Hi everyone,

This is the last official week of class; the whole team will be in on Wednesday; please reach out if you need anything. I will be doing 1-1s this Wednesday and will pass one last time from all studios.

If you want to pick up the work you gave as a loan to the Professor's office, please let me know. If you don't claim your work, I will leave it hanging for the next Professor.

If you need any mentoring during July, please reach out.

Here is my summer read/listen/think list ( basically all my 3-semester recommendations in one place)

See you in the Darkness

Despina Stokou

Listen: Fucking Cancelled - Half measures availed us nothing https://fuckingcancelled.libsyn.com/half-measures-availed-us-nothing-turning-it-over with Clementine Morrigan and Jay Lesoleil

I highly recommend this podcast to everyone in the class, as they talk about cancel culture, its impact on social groups, and, in this episode, its origins in trauma. Both Clementine and Jay are recovering addicts, so they use the NA Step working guide ( another valuable readhttps://gssana.org/books/na-step-working-guide.pdf) - Here, they discuss Step 3, which is about entrusting yourself to the care of a higher power. They discuss the spiritual and social aspects of this notion.

Read: Conflict is Not Abuse- Sarah Schulman (look at her fictional work too!)

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Schulman illuminates how cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behaviour and Traumatized behaviour resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

Listen: Sarah Schulman in Conversation with curator Helen Molesworth https://podcasts.apple.com/gd/podcast/sarah-schulman/id1400997563?i=1000599637988

The novelist, playwright, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman discusses her most recent book, Let the Record Show, A Political History of ACT UP New York [1987-1993], a landmark document of the activist response to the AIDS crisis. Schulman describes the triumphs, challenges, and simultaneous histories of ACT UP, and what they teach us about movements in general. - podcast

Read: Undrowned Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

Follow/Listen: Michaela Harrison - Whale Whispering project https://www.michaelaharrison.org/we-are-one-ancestral-flow

Siren. Healer. Composer/writer. Harrison's ongoing project is wailing with the whales as a form of curative release, just as the Africans who crossed the Atlantic in slaving vessels surely did

Read: Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds- adrienne maree brownhttps://www.amazon.com/adrienne-maree-brown/e/B07195S2WT/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

Read: The Other Black Girl: a Novel - by Zakiya Dalila Harris Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and the micro-aggressions, she's thrilled when Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They've only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events cause Nella to become Public Enemy Number One and Hazel, the Office Darling. - this is fiction, a hard-to-put-down read that deals with a lot of the same identitarian politics we find in the academy or any other corporation

Listen-Read: Death of an Artist A moving portrait of Ana Mendietahttps://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/09/21/ana-mendieta-death-true-crime-podcast-helen-molesworth-interview, a Cuban American artist who ( allegedly) was thrown out the window by Carl Andre. A chilling portrait of the conspiratorial real-world silences that compound the art historical neglect of women and people of color.

Watch: Wide Rainbow serieshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcV3Tw-2V4w&t=33s - here with Christina Quarles about stencils.

Wide Rainbow is a free 501c3 non-profit based in NYC that connects contemporary artists with the community. They serve low-income neighborhoods with limited or no access to the arts or arts education. They also have an educational DIY video workshop series on youtube where you can meet artists in their studios and learn about new mediums or techniques for painting, meditation, performance, music, and recording.