The Classroom
Third FloorSurviving Papers: Queer Activist Archives & Material Histories, with Adam Eli and Daylon Orr
This conversation between bookseller, publisher, and archivist Daylon Orr of Fugitive Materials and activist and writer Adam Eli explores the material histories of queer art and activism and the critical work of preserving these archives. The two discuss the legacies of Sir Lady Java, Vaginal Davis, Hot Peaches, Lypsinka, ACT UP, Gay Activist Alliance, Lesbian Feminist Liberation, and other lesser-known artists and community organizers. Presented by Fugitive Materials.
Dear Mazie,: Sanctuary, Speculation, and Sky, with Emanuel Admassu, Jen Wood, and Kennedy Jones
Dear Mazie,: Sanctuary, Speculation, and Sky is an experimental reader that explores the life, work, and legacy of Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), a trailblazing artist and educator who became the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States. On the occasion of the publication’s launch, contributors Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood, co-founders of the art, architecture, and urban design practice AD-WO, speak to their work translating Meredith’s archival materials and architectural interventions into the eponymous exhibition and the publication. Together, they consider how they invoked Meredith’s role as a creator of “emotional architectures”: someone who built sanctuaries (from homes to institutions to communities) for herself and other people of color to foster rigorous artistic pursuit, free of persecution. Presented by Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), with Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU).
50 YEARS of ART PAPERS, 1976–2026 with Re'al Christian, Sarah Higgins, Dan R. Talley, and Emily Watlington
50 YEARS of ART PAPERS, 1976–2026 tells the story of five decades of independent, artist-centered, and often artist-produced publishing by tracing the work of the longest-running nonprofit art magazine in the US. The 440-page book anthologizes some of the most timely, timeless, and ahead-of-their-time texts from the past half-century of art criticism as viewed, locally and globally, from Southern perspectives. This event celebrates the launch of the book with co-editors Sarah Higgins (ART PAPERS Executive + Artistic Director) and Re'al Christian (writer, ART PAPERS Contributing Editor) in conversation with ART PAPERS co-founder Dan R. Talley, and moderated by Emily Watlington (Art in America). Presented by ART PAPERS.
Writing the Dead: A Study Session, with Adam HajYahia and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
This study session led by Adam HajYahia and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Bilna’es) grapples with the contradictions, negotiations, and political commitments inherent in the practice of translation. We read texts that consider what it means to carry language and meaning across not only linguistic boundaries but also distinct cultures, struggles, and historical moments. Drawing on the multilingual publishing of Bilna’es, the session situates translation within a broader philosophical and political matrix: as an act of interpretation, mediation, and transmission that can preserve a text while also transforming it. Together, we ask what is gained, altered, rendered untranslatable, and what resists translation altogether when words move between contexts. How does translation negotiate the distance between the conditions in which a text was written and those in which it is read? What kinds of fidelity—to language, history, struggle, or the dead—does it demand? Translation is thus considered as a mode of reading and writing through which the past becomes available to the present, and through which inherited concepts and struggles might acquire new political life—sometimes against their interests. Presented by Bilna’es.