In my Community-Engaged ePortfolio (CP-eP) I analyze existing communication and information responses to Feminist Theory and Black Archival Practice for Black Women Artist, Cultural Workers and Organizers at Build Your Archive located in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Greater Metro Atlanta as part of my work for the CIS 675 course (Community-Engaged Scholarship) during fall 2024. On this page, I provide an overview of how I plan to approach my project, describe why this project is important, and explore my theoretical and conceptual len(s).
Jasmine Nicole Williams, film photograph,Grace Gardner, 2022
What Do I Plan to Do?
For the duration of this course I will plan, execute and evaluate the documentation strategy of jasmine nicole wiliiams' solo exhibition, "kin to red dirt on white carpets"
Build Your Archive, will be shifting it's consulting focus to curatorial for the duration of January 2024 - September 2024. In 2023, as Founder and Principal Archivist of Build Your Archive, I was selected to propose an exhibition to local Atlanta gallery, Swan Coach House Gallery to present a group or solo exhibition.
This would place Build Your Archive in the position as an information organization, to design, curate and produce an exhibition alongside stewarding the archive of an artist in real time. This also provided the opportunity to refine processes and implement values of data justice within the infrastructure distributed inside the practices that of cultural worker and organizer.
Because I had been working with jasmine nicole williams, printmaker, mularist and organizer since 2016, I was familiar with her practice and brought the opportunity to her to create a body of work specifically for this exhibition.
Why Is It Important?
[The Context of Need] Environment and Setting
In Architecture in Black: Talking Space with LaVerne Wells-Bowie, bell hooks states "Memories are cultural legacy we must honor. By continuning to perpetuate the creative relationship to space particular to the African Diaspora, we acknowledge our history, its particularity and urgency. This also means that it is our task as insurgent black intellectuls and critical thinkers to articulate these relationships theoretically and analytically so that they will be documented in a way that allows them to be sustained in print. This practice means that black people won't have to constantly reinvent this knowledge orally to convince a world outside ourselves that we have had and have a complex relationship to space, to architecture and to the politics of the visual." (hooks, 1995)
Jasmine's solo exhibition is a significant event in her career as artist and cultural worker. It is important to prioritize documentation of all phases of the work because they will be evidence of her creative process, political ideals and groundings and the relationships that were sustained to support her to get this point.
[ Population Profile ] Barriers & Obstacles
The current challenge of this project is there is no funding outside of the W.A.G.E fees paid by the gallery to both the curator and the artist to present, mount or document this exhibition.
W.A.G.E.’s mission is to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and the institutions that contract our labor, and to introduce mechanisms for self-regulation into the art field that collectively bring about a more equitable distribution of its economy.
Echoing the sentiments of the Community Archives Collaborative, "Despite their importance to collecting, preserving, and sharing stories of marginalized people, many community archives face difficulties growing their operations, keeping their doors open, and enhancing their programming and collections activities."
How Does Your Project Relate to This? How Does the Organization Perceive Your Role?
In the essay "Workers for Artistic Production", bell hook argues that "Artistic production would be enriched in our culture if grant givers would create a system of inter-art relations that would reward discussion and engagement - the sharing of knowledge, information and skills across boundaries of race, class, gender, age etc. "
As the Founder and Principal Archivist, believe the same and have spent a considerable amount of the semester proposing the exhibition and why it is necessary to documented at this time in jasmine's career. ByJanuary 2024, I applied to over $189,880 in Grants & Funding that would be applied to jasmine's solo exhibition as well as existing projects and programming for Build Your Archive.
It is an on-going issue of small business and community archives to recieve funding support the stewarding and preservation work (Jules, 2019) because most grants and funding orginizations see documentation as a by-line in the budget that either does not need to be or is minimally funded.
How Do I Plan to Do It?
Methodological lens: Feminist Ethonography
I will be exploring my work for this portfolio on Build Your Archive through Feminist Ethnography which is "a qualitative research methodology emerging out of anthropology – a discipline that examines the lived experiences of a community “in its natural habitat.” (Ghosh, 2016)
The body of work that jasmine will creating, is deeply personal to her lived experience as well as one that I have witnessed over the years. I like to echo Nikki Lane when she says, "By adding these experiences to the record, they become part of the limited but growing body of available knowledge about the everyday experiences of Black people within the African diaspora." (Lane, 2016) As the exhibition will become a record of her experience and enter the collective memory of our community to help others.
Within this method inside a artistic practice the framework or main parts are developed in these areas:
Data Collection - Studying previous work and archival materials, Studio visits and meetings outside of the studio
Interpretation - Critiques and editing down the work before mounting the exhibition
Presentation of that data - Final exhibition, artist talk and community programming.
What Results & Outcomes Do I Plan to Achieve?
Disciplinary lens: Black Archival Praxis
I will be positioning my work for this portfolio within the disciplinary lens Black Archival Praxis and Black Memory Work. (Sutherland and Collier, 2022) Through this lens, I will be prioritizing nurturing the relationships with the documentarians so that they are familar with jasmine and her work but also fall into our shared processes of preservation seasmeslly.
Previously, I grounded the work in these disciplines I defined them as such:
Black Archival Praxis / Practice is the mutual understanding that the experience of Black life and the ways and which Black People choose to document and preserve their lives has expanded what and how the field of Archiving traditionally defines "Archives". Whereas historically documentation of the Black community has been used as a tool of observation and surveillance.
As a Black Women and Black Memory workers we "bring specific skills to the proverbial kitchen table and remind us of the richness before" (Ewing 2022). It is one that combines both experience and collective memory to the archives and projects that we are involved in that is able to provide radical care and empathy in ways that is natural to the communities that we serve. (Caswell and Cifor, 2017)
Within the process of humanization, the relationship between the archivist and the artist is deepened to help the artist see future value in not only their narrative but the cultural work that they produce during that particular time in history. (King, 2023)
References:
Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor. 2016. “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives”. Archivaria81 (May), 23-43. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13557.
Community Archives Collaborative. Retrieved December 7, 2024, from https://communityarchivescollab.org
Ewing, K. T. (2022). Fugitive Archives: Black Women, Domestic Repositories, and Hoarding as Informal Archival Practice. The Black Scholar, 52(4), 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2022.2111653
Ghosh, S. (2016). Feminist Ethnography. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss765
Jules, Bergis. Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community-Based Archives. 2019, shiftdesign.org/content/uploads/2019/02/ArchitectingSustainableFutures-2019-report.pdf.
Lane, N. (2016). Bringing Flesh to Theory: Ethnography, Black Queer Theory, and Studying Black Sexualities. Feminist Studies, 42(3), 632. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.42.3.0632
Hooks, B. (1995). Art On My Mind: Visual Politics. New Press. p 141
Hooks, B. (1995). Art On My Mind: Visual Politics. New Press. p. 160
King, S. (2023). CIS668 ePortfolio. https://scking1-cis668-fall23.myportfolio.com/interdisciplinary-perspective
Schoenebeck, Sarita, and Paul Conway. 2020. “Data and Power: Archival Appraisal Theory as a Framework for Data Preservation” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4 (CSCW2): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3415233.
Sutherland, T., & Collier, Z. (2022). Introduction: The Promise and Possibility of Black Archival Practice. The Black Scholar, 52(2), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2022.2043722