alexa dexa, Johanna Hedva, and Finnegan Shannon
November 13, 2024 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Explore how disabled and chronically ill artists can reshape our understanding of monuments in the next Monument Lab workshop, curated by Senior Project Manager and Curatorial Associate Aubree Penney.
Monument Lab defines “monument” as “a statement of power and presence in public.” This definition underscores monuments’ significant influence and visibility in our shared spaces. However, too often “public” excludes the disabled and chronically ill. Many cannot reach existing monuments due to physical and social access barriers, including inaccessible architecture; inequity of resources such as lack of time, finances, energy, and transportation; and the continuing threat of COVID-19.
The disabled constitute the largest minority group in the US, with 27% of adults living with a disability according to the National Institute of Health, and people of color and LGBTQIA+ people comprise a disproportionately large percentage of the disabled population. The absence of inclusive design and consideration in public spaces further marginalizes a significant portion of the population—on top of the inequity they encounter daily—even as a lack of representation perpetuates the erasure of disabled people in historical memory and public consciousness.
Bringing together artists whose practices contend with public-ness in light of their own lived experience with disability and chronic illness, this session will investigate how monuments can better anticipate and celebrate every body.
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National Mall | Washington, DC | August 18-September 18, 2023
Jonai Gibson-Selix | Designer
Aubree Penney | Activities Lead and Writer
Symone Salib | Illustrator
Tina Villadolid | Writer
Activity Booklets were distributed on the National Mall. The booklet poses open ended questions, encouraging interaction with key themes of the project, including monumentality, storytelling, and representation.
Beyond Granite: Pulling Together was presented by the Trust for the National Mall, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the National Park Service and curated by Paul Farber and Salamishah Tillet for Monument Lab.
Generously funded by the Mellon Foundation
National Mall | Washington, DC | August 18-September 18, 2023
Paul Farber and Salamishah Tillet | Co-curators
Aubree Penney | Assistant Curator
Jen Cleary and Aubree Penney | Accessibility Co-leads
Curatorial
I had the pleasure of serving as assistant curator in my capacity as a Curatorial Associate for Monument Lab, doing extensive research in preparation for the artist selection process. Drawing from the central question of the exhibition–What stories remain untold on the National Mall?–we wanted to bring artists who could offer compelling responses to the question, reimagining monumentality and representation on the Mall through temporary artworks, or as Monument Lab calls them “prototype monuments.”
Accessibility
We believe “America’s Front Yard” is for everybody and every body. By considering diverse needs, the team behind Beyond Granite: Pulling Together strove to create an inclusive, accessible, and enjoyable experience for all visitors.
Works were placed near accessible pathways, and mesh was installed to form paths at grassy exhibition sites, facilitating easier navigation for those with mobility impairments. Additional accessibility resources, including descriptions of artwork images and sounds, specifics about the Welcome Stations and programming (including ASL and CART), and AI-assisted translations of exhibition materials were available via beyondgranite.org. Visual descriptions were provided as part of speakers’ introductions in programming.
We consider these efforts not only as measures to maximize accessibility but also as intentional extensions of the project, an envisioning of public art on the National Mall as a resource for all.
Beyond Granite: Pulling Together was presented by the Trust for the National Mall, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the National Park Service and curated by Paul Farber and Salamishah Tillet for Monument Lab.
Generously funded by the Mellon Foundation
Image Credits
Wendy Red Star, The Soil You See... (2023). Photo courtesy Steve Weinik.
Derrick Adams, America’s Playground: DC (2023). Photo courtesy Steve Weinik.
Paul Ramírez Jonas, Let Freedom Ring (2023). Photo courtesy Steve Weinik.
vanessa german, Of Thee We Sing (2023). Photo courtesy Steve Weinik.
Ashon T. Crawley, HOMEGOING (2023). Photo courtesy Steve Weinik.
Tiffany Chung, For the Living (2023). Photo courtesy Steve Weinik.
National Mall | Washington, DC | August 18-September 18, 2023
Download the Newspaper
Paul Farber and Salamishah Tillet | Co-editors
Patricia Kim | Managing Editor
Aubree Penney | Editorial Coordinator
Connie Harvey | DesignerBlair Richardson, MiniSuper Studio | Designer and Illustrator
Featuring contributions by Catherine Townsend, Marcel Acosta, Jeffrey Reinbold, Georgetta and Nekisha Durrett, Related Tactics, and Kirk Savage
Beyond Granite: Pulling Together was present by the Trust for the National Mall, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the National Park Service and curated by Paul Farber and Salamishah Tillet for Monument Lab.
