In Conversation: Amy Sherald — Thursday, November 5, 6 – 7 pm CST
The Birmingham Museum of Art will welcome American painter Amy Sherald as the speaker of its Annual Chenoweth Lecture. The virtual conversation with Sherald will discuss her work, studio practice, her iconic portraits, and her piece All Things Bright and Beautiful, which is currently on view in BMA’s Pizitz Gallery.
The Feminist Data Set: Workshop #2 — Thursday, November 5, 3:30 – 6:30 pm CST, online through Contemporary Art Center New Orleans
People do all sorts of tasks in AI systems, from sorting data and responses (such as for Cortana; human laborers often wade through Cortana conversations consumers have with the AI to annotate) to mechanical turk, where real people do many, many small tasks over many hours to train the AI models. AI is made by people, and human hands, and those humans are often underpaid. Thus, we wonder, can we make a feminist system of this, how could we, and what could it look like?
Jasper Lee: Cobweb Codex at Vinegar Projects, Birmingham, Alabama — opens Friday, November 6, 5 – 7 pm CST
In Cobweb Codex, artist Jasper Lee presents Super 8mm footage of the central Alabama landscape is combined with D.I.Y. animation techniques, video diary entries, collages of everyday graphic ephemera and the sounds of oral histories, drumming, doom metal, radio transmissions and field recordings conducted in the region. These ingredients are woven into a localized gestural study of how people move through the land, and how it moves through them subconsciously.
Laura Splan Artist Talk — Friday, November 6, 4 – 5 pm EDT
Laura Splan will speak about their interdisciplinary work and the poetic subjectivities of everyday life. Laura Splan’s work connects the material artifacts of science to the poetic subjectivities of the everyday. Her transdisciplinary projects destabilize notions of the presence and absence of bodies evoking the systems that delineate their status.
Dawoud Bey: An American Project at The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia — opens Saturday, November 7
An American Project traces these through lines across the forty-five years of Bey’s career and his profound engagement with the young Black subject and African American history. The title intentionally inserts his photographs into a long-running conversation about what it means to represent America with a camera. The questions of who is considered an American photographer, or simply an American, and whose story is an American story are particularly urgent today.
Artist Talk with Letitia A. Waller — Sunday, November 8, 6 – 7:30 pm EDT
Brought to you by The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Greater Cleveland, Letitia A. Walker will discuss their self portraits in photography as a departure from their other two and three (newly designed) dimensional works. Walker is creating images that either metamorphosed into nature or similar entities from dreams. They are building a strong spiritual base with their Ancestors, thanking them for strengthening insightfulness.
Closing: Sheila Pree Bright and Steve Schapiro at Laney Contemporary, Savannah — November 7
This particularly current exhibition is an intense and revelatory conversation between two eras and two important photographers grappling with shared subject matter in differing times. Steve Schapiro (b. 1934, NY) and Sheila Pree Bright (b. 1967, GA), thirty years apart in age and fifty years apart in the events photographed, each dynamically emphasizes the power of documentary photography as a search for the truth.
