. 1977) is a Bronx-based artist, educator, historian, writer, and community organizer who works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Rodriguez stewards the histories and stories of people that have shaped her lived experience, describing her practice as “the depiction and archiving of spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.” Through her multidisciplinary practice, Rodriguez documents the ways in which the diverse social fabric of the South Bronx is rewoven as the people and cultures coexist. Rodriguez utilizes language as well as cultural and sociopolitical references to create unified portraits of individuals from various communities formed in what she describes as the “periphery of empire.” Engaging with the legacy of the Ashcan School, who bore witness to the rise of the modern metropolis and depicted how the poor and working class in New York enclaves were transformed by this, Rodriguez views figures such as Alice Neel, Jane Dickson, and Martin Wong as an extension of this tradition and situates her practice alongside them. Rodriguez earned her MFA from Hunter College in studio art and her BFA in visual and critical studies from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown at The Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York, NY; Cue Art Foundation, New York, NY; Casa Warmu, Quito, Ecuador; Queens Museum, New York, NY; and El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, among others. Rodriguez has held residencies at Hunter College, New York, NY and the Shandaken Project, Catskills, NY. She is an Adjunct Professor at the Cooper Union and has been a teaching artist at the Bronx Museum and Museum of Modern Art. Works by Rodriguez have recently been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY; Virginia MoCA, Virginia Beach, VA; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico, among others. Third World Mixtapes: The Infrastructure of Feeling, Rodriguez’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, was on view in spring 2023.
Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and editor living in NY. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and e-flux journal, where he is the associate editor. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space.