Berette S. Macaulay "BIPOC on Colonialism, Nationalism, and [The Harmful Illusion of] White Supremacy"

How incredible to have come to our LAST (for a while anyway) episode of Critical Bounds. Please enjoy this exceptional conversation with Berette S. Macaulay.

We have such gratitude for Berette for engaging in this conversation. We discuss living a multiplicitous life, and the institutional lie that you must focus on One Thing, or be branded a failure. How to interrogate the process and usefulness of critical dialogue. What populations are still being overlooked in the art world? The influence of the Black Portlanders project. Working with artists who are creating work to, “...speak to some of the traumas, but not define ourselves by these traumas.” How institutional racism creates a challenge in even putting together a show that is about Black people. Tokenism in cultural institutions. The invisibility of power. Interrogating terms like “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, to unroot the mythologies of “Whiteness”. And so much more.

Berette S. Macaulay is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer from Jamaica and Sierra Leone. Her research and visual arts practice engage themes of belonging, identity-performance, illegibility, love, memory, and mythmaking. 

She is currently the inaugural curatorial fellow at On The Boards Performing Arts Theater in Seattle, has exhibited and published nationally and internationally, receiving recent Artist Grants from the Vermont Studio Center Residency, Shunpike Arts, and 4Culture. Art and writing publications include Feminist Media Histories, UNESCO Courier, Of Note and Museé magazines, and the World Policy Journal. Her curatorial work includes illusive self (2013) at Taller Boricua Gallery, NYC, and Exploring Passages in the Black Diaspora (2020) at Photographic Center NW. 

MFON in Seattle catalogue. Get the print catalog HERE.

Berette was the creator and organizer of the MFON in Seattle (2019/20) program in which she facilitated exhibition partnerships with MFON Women, Frye Art Museum, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and Photographic Center Northwest, following the legacy work of Adama Delphine Fawundu and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn to feature Black women photographers from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. 

Berette’s awards include a 2019 Simpson Center Research Cluster Grant as founder of Black Cinema Collective (BCC) where she curates screenings, watch parties, and panel discussions alongside co-programmers Savita Krishnamoorthy and Mateo Ochoa, focusing on African and Afro-Diasporic films. BCC functions as a project of i•ma•gine | e•volve, an interdisciplinary arts incubator she has been tending to since 2010. 

Berette was named a 2019 Ottenberg-Winans Fellow for African Studies (UW), and is the recipient of the 2020 Champion of Seattle Arts (COSA) Award. Berette also serves as the Art Liaison Program Manager at Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin on "Art, AI, and Technology"

It’s the Last episode of our segment on Art, AI, and Technology, with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin. We talk about Amelia's podcasts Wampum.codes, a podcast which features Indigenous people working with tech in a multitude of ways, and Dreamstacks, the developer podcast by Contentful + Algolia which Amelia hosts. We also discuss her former life as an early-internet hacker and simultaneous opera singer, her Mozilla Fellowship on "trustworthy AI" and using Indigenous value-systems in tech, and much more.

“Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist/technologist who helps communities leverage emerging technologies to effect positive change in the world. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist at Contentful in the SF Bay Area. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness Dalai Lama’s World Headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. She founded IDEA New Rochelle, which partnered with the NR Mayor’s office to develop citizen-focused VR/AR tools and was awarded the 2018 Bloomberg Mayors Challenge $1 million dollar grant to prototype their AR Citizen toolkit. She is a Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing with Wendy Red Star a 360 video story about Native American Monsters which was selected for a McArthur Grant through the Sundance Institute Native New Frontiers Story Lab 2018. It is on display at Newark Museum beginning February 2019.

Amelia was a professor of time-based media art and performance art at Vanderbilt University for five years before returning to her roots in NYC creative technology, graduating from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2015. In 2016 she went on to found and direct the DBRS Innovation Lab, an applied research lab that specialized in developing creative uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Amelia is the founder of the Stupid Hackathon, which now holds events around the world. She is a fellow of the Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab , a Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow, in 2018 she was awarded Engadget Alternative Realities Prize for her VR experience Your Hands Are Feet. She was a member of the 2017-2018 cohort at NEW INC, the incubator of the New Museum in NYC. In 2016 she was an Oculus Launch Pad Fellow and an Artist in Residence at Pioneer Works 2016, Her art is part of the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the McCord Museum. Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.

Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the host of Contentful + Algolia's Developer Podcast DreamStacks.”

Meghan Elizabeth Trainor on "Art, AI, and Technology"

Head over to Soundcloud to listen to our fantastic conversation with Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and performer Meghan Elizabeth Trainor (not THAT one) about Computational Witchcraft, creating mythologies in order to truly own our places in spaces like tech that are historically unwelcoming to and erasing of womxn and other folxs who have been marginalized (because we have always been there, regardless of the dominant mythologies), using her project Witchcraft Memes to try to spark an interest in STEM for teens and tweens, using nurturance in community as a form of activism, her installation Elektron Oracle form the show Good Witch/Bad Witch at Museum of Museums in Seattle, curated by Bri Luna AKA The Hoodwitch, and much more.

“Meghan Elizabeth Trainor is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and performer.  

