CRITICAL ACTS
EVENTS
CRITICAL ACTS
EVENTS
Still/Hear: A Healing Concert
14 May 2021 • Golda Sargento, Chera Amlag, Anida Yoeu Ali, Naomi Macalalad Bragin, Ching-In Chen
Faculty, students and the larger community came together for an online concert to demand an end to Anti-Asian violence. This healing concert is a response to the Asian American community’s experiences of erasure, exclusion and violence through music, song and poetry.
Performance, Play & Intimacy
6 May 2020 • Neve Kamilah Mazique-Ricardi & Robert Farid Karimi
A roundtable discussion between artists Neve Kamilah Mazique-Ricardi and Robert Farid Karimi as they play with questions of social engagement in a time of social distancing. With laughter, games, stories, and a sense of wonder and joy, they ask us to access our intimate relations, finding ways to make contact and feel together. An introduction will be given by Professors Naomi Macalalad Bragin, and Anida Yoeu Ali and ASL interpretation will be provided for this event. This event is a part of UW Bothell’s 2020 Critical Acts Visiting Artist Residency Program and co-hosted by Henry Art Gallery.
Centering Indigenous Performance Roundtable Discussion
9 May 2019 • Gregg Deal, Storme Webber, RYAN! Fedderson, Dakota Camacho
Centering Indigenous Performance focused on Indigenous knowledge, methods and worldviews, not simply as tools of resistance or intervention but because these are fundamentally valuable to our world. Visiting artist Gregg Deal was placed in conversation with three other local Indigenous artists from the Pacific Northwest. With the audience seated in concentric circles radiating from the talk circle of Native artists at center, this in-the-round event invited audience members to actively witness, listen and/or participate when prompted. Students of the BISIA 483: Alive Festival Course helped to conceive and produce the event’s lighting, stage and set design.
Existence As Protest
May 7 – 13, 2019 • Art Exhibition, Public Lecture, Community Engagement • Gregg Deal
As part of the 2019 Critical Acts Visiting Artist Residency, UWBothell, UWTacoma and Cascadia campus communities and members of the public were invited to engage with Gregg Deal for a week-long series of events. Gregg offered multiple opportunities to witness his interdisciplinary work, including a multimedia visual art exhibition, “in-studio” live painting and storytelling sessions, workshops and discussions with students, artist talks and impromptu public performances. Live studio sessions at Cascadia’s Mobius Gallery brought students, faculty, staff and public audiences into close exchange with Gregg, who interacted with visitor-participants while he painted a new visual work. The entire exhibition was on view from May 7 – June 13, 2019. Additionally, during Gregg’s week-long residency, he performed and presented an artist talk at Tacoma Art Museum as well as screened his documentary film “The Last American Indian on Earth” at UWTacoma. Gregg’s residency program across all three campuses was filmed by the students of Global Media Lab, an advanced level filmmaking class.
de skin off my blk
23 April 2018 • avery r. young
avery r. young arrived as part of the first Critical Acts Visiting Artist Residency program in 2018. avery’s live concert performances are dubbed “sunday mornin jook joint,” as avery merges spiritual and secular aesthetics with the sounds of 400+ years of the African-American experience into phonetics, linguistics, hymns, jazz and hip hop. avery’s weeklong off-campus engagement in the Seattle-Tacoma region included multiple public performances, community workshops, high school classroom visits and media student collaborations. The artist spent 3 consecutive days on the UWBothell campus and offered workshops to performance and creative writing classes, gave a public performance, and collaborated on short film projects with students from the Global Media Lab. avery’s residency on the UWB campus helped to inspire, generate and challenge student works that were then presented during the Alive 2.0 festival of Open Studios and the culminating showcase on May 29, 2018 in Mobius Hall.
Decoding Art and Performance
1 March 2017 • Anida Yoeu Ali, Thea Quiray Tagle, Jade Power Sotomayor
While much has been done to raise awareness about offensive representations of women, people of color, immigrants, queer folks and alter-abled bodies, we are constantly encountering this imagery in our daily lives in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. Many of us hear “jokes” whose punch-lines rely on xenophobic, Islamophobic, or transphobic beliefs, and are expected to “loosen-up” and not “take things so seriously.” We have also become keenly aware and suspicious of the ways in which these Othered bodies are used in marketing and advertisement to send messages about “acceptance” and “diversity” that often don’t promise equality and improved life quality for those same bodies. At the same time, artists and performers continue to create works that challenge and undermine these images and acts, sometimes by critically deploying the same imagery. This discussion by UWB arts faculty asks the questions: How can we become attuned to decode the various ways that representation functions in relationship to power? And how can the UWB campus engage and foster art, performance and other creative activities that contribute to complex ways of thinking and seeing?