CBH Talk | Of Manacles and Monuments - Act 3: Our National Healing and the Role of Art
Of Manacles and Monuments is a three-part public programming series co-presented by the Center for Brooklyn History and More Art. The series is inspired by Fred Wilson’s public artwork Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds which is on view in Columbus Park, Downtown Brooklyn.
About the Program
The final program in the series brings practitioners of different art forms and academic disciplines together to explore how we’re to feel about our history in America, whether there is positive potential in shame, and the role that art plays. Artists Fred Wilson, Nona Faustine, and Dread Scott, activist and scholar Salamishah Tillet, writer Akiba Solomon, who co-authored How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance, join this conversation.
About Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds
Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds is a public artwork by Fred Wilson, commissioned by More Art and currently on view in Columbus Park, Downtown Brooklyn. Wilson’s first ever large-scale public artwork, it features a 10-foot-tall sculpture composed of layers of decorative ironwork and statues of Siibele/Senufo “rhythm pounder” figures. The ornamental gates and fences act as a metaphor for security and insecurity and graphically reference mass incarceration. The title of the work borrows from William Blake’s concept of “Mind Forg’d Manacles”—self-created barriers to personal and societal growth and freedom, built by fear, division, and perceptions of difference. Located just a few short blocks from the Center for Brooklyn History, program attendees are encouraged to visit the artwork. Click here for Google Maps.
Participants
Nona Faustine (born 1977) is a photographer and visual artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and The International Center of Photography at Bard College’s MFA program. Her work focuses on history, identity, representation, and evoking a critical and emotional understanding of the past, and proposes a deeper examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes.
Faustine’s images have received worldwide acclaim and have been published in a variety of national and international media outlets such as Artforum, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, New Yorker Magazine, and Los Angeles Times. Faustine’s work has been exhibited at Harvard University, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Schomburg Center for Black Research in Harlem, the International Center of Photography, Saint John the Divine Cathedral, and the Tomie Ohtake Institute in Sao Paulo, among other institutions. Her work is in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center at Maryland State University, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and recently, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2019, Faustine was the recipient of the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, the Colene Brown Art Prize, the Anonymous Was A Woman grant and was a Finalist in the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Competition. In January 2020, she participated in the inaugural class of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal Residency.
Faustine's My Country silkscreen series, her first body of work published by Two Palms, was featured in an exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA in 2020.
Photo by Grace Roselli, Pandora's BoxX Project
Dread Scott is a visual artist whose works are exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied a federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented at TED talk on this.
His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum, The National Gallery of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships form Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant.
In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour on CNN and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.
Akiba Solomon is a senior editor at The Marshall Project. She is an NABJ-Award winning journalist from West Philadelphia. The Howard University graduate has served as senior editorial director at Colorlines and has written about culture and the intersection between gender and race for Dissent, Essence, Glamour and POZ. Solomon has also been a health editor for Essence, a researcher for Glamour and a senior editor for the print versions of Vibe Vixen and The Source. She is the recipient of the 2021 Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism for The Language Project, a series about the terms journalists use to write about incarceration. She co-authored How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance (Bold Type Books, March 2019).
Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark and a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times. Her books are Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (2012) and In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (2021).
Salamishah is the executive director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design at Rutgers, and also the cofounder, along with her sister Scheherazade Tillet, of A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that empowers young people to use art to end violence against all girls and women, and founding member of the Black Girl Freedom Fund. In 2021, she co-hosted the Webby award-winning podcast, Because of Anita, a thirty-year retrospective of the impact of Anita Hill’s testimony. Salamishah is currently co-curating Pulling Together, the first public art exhibit on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and completing a book on the civil rights musician Nina Simone. In 2022, she received the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
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Fred Wilson is a conceptual artist whose work investigates museological, cultural and historical issues, which are largely overlooked or neglected by museums and cultural institutions. Since his groundbreaking exhibition Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, Wilson has been the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions around the globe. His work has been exhibited extensively in museums including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio; the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Institute of Jamaica, W.I.; the Museum of World Cultures, Sweden; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; the British Museum, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work can be found in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Long Museum, Shanghai, the Tate Modern in London and National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
Wilson presented his exhibition Afro Kismet at the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey, which traveled to London, New York and Los Angeles. Since 2008 Wilson has been a member of the Board of Trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He represented the U.S. at the Cairo Biennale (1992) and Venice Biennale (2003). His many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant (1999); the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2006) the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change fellowship (2018) and Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Award (2019). Most recently Wilson unveiled "Mother", a large-scale installation commissioned by Delta Airlines for New York’s LaGuardia airport.
