Calendar

Dean Moss’s interdisciplinary performance piece johnbrown layers live choreography, video performances, sound recordings, and music to examine the legacy of abolitionist John Brown across generations. The work premiered at The Kitchen on October 16, 2014, the 155th anniversary of Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. At the Artist’s Institute, Moss places two excerpts from johnbrown, an audio work and a video-play, in conversation with Horace Pippin’s painting from 1942.

In this afternoon talk, Moss will speak about his work, and reflect on John Brown’s legacy in activism and art making today.

Dean Moss is a dance-based multidisciplinary theater and media artist, curator, and lecturer. His current research investigates the fluidity of self through cross-cultural, multimedia performance collaborations that often incorporate audience participation.

Register here for this online event.

ARTS.BLACK editors Jessica Lynne and Taylor Renee Aldridge talk with organizer, author, mother, and poet Tawana Petty. Petty’s words accompany Horace Pippin’s painting, “John Brown Going to His Hanging” (1942) at the Artist’s Institute, alongside eleven other writers that ARTS.BLACK commissioned to write wall labels for the season. Petty will speak about her organizing work with Petty Propolis and poetry as a form of resistance. Register here to attend.

Tawana Petty has spent over fifteen years teaching poetry as visionary resistance to unjust policies and practices. She is a long-time organizer whose work focuses primarily on racial justice and equity issues, as well as data and digital privacy rights. She is the founding director of Petty Propolis, a Black women-led artist incubator, which teaches year-round anti-racism and literary workshops, and hosts an annual art festival and artist retreat in historic Idlewild, Michigan. Tawana was honored with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition in 2018 and was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021.

Historians Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Blakeslee Gilpin will discuss John Brown and his place in visual culture. Click here to register for the Zoom webinar.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, PhD is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and writing focus on race, class and gender in American art and in African-American art specifically.

Blakeslee Gilpin, PhD is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University. He is author of John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change.