Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Hope this finds you well after the summer. Here, there is a lot going on as I complete the third and final year projects of the Canada Council for the Arts grant I received in 2020.
The website for A Picture of Health: Jo Spence, a Politics of Disability and Illness, is now live. This project, co-curated with poet/scholar Elisabeth Frost, is based on the work of UK photographer Jo Spence (1934 - 1992) and her legacy for Disability Arts today. The project includes the work of Spence, as well as 19 other artists and writers.
As part of A Picture of Health, there will be a virtual speakers series: On October 2, German artist Yvonne Buchheim talked about her work and the influence Spence has had on her practice. On October 23, 3pm (US Eastern time), the Sāmoan/Pakehā crip artist Pelenakeke Brown will talk about the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan concepts of time and space. And on November 15, 11:30am (US Eastern time), British writer, art critic, and pioneering AIDS activist Simon Watney, will talk about his history of organizing and advocacy in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, focusing on his shared work with Jo Spence. All events will have ASL interpretation. Just click on the speaker above for more information on these free online events.
On October 24, 2pm (US Eastern time), Disability Poetics, a video series I curated, will have its launch event. Four of the ten poets featured in the video series will talk about their thoughts on what Disability Poetics is and can be. The poets at the launch event will be Meg Day, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Stephen Kuusisto, and Naomi Oritz, I’ll be moderating the event. You can register for the launch event here. And here’s the trailer!
Last May, I traveled to Japan with filmmaker and visual artist Alison O’Daniel to film in the gardens I wrote about in my poem sequence In the Gardens of Japan and my memoir In the Province of the Gods.
On November 4, at 3pm (Japan time), the film will premiere on a program at the Chihan Art Project in Izu, Japan, as part of a program featuring the song cycle of In the Gardens of Japan, composed for voice (Mika Kimula) and traditional Japanese instruments by Kumiko Takahashi. There will be a video documenting the event and I’ll let you know when that is available online.
Recently, I had three poems translated into Greek by Aris Kleiotis and published on Poeticanet. And the Literary Colloquium Berlin translated my essay “The Behavior of the Delinquents” into German.
Meanwhile, I was honored to be one of twelve curators invited to participate in the 2023 British Arts Network Curatorial Forum. For ten days in October, I was in London, Manchester, and Eastbourne, meeting with curators and museum professionals. I’ll report on what transpired at the Curatorial Forum in a later newsletter.
As always, thanks for your continued engagement with and support of my work.