The public art piece Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds, commissioned by More Art, is made possible by a grant from the Downtown Brooklyn + Dumbo Art Fund, a partnership with Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Dumbo Improvement District as part of New York State’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This project is supported in part by the Lambent Foundation, the Joseph Robert Foundation, the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, Pace, The David Rockefeller Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and commissioning sponsor VIA Art Fund. Additional support for educational programming has been provided by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. More Art thanks partners, NYC Parks and the Center for Court Innovation.
Of Manacles and Monuments is a three-part public programming series co-presented by the Center for Brooklyn History and More Art. The series is inspired by Fred Wilson’s public artwork Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds which is on view in Columbus Park, Downtown Brooklyn.
About the Program
The final program in the series brings practitioners of different art forms and academic disciplines together to explore how we’re to feel about our history in America, whether there is positive potential in shame, and the role that art plays. Artists Fred Wilson, Nona Faustine, and Dread Scott, activist and scholar Salamishah Tillet, writer Akiba Solomon, who co-authored How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance, join this conversation.
About Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds
Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds is a public artwork by Fred Wilson, commissioned by More Art and currently on view in Columbus Park, Downtown Brooklyn. Wilson’s first ever large-scale public artwork, it features a 10-foot-tall sculpture composed of layers of decorative ironwork and statues of Siibele/Senufo “rhythm pounder” figures. The ornamental gates and fences act as a metaphor for security and insecurity and graphically reference mass incarceration. The title of the work borrows from William Blake’s concept of “Mind Forg’d Manacles”—self-created barriers to personal and societal growth and freedom, built by fear, division, and perceptions of difference. Located just a few short blocks from the Center for Brooklyn History, program attendees are encouraged to visit the artwork. Click here for Google Maps.
Participants
Nona Faustine (born 1977) is a photographer and visual artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and The International Center of Photography at Bard College’s MFA program. Her work focuses on history, identity, representation, and evoking a critical and emotional understanding of the past, and proposes a deeper examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes.
Faustine’s images have received worldwide acclaim and have been published in a variety of national and international media outlets such as Artforum, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, New Yorker Magazine, and Los Angeles Times. Faustine’s work has been exhibited at Harvard University, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Schomburg Center for Black Research in Harlem, the International Center of Photography, Saint John the Divine Cathedral, and the Tomie Ohtake Institute in Sao Paulo, among other institutions. Her work is in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center at Maryland State University, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and recently, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2019, Faustine was the recipient of the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, the Colene Brown Art Prize, the Anonymous Was A Woman grant and was a Finalist in the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Competition. In January 2020, she participated in the inaugural class of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal Residency.
Faustine's My Country silkscreen series, her first body of work published by Two Palms, was featured in an exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA in 2020.
Photo by Grace Roselli, Pandora's BoxX Project
Dread Scott is a visual artist whose works are exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied a federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented at TED talk on this.
His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum, The National Gallery of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships form Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant.
In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour on CNN and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.
Akiba Solomon is a senior editor at The Marshall Project. She is an NABJ-Award winning journalist from West Philadelphia. The Howard University graduate has served as senior editorial director at Colorlines and has written about culture and the intersection between gender and race for Dissent, Essence, Glamour and POZ. Solomon has also been a health editor for Essence, a researcher for Glamour and a senior editor for the print versions of Vibe Vixen and The Source. She is the recipient of the 2021 Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism for The Language Project, a series about the terms journalists use to write about incarceration. She co-authored How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance (Bold Type Books, March 2019).
Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark and a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times. Her books are Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (2012) and In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (2021).
Salamishah is the executive director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design at Rutgers, and also the cofounder, along with her sister Scheherazade Tillet, of A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that empowers young people to use art to end violence against all girls and women, and founding member of the Black Girl Freedom Fund. In 2021, she co-hosted the Webby award-winning podcast, Because of Anita, a thirty-year retrospective of the impact of Anita Hill’s testimony. Salamishah is currently co-curating Pulling Together, the first public art exhibit on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and completing a book on the civil rights musician Nina Simone. In 2022, she received the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
Fred Wilson is a conceptual artist whose work investigates museological, cultural and historical issues, which are largely overlooked or neglected by museums and cultural institutions. Since his groundbreaking exhibition Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, Wilson has been the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions around the globe. His work has been exhibited extensively in museums including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio; the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Institute of Jamaica, W.I.; the Museum of World Cultures, Sweden; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; the British Museum, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work can be found in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Long Museum, Shanghai, the Tate Modern in London and National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
Wilson presented his exhibition Afro Kismet at the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey, which traveled to London, New York and Los Angeles. Since 2008 Wilson has been a member of the Board of Trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He represented the U.S. at the Cairo Biennale (1992) and Venice Biennale (2003). His many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant (1999); the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2006) the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change fellowship (2018) and Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Award (2019). Most recently Wilson unveiled "Mother", a large-scale installation commissioned by Delta Airlines for New York’s LaGuardia airport.
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