Description:

Open The Door: Memory, Mourning and The Ancestor As Foundation

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February 18, 2020 marks posthumously the 86th birthday of Audre Lorde and the 89th birthday of Toni Morrison (the first since her death in August 2019).  M. Carmen Lane and Michael Rakowitz will engage in a public talk on ancestry, place, dispossession, and the steadfastness of survival. Using textual prompts from both Lorde and Morrison, the artists continue a dialogue between each other that began half a decade ago and which has impacted both of their practices—which involves grief as both a material and a process that resists disconnection.

M. Carmen Lane is the February 2020 Artist in Residence of the Department of Art Theory and Practice and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. This talk is also part of the Kaplan Institute's 2019-2020 Memorializing Dialogue, a year-long public conversation about commemorating, contesting, and claiming from humanistic perspectives.

This event is co-presented by Art Theory and Practice, the Block Museum of Art, the Kaplan Humanities Institute, and ATNSC Center for Healing & Creative Leadership.

About the artists

M. Carmen Lane is a two:spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) artist, writer, and facilitator living in Cleveland. https://mcarmenlane.com/

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American conceptual artist living and working in Chicago, and Professor in Northwestern's Department of Art Theory and Practice. http://www.michaelrakowitz.com/