Berette S. Macaulay "BIPOC on Colonialism, Nationalism, and [The Harmful Illusion of] White Supremacy"

How incredible to have come to our LAST (for a while anyway) episode of Critical Bounds. Please enjoy this exceptional conversation with Berette S. Macaulay.

We have such gratitude for Berette for engaging in this conversation. We discuss living a multiplicitous life, and the institutional lie that you must focus on One Thing, or be branded a failure. How to interrogate the process and usefulness of critical dialogue. What populations are still being overlooked in the art world? The influence of the Black Portlanders project. Working with artists who are creating work to, “...speak to some of the traumas, but not define ourselves by these traumas.” How institutional racism creates a challenge in even putting together a show that is about Black people. Tokenism in cultural institutions. The invisibility of power. Interrogating terms like “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, to unroot the mythologies of “Whiteness”. And so much more.

Berette S. Macaulay is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer from Jamaica and Sierra Leone. Her research and visual arts practice engage themes of belonging, identity-performance, illegibility, love, memory, and mythmaking. 

She is currently the inaugural curatorial fellow at On The Boards Performing Arts Theater in Seattle, has exhibited and published nationally and internationally, receiving recent Artist Grants from the Vermont Studio Center Residency, Shunpike Arts, and 4Culture. Art and writing publications include Feminist Media Histories, UNESCO Courier, Of Note and Museé magazines, and the World Policy Journal. Her curatorial work includes illusive self (2013) at Taller Boricua Gallery, NYC, and Exploring Passages in the Black Diaspora (2020) at Photographic Center NW. 

MFON in Seattle catalogue. Get the print catalog HERE.

Berette was the creator and organizer of the MFON in Seattle (2019/20) program in which she facilitated exhibition partnerships with MFON Women, Frye Art Museum, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and Photographic Center Northwest, following the legacy work of Adama Delphine Fawundu and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn to feature Black women photographers from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. 

Berette’s awards include a 2019 Simpson Center Research Cluster Grant as founder of Black Cinema Collective (BCC) where she curates screenings, watch parties, and panel discussions alongside co-programmers Savita Krishnamoorthy and Mateo Ochoa, focusing on African and Afro-Diasporic films. BCC functions as a project of i•ma•gine | e•volve, an interdisciplinary arts incubator she has been tending to since 2010. 

Berette was named a 2019 Ottenberg-Winans Fellow for African Studies (UW), and is the recipient of the 2020 Champion of Seattle Arts (COSA) Award. Berette also serves as the Art Liaison Program Manager at Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington.

Alexis L. Silva on "BIPOC on Colonialism, Nationalism, and [the harmful illusion of] White Supremacy"

At last, our conversation with artist writer, and curator Alexis L. Silva is available for your listening pleasure! We talk about finding your community in the art world, redefining success in a non-colonial context, the value of community museums (like the Wing Luke Museum, where he works), being 2nd generation, and a Person of Color in the art world, why we should be building coalitions now, more than ever, and much more.

“Alexis L. Silva is a Seattle based Hispanic Latino artist, writer, and curator who works through the means of performance, installation, and photography. Inspired by the idea of emotion transforming into something tangible and the overall human narrative, he creates his work by constructing thoughtful and immersive experiences that provoke emotive and visual poeticism. 

Born from immigrant parents under the heat of the Las Vegas sun, Alexis began working with photography at the age of 10. Enamored by the idea of capturing time in a box, he continued to pursue his interest in photography and graduated from Las Vegas Academy of the Arts with a focus in Photography. He went on to receive his BFA from Cornish College of the Arts with a focus in Performance, Installation, and Photography. His current works are a collection of poems and found images that tell his family's immigration story. His love for storytelling and narrative fuels his practice where he explores ideas of queerness, race, and the overall human experience.”

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman on "Art, AI, and Technology"

The first episode of our segment on “Art, AI, and Technology” is finally up for your consideration. Head over to Soundcloud (or your listening conveyance of choice) for our conversation with director Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman about his web series and now feature film Early Stage, the protests happening in both LA (where he is based) and Seattle (where I am) this summer, police brutality, the houseless crisis, the perils of social media, AI as a symbiotic lifeform, and the rather banal-yet-dangerous role it currently plays in our lives, Star Trek, Covid, how smartphones have changed our brains, and his conversations with Paradise, CA residents that resulted in his upcoming film, "Tips on Surviving the End of the World".

His intimate, provocative documentary work has won a regional EMMY and an Edes Award for Emerging Artists. His documentaries have been featured in the Zeppelin Museum, the Athens Biennale, San Francisco's DeYoung Museum, the BBC, PBS, Atlas Obscura, the Washington Post, NBC Left Field, and a handful of other platforms. This work has brought him to Ghana, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Tahiti, a heavy metal cruise in the Caribbean, and a snake-handling Pentecostal Church in Kentucky.

His scripted webseries "Early Stage", which was the seed of his current feature film, was originally released online as short vignettes on DIS.art, and in the physical world at Madrid's Matadero Museum in 2019 and at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Coppenhagen in 2020, and was recently part of a group exhibition called "The Sea Is Glowing" at Drugo More Gallery in Rijeka, Croatia.

He has directed music videos for Squarepusher (Warp Records), DNTEL (Dublab), Anna Ash, Gosh Pith, Horatio Clam, Lord Scrummage, and Briar Rabbit.

AJ Hawkins on "Art and Death"

Continuing with our series on “Art and Death”, please enjoy our conversation with artist AJ Hawkins about how changing relationships to faith can change our relationships to grief and grieving processes, how the death of a beloved pet inspired a search to make sense of her own mortality, the necrobiome as a "microbiological afterlife", her project "The Reclamation", How Death Positivity includes issues like bodily autonomy and environmentalism, how art can be used to connect and communicate, and to cope with things that feel "too big", and a crash course on ecological disposition.

AJ Hawkins uses fine art as a research medium to explore the challenges of living in a mortal body. Drawing on her background as a painter, sculptor and custom fabricator, AJ often creates hybrid art works that blur the lines between 2- and 3-dimensional, traditional and experimental.

Her Kickstarter-funded project, The Reclamation, challenges viewers to choose more environmentally-friendly afterlives by highlighting the value of human decomposition and the necrobiome. In years since, AJ's art has focused on experiences surrounding grief and illness. Her new series, The Poisoned Body, explores the physical and psychological toll of living with a prolonged and severe iatrogenic disease.

T.s. Flock on "Art, Gender, and Sexuality"

T.s. Flock self-portrait (courtesy T.s. Flock)

Check out our latest episode with T.s. Flock for our “Art, Gender, and Sexuality” segment. where we discuss the titular subjects, as well as etymology, the importance of aesthetic literacy, embodiment, and a plethora of other things.

“T.s. Flock is a Seattle-based writer and critic, and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle, an arts and culture publication, and was formerly an Arts Editor for Seattle Weekly. Other publications for which T.s. has written include Fabrik, Arts Africa, and Visual Art Source. T.s. holds degrees in English Composition, German Language and Biology from Georgia State. T.s. is launching a new video series aimed at expanding aesthetic literacy in connection through the history of arts, etymology and technology.”