Edgar Arceneaux’s art practice gives material form to Blackness as an index of racial and cultural identity. Arceneaux’s approach builds on the Black conceptual materialist practice of Fred Wilson. Wilson and Arceneaux are material historians, confronting the present with the past in order to critique dominant art historical discourses and institutions. Arceneaux appropriates Jacques Derrida’s aporia and materializes its key characteristics —impasse, suspension, irresolution, improvisation, entanglement, and violence into his artworks—as visualizations of Black freedom and possibility. This thesis considers Arceneaux’s drawing Detroit (2009), the interactive installation Library of Black Lies (2013-2018), and the sculpture Orpheum Returns— Fire’s Creation (2010). In these works, to varying extents, Arceneaux creates a critical constellation where he juxtaposes historical elements from the past— ranging from vernacular artifacts and architectures to iconic Black art historical works—with material cul…
This paper argues in favor of a practice of queer optimism, joy, and revelry in the face of ongoing grief and violence. I assert that the work of Puerto Rican artist/performer Villana Santiago Pacheco (“Villano Antillano”) operates as a polyvalent expressive practice that transgresses the sonic, visual, and social traditions of the Urban Puerto Rican musical scene through campiness, friction, and blatant sexuality. I examine how she explores ideas of perception and identity by teasing, questioning, and undoing the linguistic and visual semiotic imaginaries that exist in Puerto Rican society regarding trans women/folks, while also pointing to the different registers of labor that she and, more broadly, trans women perform (including, but not limited to, sex work). Villano ultimately shows us new ways of creating and maintaining sociality, of paving forward through the dancefloor, through the street, through the conditions that seek to keep us dispossessed.
This paper focuses on Michif artist Christi Belcourt’s beadwork-inspired paintings. My research goal is to shed light on how Belcourt’s paintings make visible the notion of an interconnected world which stands in opposition to a dominant Western scientific worldview that is closely linked to settler-colonial and extractive capitalist goals. I claim that traditional Indigenous artwork, or that which is inspired by it, like that of Christi Belcourt, interrupts colonial ways of looking at the natural world in favor of ones that are grounded in cultural and place-based knowledge and memory. Using enchantment as a key theoretical framework, I argue that Christi Belcourt’s large, vibrant, beadwork-inspired paintings of plants, animals, and insects conjure an enchanted vision of the natural world, acting as a counter-imagining against colonial traditions of landscape painting and botanical illustration. As we are increasingly bombarded with images of catastrophes and destruction - both natural and human-made - Belco…