Generously funded by the Mellon Foundation
Leipzig, Germany | November 3-4, 2022
Curated by Iris Rajanayagam of Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb
Organized by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb (Federal Agency for Political Education) and GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig (GRASSI Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig)
In this symposium, spaces for reflection and exchange will be created in order to discuss possibilities of illuminating hegemonic narratives and histories through so-called transformative archives on a transnational level. It is asked to what extent the documentation, archiving and the provision of marginalized (historical) knowledge sometimes opens up spaces in which new things can be thought of and decolonial options in the landscape of memory politics in Germany and beyond can be discussed.
The focus is on the question of re_centering overwritten, erased or negated knowledge (stocks) and narratives as well as a reflection on the possibilities of expanding collective memory that are linked to this.
The Opening Panel included Nico Rodriguez Melo and myself on behalf of Monument Lab, as well as the Black Cultural Archives London and the Tamil Archive Project.
Senior Project Manager and Curatorial Associate | Philadelphia, PA / Remote | Steptember 2023-present
Project management and long term curatorial strategy and relationship building
Assistant to the Director and Curatorial Associate | Philadelphia, PA / Remote | June 2022-September 2023
Internship coordination, Operations and Administration strategy and implementation, and Project support
Open Space | UN/LEARNING Space | Online | October 2021
The curatorial collective Call You in the Morning organises Worth a Thousand Words: Part II, a toolkit workshop for curators and art professionals who work independently across different media or as part of organisations.
In this workshop, the collective will explore and think through different tools to create accessibility around an art event, and the responsibility that falls on curators and institutions. They will experiment with visual descriptions, attempting to empower creatives to feel more comfortable in being part of the process of making artworks more accessible.
In this session, every participant will write visual descriptions for pieces of artwork, thinking through the nuances and challenges that come with writing about someone else’s work. The workshop will last up to two hours, aiming to create an environment of collaboration and conversation, exploring together how tools to optimise accessibility can be creatively generative in and of themselves.
Online | November 2020 | Emma LD (Various), Hazel Kilinç (TR), Ismail Odetola (NG), Patrick Lydon (JP), and Aubree Penney (US)
Flow Tales is a digital call for artists and exhibition which explore the relationship between landscape and community on a local and global scale, and transfers this criticality to inspiration for artistic production.
Flow Tales are untold stories of water, rivers, seas, lakes, located in an era of disturbed flows around the globe.
In a small suburban yard, beneath the relentless Memphis sun, my grandfather dreamed of a stream, digging a small streambed that framed a slip of an island made just for me. We dreamed of tarps, of plastic liners, of lines of tubing that would make our dreams a reality. We dreamed in waters, shallow and clear and cool. There are moments when I swear there must have been water there. I recall sitting on my island with my feet in the water, the cool of the earth rising up into the soles of my feet. The grass was moist and dewy; your hand would come up damp if you trailed it along the top of the tickling grass. I wasn’t waiting for water. There was already water there. We were just waiting for enough water that our ankles would be wet all the way.
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College | Online | October 2020
Shannon Finnegan, Genderfail, Yvette Granata, Linda Stupart, and Eva Wǒ
Curated by Aubree Penney
Let Us Love You as You Are imagines the potential of exhibitions as care-taking spaces. This extension of the group exhibition An Alarming Specificity, which was originally set to open in the midst of a pandemic, takes up the mantle of creating spaces for bodies too often treated as marginal. Designed to nurture and affirm bodies, especially those of women and nonbinary people, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, and people of color, this event advocates for care and the sharing of care tactics as generous, loving processes that can be both individually and collectively restorative.
Artists Shannon Finnegan, Genderfail, Yvette Granata, Linda Stupart, and Eva Wǒ embrace the medium of Zoom to enable the experience of art in personal spaces, utilizing the digital format as a means of lending intimacy and comfort.
