Bethany Tabor on "Art and Death"

Head over to Soundcloud to enjoy this fantastic episode with curator, writer, and cultural arts programmer Bethany Tabor! When we downloaded the files, every bit of one side of the conversation sounded like it was underwater, and so—we re-recorded it to the best of our ability. We are so glad that Bethany’s audio was unharmed, because it’s a great conversation.

We talk about her work with Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, creating events that give space for people to talk and learn about death and dying. We discuss performance art, John Underwood, the founder of the Death Cafe Movement, her writing about artist Teresa Margolles, Dia de Los Muertos and how its appropriation perfectly encapsulates the inextricably imperialistic relationship between US and Mexico, and how Covid has not actually changed our proximity to death.

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.

All the Updates

It has been a busy past month, with moving, settling in, and recording.

During the past few weeks we have been fortunate to speak with several illuminating guests: Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman spoke with us about his upcoming feature film Early Stage, “…an anthology film, speculating about the inner life of artificially intelligent networks.”

For our segment on Art and Death, we conversed with Bethany Tabor, a cultural arts programmer whose work focuses on death and end of life practices, J Simmz, a curator, writer, and co-founder of Doppelgänger Projects in New York, who works closely with the Death Positive Movement. Simmz conceptualizes exhibitions with heavy focus on the cycles of life and death, mysticism, and transcendence. This segment also included poet, mixed media artist, founder of Thedna Arts, and death doula Carrie Redway. Redway’s work with death is closely related to cycles of nature, folklore, mythology, and ritual.

We also delved more deeply into our Art and Health segment, speaking with artist and physician Dr. Eric Avery. Avery’s work has spanned several decades, and includes work exploring the social side of the AIDS/HIV crisis, as well as emerging infectious diseases, human rights abuses, death, and sexuality. We were also excited to speak with Dr. Bettina Judd, a writer, artist, performer, current Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, and author of Patient, a book of poems that explores the historical utilization of, and standardization of the dehumanization of Black, non-cisgender male bodies in the field of Eurocentric healthcare that continues today.

Our new intern, Tori Currier.

We would also like to take this time to welcome our summer intern Tori Currier! Tori is originally from East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. She currently resides in Northampton, Massachusetts where she attends Smith College. Tori is a junior (2022J) majoring in Art History. Focused on LGBTQ+ art, she is passionate about the role of art in social movements. Presently, she is conducting research for an honors thesis about AIDS crisis art and its continued censorship in the art world today. 

Tori intends to pursue a career in higher education. Her ambitions include changing how art history is traditionally taught by giving more attention to artists who have long been excluded or underappreciated. Interested in how history can be conveyed through creative fiction, Tori is developing a television screenplay about LGBTQ+ artists from the 60’s - 80’s, hoping to educate younger generations about the community’s history and the significant social roles that art has played throughout these decades. 

As an intern for Critical Bounds, she will strive to facilitate conversations about the importance of art in critical global issues. She is enthusiastic about how programs and websites in the social media age can become spaces for marginalized voices as well as tools to make education more accessible.

Tori will be doing research, handling a lot of our social media, and taking over the blog for the next few weeks, as well as making an episode of her own in August, and we are so happy to have her.