Distinguished Visitors 2022-23

Shawnee Gibson was a "Special Guest of Amy Guggenhiem's Women in International Cinema Course"

A passionate and compassionate Speaker, Shawnee Gibson was a "Special Guest of Amy Guggenhiem's Women in International Cinema Course" Monday, April 3rd @ 2 pm in Engineering 305.She talked about her unique perspective on Black Maternal Health, from direct experience as a Mother, a psychoanalyst and leader, and the subject of the documentary, "AfterShock".

When a Black mother dies, there is a ripple effect. AFTERSHOCK, an original documentary from Onyx Collective and ABC News Studios. Following the deaths of two young women due to childbirth complications, two bereaved families galvanize activists, birth-workers and physicians to reckon with one of the most pressing American crisis today: the US maternal health crisis. Directed by Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee.

"Aftershock" is available to view at AFTERSHOCK

Shawnee Benton Gibson, LMSW / FDLC, is the mother of Shamony featured in AFTERSHOCK, is an advocate for reproductive justice as well as the Co-Founder and CEO of Spirit of A Woman (S.O.W.) Leadership Development Institute, an organization established in 2002 and designed to educate, elevate and effect positive and sustainable transformation in the lives of individuals, groups, families and communities. She is a master teacher, trainer, healer, vision coach, performance artist, inspirational speaker, officiant, mother and friend.

Duke Riley and Diana Senchal visit Lara allen's class

In class, Duke Riley discussed his exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, "DEATH TO THE LIVING: Long Live Trash," which speaks to "local pollution and global marine devastation" from single use plastic. Afterwards, students wrote a critical art review of the work based on what they had read, their experience of visiting the exhibition, and what they learned from the Q & A with Riley. Students were very excited about meeting the artist and many reported being inspired by the exhibition for a variety of different reasons.

Diana Senchal PhD: Author, poet, translator, musician, and educator led a discussion on language, literature and culture, focusing on 2 chapters from her book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in School and Culture, Antigone, and Sonnet #35 by Petrach. The class conversations were deeply meaningful reflections on how we engage with others throughout the creative process, and how we recognize and develop a sense of solitude in both public and private spaces.

Duke Riley Visit

Diana Senchal

Maria Damon Zoomed into Adeena Karasick’s Artist Book Class (HMS 491) On Wed. March 29

On Wed. March 29, scholar, weaver, poet and book artist, (and our beloved colleague), Maria Damon Zoomed into Adeena Karasick’s Artist Book Class (HMS 491) and spoke about the relationship between text and textile. Tracking through a range of crucial etymologies, highlighting how language itself is a weaving of meaning, she then treated the class to an extensive slide show of her award winning text-iles, situating them historically, politically, aesthetically and biographically. The students were rapt!

Go Hirasawa, Jelena Stojkovic (on Zoom), and Ethan Spigland discuss Nagasaki Oshima and landscape theory on March 27, 2023.

Many thanks to Charles Abelmann and Stella Cai for the screening and discussion of the documentary ENGLISH HUSTLE at Pratt.

Ali Sengul visited the Women in International Cinema Class on March 6th. Ali Sengul's Talk on the Turkish Film "Clair Obscur", Director Yeşim Ustaoğlu (2016)

Prof. Sengul - who has followed the Director's work since the 1990's, will give an interactive talk on this moving, forward-looking film in my "Women in International Cinema Class" offering insights on the Turkish context, feminist, and critical readings of this timely independent film.

Ali holds a PhD from the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas-Austin and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. Ali teaches film history and aesthetics at Brooklyn College and Baruch College and is the author of several articles and book chapters on Turkish and Kurdish cinema. Ali’s research focuses on the intersection of cinema, national identity, modernity and aesthetics of political cinema in Turkey.

HOLLYWOOD IN CHINA: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST MOVIE MARKET BY YING ZHU (MODERATED WITH A RESPONSE FROM KAREN MA) held on March 20th

Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, Hollywood in China charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values

are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications. The book is an inside look at the intense business and political maneuvering that is shaping the

movies and the U.S.-China relationship itself—revealing a headlines-grabbing conflict that is playing out not only on the high seas, but on the silver screen.

Ying Zhu and Karen Ma

SPEAKER TIM YIP EVENT THREE MODELS OF THE FUTURE, MODERATED BY MARY MC BRIDE. HELD ON MARCH 6TH

Embodying his aesthetic concept of 'New Orientalism', Tim Yip's works draw upon ancient cultures to reshape our thinking of the future. Whether that be in projects such as motion picture "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", the 2004 Athens Olympics handover ceremony or his rendition of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the Academy Award winning artist's inventive and multifarious approach in art, costume design, dance and theater leads us to reconsider our intrinsic concepts of art and creativity.

