FRAMEWORK PANEL #28

Envisioning More than Human Futures

Wednesday, April 18, 2018, 6:30 – 8:00 pm

Fundred Reserve Open Lab
1932 9 1/2 St. (in the alley off of U St.)
Washington, DC 20001

Presented in collaboration with Fundred Reserve Open Lab

Attendance is FREE

Moderator: Dawne Langford

Panelists: Monica Jahan Bose, Kate Clark, Chris Kennedy, Dave Haffner, & Sebi Medina-Tayac.

Transformer continues our ongoing FRAMEWORK Panel Series with FRAMEWORK Panel #28: Envisioning More than Human Futures - a panel discussion with artists, scientists, and activists that explores the intersection of urban ecology, environmental policy, art and community organizing and how the art world has become a forum for these multi-disciplinary discussions.

Panelists will discuss: How the Environmental Protection Agency’s new strategic plan and agenda of deregulation impact communities in DC and around the country; building empathy toward urban ecology; and integrated conversations of race, class, and ecology.

This panel is presented in conjunction with Transformer’s upcoming May/June exhibition: Department of Weedy Affairs, an exhibition, and series of programmatic performances and workshops led by the Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), an artist collective which imagines a governmental agency that is beyond human.

Through a toolkit of radical care practices and embodied science, the EPA’s Office of Weedy Affairs offers visitors an opportunity to engage with and learn from spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds), and to submit a comment to the US Environmental Protection Agency using a recording booth and web platform, OnBehalfOf.life, in the Gallery’s window vitrine.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR: 

Dawne Langford is an independent documentary producer and curator. She is currently working as Manager and Curator of Programs for The Fundred Reserve Open Lab and providing support to Mel Chin Studios. She has curated special exhibits for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific Center's Culture Lab, SPRING/BREAK, Olly Olly, Torpedo Factory, and Transformer. She has three public art projects designed as institutional interventions in development, includingThe Banneker Project. Her recently completed documentaries in distribution include Check It, Seeing Joseph I and Kandahar Journals. 

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Monica Jahan Bose is a Bangladeshi-American artist and activist whose work is at the intersection of art and policy. She has exhibited her work extensively in the US and internationally (17 solo shows, numerous group exhibitions), and her over 20 performances have engaged thousands of people.  Her ongoing collaborative project Storytelling with Saris has travelled to nine states and several countries and been featured in numerous publications and TV and radio programs.  She has collaborated with the International Center for Climate Change and Development and the Sierra Club on empowerment workshops that highlight the disparate gender impacts of climate change. Her artwork has appeared in the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, Art Asia Pacific, the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the Japan Times, and all major newspapers in Bangladesh.  She recently created a large-scale installation and performance for the Smithsonian’s Ae Kai Culture Lab in Honolulu. She will travel to Athens in July for a solo exhibition in connection with the UNESCO World Book Capital celebration.  She has a B.A. in the practice of art (painting) from Wesleyan University, a post-graduate diploma in art from Santiniketan, India, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.  

Kate Clark is a public artist that co-curates projects and exhibits that reimagine how social and topographic landscapes are interpreted through multi sensory, inclusive strategies. She is the founder and director of Parkeology, a federally and state funded program that excavates buried social histories within museums, archives, and urban parks through installations, exhibitions, and performances. Clark has developed collaborations with many communities and specialists including park rangers, sound artists, customs agents, geologists, LGBTQIA activists, historians, construction workers, archivists, and priests. Currently she is working with National Museum of Natural History curator and anthropologist Gwyneira Isaac on a multi-year project reconnecting descendants to their family artifacts within Smithsonian collections. As a research fellow at Provisions Library for Arts and Social Change and at the Hirshhorn Museum, Clark co-founded Knowledge Commons DC, a nomadic free school that since 2012 has served over 7,000 students. Clark studied as a Parson's Urbanisms of Inclusion fellow at Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and received her MFA in interdisciplinary public art at University of California, San Diego. Kate is based between San Diego, California, Anacortes, Washington, and Washington, D.C. // www.parkeology.org // www.kateclarkprojects.com

Christopher Lee Kennedy is a Brooklyn-based trans-disciplinary artist; educator and Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) agent who creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’ and the bio-cultural possibility of interspecies collaboration. He has worked collaboratively on projects shown at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, and the Queens Museum. Kennedy is currently a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design, The New School University.

Dave Haffner works as an Earth scientist measuring stratospheric ozone and air pollution from space with NASA. He received his formal education at U.C. San Diego studying the chemistry and geology of the Earth and oceans, and has a strong interest in exploring the ways people relate to the environment and to each other, particularly the problems that result when these relationships are misunderstood. 

Sebi Medina-Tayac is a community organizer and filmmaker, working primarily in the Indigenous, immigrant and environmental justice movements. A member of the Piscataway Indian Nation, he has deep roots in the Washington DC area and his family has long fought for social justice and liberation. Since graduating from Yale, he organized Native and youth participants for the People’s Climate Match, consulted for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and co-founded the Uptown Art House. He has been a leader in grassroots efforts to organize and resource the DMV’s vibrant indigenous community. A former journalist, he applies his media training, traditional and digital, to uplift mobilizations and create high-impact content. He currently works as the Digital Organizing Manager for the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.