Sweatpants, messy hair, and pandemic exhaustion welcome. Come as you are to rest, learn, and be with us as this virtual exhibition unfolds before you and with you, followed by a Q&A with the artists and curator Aubree Penney.
Generously made possible by the John B. Hurford ‘64 Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Featured images: 1) Linda Stupart Watershed 2020, video, 11:06. 2) Eva Wǒ Post-Supremacy Portal [with Mx. Abdul-Aliy Muhammed, Alex Smith, Andrea Jácome, Arazel Thalez, Ash Richards, Barbara Gittings (1932-2007), Chaska Sofia, Darius McLean, Dev & Zuri Love, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells (1993-2020), Sir Eli Ra & Bryan Oliver Green, Gladys Bentley (1907-1960), Heart Byrne & Harlow Figa, Icon Ebony Fierce, Ixa fka Mr. Manic, Juliana Reyes, Kira Rodriguez, Kiyoshi Kuromiya (1943-2000), Manny Figeuroa, Mia Secreto, Moor Mother, Nizah Morris (1955-2002), ociele hawkins, Raani Begum & sub, Shoog McDaniel, Tristan “TK” Morton, Wit López, & Zuri Love] 2020, GIF
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College | March 2020
Visit the website
Featuring work by Shannon Finnegan, Chitra Ganesh, GenderFail, Yvette Granata, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Linda Stupart, and Eva Wŏ, An Alarming Specificity engages with human bodies which do not align with a fictional norm grounded in white patriarchal hegemony. Curated by Aubree Penney, the exhibition examines ways artists subvert the predominance of white, heterosexual, cis-male, non-disabled bodies as the default of humanity.
Though the physical exhibition and events have been cancelled to help limit the spread of COVID-19, the exhibition will continue its work of upholding individual bodies attempting to survive and thrive in a world which frequently neglects to support, protect, recognize, or heal them. Through its physical closure as an act of care which centers vulnerable bodies, as well as its online presence, An Alarming Specificity is about loving bodies and beings as they are, finding tactics for support. I can think of nothing that suits the project so much as these protective measures. In this interim space, the show still exists, albeit in a very different form. Sometimes care looks like distance. Check the website for forthcoming online elements of the exhibition, and in the spirit of the project, please be extra gentle with yourselves as we navigate this difficult moment.
—Aubree Penney, Curator
The exhibition is made possible with support from The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, the House Fund for Distinguished Visiting Artists and Critics, and the Haverford College Distinguished Visitors Program.
Featured images:
Eva Wǒ Loaded Fries 2018, digital image for lightbox
Eva Wǒ Bad Bitch N Chill [featuring Kh, Khirby, and Keishi] 2019, GIF
Essay commissioned as part of After Decameron, a project exploring storytelling in the wake of pandemic
April 2020 | Open Space Gallery | Curated by Riet Timmeman
Crosstown Concourse | Memphis, TN | July 25-August 25, 2019
Sully Allen, Jesse Butcher, Zahria Cook, Dehanza, Mulanre "Eddie" Gan, Mary Jo Karimnia, Melanie Manos, Jeremiah Matthews and Kayla Selby, Natalie Minik, Alex Paulus, Cat Peña, Nick Peña, Terri Phillips, Corkey Sinks, Joey Slaughter, Jessica Weaver, Terri Weaver, and Tad Lauritzen Wright
Curated by Aubree Penney
Engaging with the architecture and history of Crosstown and the residues of both its predecessor Sears and its subsequent transformation, group exhibition Negative Space operates within unused miniscule spaces in public areas of Crosstown Concourse. Numerous holes, nails, and small architectural elements pockmark walls and columns, bearing evidence of past usage. Negative Space invites current Artists in Residence at Crosstown Arts as well as local community artists to embrace these underutilized spaces for art display. Featuring both site specific installations as well as a performance by Melanie Manos, Negative Space offers artists and audience members an opportunity both to explore the Concourse and to consider scale and intimacy in public art display.
Made possible by the Crosstown Arts Residency Program. | Graphic design by Jeremiah Matthews.
Photos by Aubree Penney 2019
Crossbones Garden, London | March 2018 | curated by Aubree Penney
featuring work by Laura Agustín, Cora, KLW, L., John Muse, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, and Linda Stupart
The Long Ongoing Moment publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Outside at Crossbones Garden, a memorial garden commemorating a mass graveyard in Southwark with a long-standing relationship to sex work.