Tim Yip with Prof. Mary McBride

Elena Vogman spoke on Sergei Eisenstein at hms event held on march 9th

Elena Vogman is a visiting assistant professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She holds a PhD in general and comparative literature from Free University, Berlin and was a postdoctoral fellow at Peter Szondi-Institute for General and Comparative Literature, Berlin and International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM, Weimar), as well as a guest professor at École Normale Superieure, Paris.

ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES DISTINGUISHED VISITOR Dr. Kiu-wai Chu visited hms

Dr. Kiu-wai Chu will visit HMS on the afternoon of March 3. He will give an informal presentation on his current research involving environmental humanities in the Asian region. Stop by Dekalb 208 in you would like to learn more about this fascinating topic.

Kiu-wai Chu (朱翹瑋) is Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities, and a faculty member of the Chinese programme. He obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature in University of Hong Kong, and his previous degrees from SOAS University of London and University of Cambridge. He was a visiting Fulbright scholar in University of Idaho, and Postdoctoral Fellows in University of Zurich and Western Sydney University.

In 2022-23, he is selected Luce East Asia Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and is there in residence to work on his book project, Chinese Eco-images in the Planetary Age: The Multispecies World of Humans, Animals and Plants (provisionally titled).

His research focuses on ecocriticism, environmental humanities, human-animal studies, and contemporary cinema and visual art, specifically in Chinese and Southeast Asian contexts. His work has appeared in Oxford Bibliographies; books such as Transnational Ecocinema; Animated Landscapes; Ecomedia: Key Issues; The Palgrave

Handbook of Asian Cinema; Cli-fi: A Companion; Chinese Environmental Humanities; and journals Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture; Journal of Chinese Cinemas; Journal of Chinese Governance; Asian Cinema; photographies, Screen, and elsewhere.

He is a Living Lexicon Editor of journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press), and editorial board member of journals Media+Environment (University of California Press), Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Books), and the book series "Green Media" (Amsterdam University Press) and "African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities" (Brill).

He is an Executive Council Member-at-large of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE-US) (2021-23). He is also a member of the Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab).

Éden Lebegue, a recent graduate of beaux-art in Clermont-Ferrand visited the French Class

Students finished a wonderful 2-class Zoom visit with Éden Lebegue, a recent graduate of beaux-art in Clermont-Ferrand. Students got to practice their spoken French with them, and then Éden did a presentation on how to describe/present a work of art in French! Students also got to ask her specific contextual vocabulary questions regarding art. Each student will use this presentation to choose and describe a work of art in French in next Wednesday's class.

Vocabulaire analyse d’œuvre

Musician and film enthusiast Tristan Teshigahara Pollack delivered a captivating presentation on the work of his grandfather, Hiroshi Teshigahara, for Ethan Spigland's Japanese Cinema class on December 6, 2022.

Musician and film enthusiast Tristan Teshigahara Pollack delivered a captivating presentation on the work of his grandfather, Hiroshi Teshigahara, for Ethan Spigland's Japanese Cinema class on December 6, 2022.

Rob Redding presented a talk with Amy Guggenheim’s class “Women in International Cinema” contextualizing three films dealing with intersectionality making ties to queer, Afrocentric and postcolonial themes in popular culture.

Rob Redding is an American talk host, journalist, author and artist. He syndicated his show Redding News Review on Sirius XM. He has published 12 best-selling books and won numerous awards. He has taught at Pace and City universities. He wrote "Black voices, White power: Members of the Black press make meaning of media hegemony" in the Journal of Black Studies. He has a Master's in Communication from Marshall University and a Master's in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. His art is currently on view in the Myrtle Hall gallery on our campus.

Renowned filmmaker and poet Abigail Child paid a visit to classes taught by Nada Gordon (Literary and Critical Studies) and Ethan Spigland (Recycled Images) this semester.

Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental media since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film/video works and installations. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, she makes “brilliant exciting work…a vibrant political film that’s attentive to form.” Her major projects address issues of gender, sound /image juxtaposition and "re-formatted" Hollywood and home movie tropes. Child has had many solo shows nationally and internationally, including mid-career retrospectives worldwide.

She screened several films included her recent Origin of the Species. https://www.originofthespeciesfilm.com/

Cyberfeminism Index with Speaker: Mindy Seu

Mindy Seu presented her Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, at Pratt Manhattan on November 28, 2022. Introduced and moderated by Mendi Obadike.

