Appraising Access

Session Objective: to investigate how marginalised communities are disproportionately disadvantaged by infrastructures

During this week’s class session, we conducted comparative analyses of selected “Unequal Scenes” and brainstormed visualisations in preparation for the Statistical Story assignment.

  • Dive: into this session’s selected artwork, a piece from Calida Garcia Rawles’ “Water Dancer” series.

Calida Rawles' painting titled "Pillar." The painting features a Black female with a stern look on their face wearing a white shirt and wading in a pool of clear water. In this moment they hold a brownish grey vase atop their head. The dark blue - nearly black sky is riddled with white stars.
Pillar (2018)

Merging sharp hyper-realism with poetic abstraction, Calida Garcia Rawles paints African-American women and men submerged in glistening water; bodies are swarmed by a flurry of bubbles, ripples, and refracted light. For Rawles, water is a spiritually healing element for all people – yet she recognises its historical connotations to racial exclusion and cultural fears. She uses the complicated duality of water as a platform to address identity politics while reimagining her subjects beyond cultural tropes. At times, her work alludes to current events, even making topographical maps of cities where acts of racially targeted violence have occurred. In other moments, her works are purely celebratory of the resilience, strength, and beauty of African American culture.

The “Water Dancer” series reflects Rawles’ triple consciousness as Black, woman, and American. Her work on these themes is also showcased in the cover art for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, The Water Dancer.

(photograph by Glen Wilson)

photograph of Calida Garcia Rawles

  • Review: the Course Slides, summarising our community conversation on environment access and resources.

Class Slides - 29 September.pdf