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Cutting Your Crap. Pasting the Pieces.
March 31, 2021 @ 6:00 pm
Featuring: Dr. Grace Sanders-Johnson
This workshop invites you to look at the materials in your life and re-imagine them in new and generative ways. From our canvas (a toilet or paper towel roll) to our medium (newspaper, old magazines, or product packaging), we will observe and account for our “stuff” and transform it into something beautiful.
Materials needed: Toilet paper roll, liquid white school glue, paintbrush, (or fingers), a bowl of water, old magazines or recycled paper, and your imagination.
This event is free and open to the public. This event kicks off Blackness 360°: Art, Culture, Health, and Futures, a series of curated experiences designed to deepen knowledge about the multiplicity and complexity of Blackness and Black experiences. The series is organized by UF Black Affairs in partnership with its 2020-21 Faculty Fellow. Support provided by co-sponsors: UF Center for Arts Migration and Entrepreneurship, UF Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, UF Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere, UF Center for Latin American Studies, and The Power Lab.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Grace L. Sanders Johnson is a visual artist, historian, and co-founder of Harriet’s Hike – an ecological literacy program for black girls and elder women in North Philadelphia. She has practiced collating for two and a half decades, including study at Fleisher Art Memorial and exhibits at IMPERFECT Gallery (2019). Sanders Johnson has worked with various public history projects such as Concordia University’s Oral History Project Histoire de Vie (Montreal 2011), the art-archive installation Nou Pa Bliye: Haitian Feminist Expressions and Translations (2014), and co-produced the experimental course “Ships: Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape” with award-winning artists Emily Carris Duncan and Joanne Douglass (2020).
She is also an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Sanders Johnson has been awarded many fellowships, including the Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship, Andrew C. Mellon and Ford Foundation Fellowships, and recently the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship. She is also a 2020-2021 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholars-in-Residence Fellow. Her work is published in several journals and books including Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (2018), Journal of Haitian Studies (2014), and Caribbean Military Encounters (2017). She is currently completing her first book entitled, White Gloves, Black Nation: Gender, Citizenship and Radical Becoming in Early Twentieth-Century Haiti (under review with UNC Press). Sanders Johnson studied at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad and Tobago), received her BA from Spelman College, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in the Joint History and Women’s Studies Program.