The resulting publication engages with an embodied sense of history, utilizing artwork as well as academic and creative writing as sites of resonance across time and space to consider death, memorialization, and sex work.
Images 1) L.’s Untitled 2017, digital photograph 2) The publication cover taken from Linda Stupart’s installation and performance some men have mistaken me for death 2017-18 at Mimosa House
Generously supported by Bankside Open Spaces Trust, Friends of Crossbones, the Goldsmiths Alumni and Friends fund, MFA Curating Goldsmiths, and private donations.
Crossbones Garden | London, UK | May 2018
sculptures by Avril Corroon, Richard Ensor, Kate Howard, Alexa Phillips, Aron Rossman-Kiss, and Joseph Steele | performances by Manon Aquilina and Linda Stupart
co-curated by Aubree Penney, Alexa Phillips, and Joseph Steele
Crossbones Garden marks the site where 15,000 people were buried between the 12th Century and 1857. Many of them were sex workers, who were denied consecrated burial despite sex work being legal and licensed by the Bishop of Winchester. Outside connects Crossbones’ history to issues faced by contemporary sex workers.
The six newly commissioned sculptures were installed throughout the garden and were each produced in response to a one-hour conversation with a London-based sex worker.
Generously made possible by Bankside Open Spaces Trust, Crossbones Garden, the Friends of Crossbones, Goldsmiths MFA Curating, and Goldsmiths Alumni and Friends Fund.
Installation and private view photos courtesy of Sam Greer. Photos of Stupart’s performance courtesy of Alexa Phillips.
EnclaveLab | London, UK | 2018
Danielle Ash, John Harris, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, and Paul Wood
Curated by Aubree Penney
a speech showed the chair in the middle reimagined audio description as a form of artistic practice, upholding audio description as a means of creating and having a visual experience. By elevating audio description from the realm of a translative act, it instead became a primary mode of production, a fictioning with the potential to be shared by people of all vision capabilities.
Workshop participants sketched and described their imagined work, and then will each wrote audio descriptions for said work in three styles: objective/conventional museum, subjective (the new style advocated for by disability scholars Rosemarie Garland Thompson and Kristin Lindgren), and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Each artist chose one of their variations to have recorded and exhibited the following weekend.
Seating intervention by curator Annika Thiems.
Featured images 1-3 courtesy Sam Greer, 2018; 4 courtesy Paul Wood, 2018
EnclaveLab | London, UK | July-August 2017
Louise Ashcroft, David Raymond Conroy / Karl Smith / Rockstar Games, Nicola Dale, Decolonial Cultural Front, and Arri Lemons
Curated by Aubree Penney |
In conjunction with [Untitled], a public conversation on titling and contemporary art production and display, Labelled explored the relationship between exhibition labels and power.
Featured images: 1) installation of Nicola Dale’s Circular Reading 2017 | 2) detail of Arri Lemons’ Self Preservation 2015 | 3) and 4) installation and detail of Decolonial Cultural Front’s #decolonizethisplace 2016
Generously made possible by Chisenhale Studios, MFA Curating Goldsmiths, and EnclaveLab
EnclaveLab | London, UK | July 2018
Fred Bungay, Lucy Cowling, Riet Timmerman, and Aubree Penney
Curated by Aubree Penney
In his 2015 book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber speaks of the form’s ability to render us stupid through its deliberate fragmenting and compartmentalizing of information about ourselves and our world into boxes. Graeber ultimately proposes creative work as a means of escaping bureaucratic structure. ReFORMed took up this mantle, reconsidering the form as a tool for codifying and creating information through creative strategies.ReFORMed featured work made in a corresponding workshop which addressed how bureaucratic measures facilitate and complicate our lives, our identities, and our creative projects and considered where we position both ourselves and the figure of the human bureaucrat against the maze of information extraction and processing. The project investigated how forms can become sites of resistance both in their creation and in the act of completion. A series of completed forms toyed with the idea of an honest or reasonable answer and reimagine each form's purpose. Newly crafted forms for viewers to fill out yielded both humour and frustration, mapped across a sea of boxes and blanks.
Generously supported by MFA Curating Goldsmiths
Photos courtesy of Sam Greer, 2018.
