Art Talk: Reflections on Recent Conversations
Conversations on art and art as conversations. Conversations by, among, and about artists. Conversations in celebration, disruption, reimagination of art and artists.
The recent convening, Conversations, hosted by CCSRE in partnership with IDA, leveraged the power of salon-style discussion between artists and invited guests to amplify the distinctive voices and project visions of the 2023-2024 Mellon Arts Fellows: Isaiah Berry Phillips – musician & producer, Rodrigo Reyes – filmmaker & documentarian, and Kim Ye – mixed-media artist & performer.
Bringing into open dialogue the creative, intellectual, and social justice-driven work of this year's three artists, Conversations served as an entry point of the Fellow's art practices for Stanford faculty, staff, students, and artists from across local communities. By providing Phillips, Reyes, and Ye both a physical and critical discursive space for [re/de]constructing their projects, artists and audience were drawn into a process of [re]discovery, uncovering resonate meaning in the works.
The intimate conversations between the Fellows and their invited guests only further enriched our understanding of the works and their histories by identifying the catalysts and art practices activating their fellowship projects. The individual presentations by each artist also brought an important "place" to the work as each Fellow situated their project within both their own narrative and a larger shared set of lived artistic, academic, and social experiences.
Respondents, Victoria Stone-Cadena, Associate Director of RITM at Yale and Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Senior Associate Director of the Research Institute of CCSRE at Stanford, posed questions that brought context to content and surfaced common themes to deepen audience engagement with fellowship projects. In mapping the unexpected through-lines and shared language between Fellows, guests, and audience members, they challenged participants to interrogate their own conceptual lenses and to reflect more intentionally on their understanding of the issues that motivate these artists and their artworks.
Conversations included:
Isaiah Berry Phillips with Tiffany Johnson, Gather Yourself: The Necessity of Self Love
Rodrigo Reyes with Daniel Chavez & Sansón, Cinema as a Tool for Liberation: Radical Collaborations to Transcend Crimmigration
Kim Ye with Maxine Holloway & Lena Chen, Content Warning
Victoria Stone-Cadena & Bridget Algee-Hewitt, In Conversation
Conversations is the first of two events planned to showcase the work of the 2023-2024 Mellon Arts Fellows. The second and final event includes artist-specific programs to be presented at different public venues in Palo Alto and neighboring communities at the end of Spring quarter.
The CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellowship Program supports working artists who live and create in California. It is part of the Centering Race Consortium (CRC), a multi-university collaboration involving race studies centers at Stanford, Brown, University of Chicago and Yale. Dedicated to centering the study of race in the arts and humanities, the consortium combines research with arts practices. CRC and this Arts Program is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