Trainor’s work has been shown, performed and presented at spaces that include Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, Philadelphia; Ask The Robot at The Frying Pan, New York; and 911 Media Art Center, Seattle.  

She completed her Masters at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts/New York University. She has been artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Digital Performance Institute and the Janie & James Washington Foundation.

Her 2014 Pugetopolis Manifesto is included in the Feminist Data Manifest-No Playlist, Compiled by T.L. Cowan with Marika Cifor and Jessica Lapp.

She wrote The Familiar Algorhythm in 2016 which was included in the curated box-set SIGIL, a project of Sharon Arnold’s Bridge Productions.

The Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University commissioned her to create a performative response to the 2016 exhibition Robots Building Robots resulting in an audio piece called Robot Philter.

Her project #meghantrainorwitchmemes was featured in the most recent issue of continent. magazine; APOCRYPHAL TECHNOLOGIES.  

Trainor's work was included in the Danish design, technology & feminism ‘zine Wilful Technologies: Rage & Resilience edited by Madeline Balaam Lone Koefoed Hansen.  

She is currently working on Elektron Oracle, an installation for the Good Witch/Bad Witch show at The Museum of Museums gallery in Seattle. This piece grew out of her talk Witch Science on the Moon that was part of the Salish Sea Anti-Space Symposium in 2019.”

Dr. Eric Avery on "Art and Health"

Go check out the second episode in our segment on “Art and Health (/Healthcare)”, with visual artist, activist, and physician Dr. Eric Avery. Dr. Avery "...is an artist/printmaker who became a physician during the Vietnam War in the 1970's. In 1974, he received his medical degree from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas and then in 1978 completed his psychiatry training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. For forty years he has worked at the intersection of visual art and medicine, leaving the practice of medicine several times to concentrate on his art career. His social content prints explore issues such as Human Rights Abuses, and Social Responses to Disease (specifically HIV and Emerging Infectious Diseases), Death, Sexuality and the Body....

​For twenty years, Avery worked as the HIV psychiatrist at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas....from 1992-2012...he made prints, paper and art actions that reflected his clinical work with HIV/AIDS. In the 1990's, in clinical art actions that high lighted developments in HIV care, he moved HIV medical practice into the protected aesthetic art space of museums and galleries, trying to prove that art can save lives.".

I first came across Dr. Avery’s work at Smith College Museum of Art’s exhibition Bearing Witness, showcasing prints made by Avery which document the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

As It Is, from Damn It Suite. (1987). Eric Avery. Woodcut printed in color on handmade Mulberry paper. Permanent collection Smith College Museum of Art.

During this conversation, we discuss Avery’s humanitarian work across the world, his human rights activism, how he brought an AIDS clinic into museums, the opioid crisis, printmaking, living in a building owned by Warhol, and so much more.

T.s. Flock on "Art, Gender, and Sexuality"

T.s. Flock self-portrait (courtesy T.s. Flock)

Check out our latest episode with T.s. Flock for our “Art, Gender, and Sexuality” segment. where we discuss the titular subjects, as well as etymology, the importance of aesthetic literacy, embodiment, and a plethora of other things.

“T.s. Flock is a Seattle-based writer and critic, and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle, an arts and culture publication, and was formerly an Arts Editor for Seattle Weekly. Other publications for which T.s. has written include Fabrik, Arts Africa, and Visual Art Source. T.s. holds degrees in English Composition, German Language and Biology from Georgia State. T.s. is launching a new video series aimed at expanding aesthetic literacy in connection through the history of arts, etymology and technology.”

Post-Hiatus Post

Aaand we're back to releasing and recording episodes after a short, but necessary hiatus. Putting the finishing touches on our episode with T.s. Flock (@whyabodyandnot on Instagram), visual arts critic and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle for the "Art, Gender, and Sexuality" segment. And ooh! Some of that tea is scalding, but in the best way. We cover arts writing, queer art, the AIDS crisis, the evangelical destruction of the US gov't, and More. So tune in tomorrow when it drops and in the meantime, check out some of our other episodes. Happy almost Fall, y'all. Sending you all best things through the ether.

Carol Rashawnna Williams on "Art and Climate Crisis"

It is time to listen to the first episode of our Art and Climate Crisis segment with Carol Rashawnna Williams. Through her work, Williams presents climate crisis through the lens of racial inequalities. Her often-communal art experiences explore our personal relationships to the land in order to promote healing, and further our understanding and personal responsibilities—to the earth and to each other.

In addition to her creative endeavors, Williams herself is active in community-building, and has been certified through Seattle Parks & Rec as an Urban Forest Educator, spending time teaching about “…conifers, indigenous, and invasive species.”

Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Music***, and Spotify to hear us talk about all of this, her childhood in Germany and Tacoma, the changing face of Seattle, how structural inequity affects climate concerns, and what individuals can do to make a difference.

Update on our Call to Artists and Curators!

Thank you all for your submissions so far. We have filled our "Art and Death" segment to capacity, but are still accepting applications for our "Art and Health" and "AI and Art" segment. If you are interested, please submit to criticalboundspodcast@gmail.com or via the form on our “Contact" page.