BROWN ARTIST RETREAT: HOUSTON
Organized by Rafa Esparza and Risa Puleo
Through a series of conversations, the Brown Artist Retreat:Houston will unpack the words “BROWN,” “ARTIST,” and “RETREAT,” centering Houston and South Texas-based artists in a one-day workshop.
Deadline to register is April 2, 2019, at Midnight.
DiverseWorks and the organizers Risa Puleo and Rafa Esparza welcome anyone who has a “kinship” with brown as an identifier. “Brown” is a term that circulates in conversations between people who are indigenous to the Americas, as well as from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and across the globe. We look forward to a conversation where we can think together across national and regional borders to discuss our shared experiences. Many of us in the global south come in all shades of skin tones, which is why “kinship” is the term that we hope brings everyone together.
One of the topics we hope to explore together is the inadequacies and limitations of language in describing our experiences in the world. In describing our experiences as brown, we hope for coalition building across nationalities and various diasporas as part of the futures we imagine together.
The Brown Artist Retreat was developed by Rafa Esparza and Risa Puleo as part of Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly at Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, TX (Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists, curated by Puleo, originated at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE and is currently on view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS). The exhibition brought together the work of artists indigenous to the Americas living in between Standing Rock and the Border Wall as temporal and geographic markers. The event was also inspired by the work of those involved in the Black Artist Retreat. Without diminishing the specific violences perpetrated in the Americas, we realize the conditions of dispossession, migration, forced internment, and border exclusion are not isolated to the Americas.
This event is open to diverse perspectives on what brown is, has been, and could be. As we enter a place and space of international, intersectional discussion, we aim to make the retreat a space and place for all. The focus of the retreat is on unpacking of the terms that on the surface seem ubiquitous: “brown,” “artist,” and “retreat;” but in fact, carry a rhetoric that we need to discuss as a community at large. We did not invent this rhetoric; we exist in it, and, through solidarity, hope to change it.
We look forward to talking more in person at the event on April 7.
REGISTRATION
All are invited. The event is free. Lunch will be served.
Pre-registration required. Click here to register.
Deadline to register is April 2, 2019, at Midnight.
Brown Artist Retreat: Houston is presented, in conjunction with the curatorial project Collective Presence, on view at DW through April 14, 2019.
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Rafa Esparza’s multifaceted, often collaborative practice involves durational performance and sculpture and considers the impact of migration, colonization, and collective histories on the formation of identity and communities. Esparza’s recent projects have questioned the centrality of artistic authorship, with the artist ceding space and resources to invited artists and cultural producers.
Risa Puleo an independent curator and critic who is most recently known for her curatorial projects Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, and Walls Turned Sideways: Artist Confront the Justice System, presented at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In 2017, she served as the inaugural curator-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art where she began working with Rafa Esparza on the Brown Artist Retreat project.