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist based in New York City. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, sharing—typically in the form of lists and spreadsheets—and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys historical precursors of the metaverse and reveals the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome and presented at the New Museum in its online form, and its print form is a recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), among many others, and has been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.

Event was held on Monday, November 28, 2022

Curator, archivist, and found footage filmmaker M.M. Serra welcomes Ethan Spigland’s class to the Filmmakers Coop on November 16, 2022.

GRACE TING

THE BRILLIANCE OF JAPANESE LITERATURE IN THE NIGHT

Monday, November 7, 2022

6:00pm

Pratt Library, 3rd floor (Alumni Reading Room)

Warren Lehrer's Visit

Visual literature pioneer Warren Lehrer presented his work to Prof. Adeena Karasick’s, HMS 491, Artist’s Book class on Monday, September 19th, 2022. Lehrer’s tour of his journey as a writer and designer/book artist included reading/performing excerpts from his books and multimedia projects, detailing his process, philosophy and evolution. After his hour-long inspiring presentation, Lehrer answered informed and probing questions from students, which erupted into lively conversation. The course itself is a historical /aesthetic and political investigation into the ever-expanding genre of Artist’s Books (a pre-requisite for the Book Minor, which Karasick helped to initiate), and it was such a thrill for the students to have the opportunity for this close encounter with such an internationally acclaimed luminary in the field.

Lehrer’s work is acclaimed for its marriage of writing and typography, capturing the shape of thought and speech, and reuniting oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling in books, animations and performance. Honors include the 2019 Ladislav Sutnar Prize for Lifetime Achievement in design, 2016 Lifetime Achievement Honoree of the Center for Book Arts, 2020 NYFA Fellow, the Brendan Gill Prize, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, the International Book Award for Best New Fiction, a Special Recognition Award from the Society of Typographic Arts, three AIGA Book Awards, two Type Directors Club awards, a Media That Matters Award, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. His books are in many collections including MoMA, The Getty Museum, Georges Pompidou Centre, and Tate Gallery. Lehrer is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. https://warrenlehrer.com/

Éden Lebegue's Visit

Native French speaker Éden Lebegue, a recent graduate of the École de Beaux-Arts in Clermont-Ferrand, France came and spoke to French 1 students in Professeur Billingsley's class at Pratt about their studies, current French artists, queer culture and its' changing iconography in France, as well as their impressions of New York, desserts they love, and current French idiomatic expressions.

Students then created works of art based upon their presentation, and created a gallery walk,

matching their images to the sentences in French.

WE CAN'T BE REPLACED/NOSOTRES NO PODEMOS SER REEMPLAZADES BY Cynthia Tobar

KODA

This exhibition explores the meaningful impact local residents have as they resist increasing inequality and the economic divide imposed on their communities in North Brooklyn. It will feature work produced on-site by Cynthia Tobar during her KODA artist residency that center narratives from Latin immigrants and longtime Bushwick residents fighting against discrimination and displacement due to gentrification. We can’t be replaced includes photographs and short video installations that bring to the fore some of the core myths and ideologies about labor, self-determination, individualism, and the struggle to stay in the city.

https://www.govisland.com/things-to-do/events/we-cant-be-replaced-koda

Cynthia Tobar is available to introduce her work to students. Contact her directly at ctobar@pratt.edu.

BLACK TECHNOPOETICS with Speaker Louis Chude -Sokei

Monday, October 24, 2022

Abstract:

This will be a general talk about those aspects of Louis Chude-Sokei’s work that deal with race, technology, science fiction, and sound recording, particularly as it culminated in the 2016 book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. He plans to also discuss public and creative work that has sprung from it—in terms of new research/writing on Blacks, robotics and Artificial Intelligence, as well as work in sound, ranging from curatorial and recording projects that include collaborations with notable figures like iconic Berlin electronic artists, Mouse on Mars, legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones, Mendi+Keith Obadike and others.

Bio:

Louis Chude-Sokei teaches at Boston University and directs the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program. Scholarly work includes the award-winning The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora (2005), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015) and the acclaimed memoir, Floating in A Most Peculiar Way (2021). He is Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and leading journals of Black Studies and founder of the sonic art and archival project, Echolocution. Other projects include collaborations with German electronic musical icons, Mouse on Mars, and legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones. Chude-Sokei was also a curator of Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Festival of Afrofuturism

Many thanks to Louis Chude-Sokei for his dynamic presentation on Black Technopoetics.

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