After-Party: at Thee Parkside from 3 to 5 p.m. at 1600 17th Street to continue the festivities and reconnect with CCA community.

Complimentary refreshments will be served!

Open Studios: Graduate Center, 184 Hooper Street (between 7th and 8th Streets)
CCA graduate students in Fine Arts open their studios to the public. Maps of students' studios will be available at each building entrance.

Free and open to the public

Tania LaureNovember 18, 2017

“The Past Is Not Always Past:” A Conversation with Edwidge DanticaT [An Excerpt]

Black women certainly are at the center of my stories. I think part of this is from my personal experience of growing up with women who are very powerful—to me—but very vulnerable in their society. That duality has always struck me, watching how people have to live in these situations, live in the bodies that we live in, and have to contort who we are in different spaces. Especially if you are poor and female in very stratified society. I think that as vessels of memory, of people who carry their stories, I see that as more than symbolism, I see that as survival. When you attach migration to it, there is a hunger in people like me to know everything from the story tellers, the story carriers in my life, because I absolutely need those stories. I desperately need them. I especially need them for the next generation of my family. I need them for daughters and nieces, and for my nephews too. I need them to know how we lived before they knew us. I need them to know who we were before we came here. I need them to know how we managed to survive, how we managed not to die. I need them to have these stories as tools for their future. In migration it becomes even more important, because you are so afraid to lose all that. You’re separated from the physical space where you were born. You can go back but it’s always changing. You’re always changing. What you are left with are the stories, and these stories come in bodies. And for me, it’s often a black female body like mine.

+Edwidge Danticat, “The Past Is Not Always Past:” A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat

inspoTania LaureNovember 9, 2017mood

i owe my life to the souls on the other side of the water.

MFA studioTania LaureNovember 4, 2017

Black Mary - A Film by Kahlil Joseph

y'all, i'm floored...#foreverinspo

To coincide with Tate Modern's exhibition 'Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power' Tate commissioned filmmaker Kahlil Joseph to create a new and exclusive film inspired by the haunting black and white photography of Roy DeCarava.

Part 1 (of a two-part film) featuring Alice Smith's haunting rework of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ "I Put a Spell on You."

sounds, inspoTania LaureNovember 3, 2017mood

new x old wips.

works in progress, MFA studioTania LaureOctober 25, 2017

IN THE WAKE OF CRISTÓBAL COLOMBO

i've reworked aspects of this so many times...i'm still not sure it's "finished."

if i could say anything about this piece, unresolved or not, it's a talk back to the inundation of negative press coverage on Haiti and Haitians in the West. coverage that promotes disaster capitalism, perpetuates retraumatization, and recycles old narratives of the historical while barely addressing actual history.

i found news clippings from the past two decades, i.e. coverage on everything from the 2010 earthquake, hurricanes Matthew, Harvey, Irma, and now Maria, the cholera outbreak brought on by UN peacekeepers, "boat people" and mass exodus, the blame placed on Haiti for HIV's "entrance" into the U.S., and more and doused them with coffee and salt. traditionally, coffee and salt is given to a person in shock or when one has to deliver bad news (that may cause shock). "The Paradise of God" is written across the bottom in sequins and engulfed by glitter. it's a reference to an entry in Christopher Columbus' nautical journal recounting his fleet's arrival to the island and his first impression(s). intent on enslaving the indigenous Taino - Arawak peoples and mining the island's gold, Haiti was the first island Columbus attempted to colonize in the West. eventually succeeding, Haiti would go from paradise to pearl to pariah under European rule and U.S. occupation.

through this work and my ongoing project, The 10th Department, i am generating an insurgent archive that disrupts conventional archives, which perform violence through misinformation and disinformation. my own form of coffee and salt.

**rather than use the Anglicized version of the Latin Christophorus Columbus aka Christoper Columbus, i've combined Cristóbal (Spanish for Christopher) and Colombo (Italian for Columbus).

MFA studio, the tenth department, works in progressTania LaureOctober 5, 2017haiti