Soft Topics: Making Grief
Soft Topics: Making Grief
Wednesday November 30, 1 – 2:00 pm (ET)
Online
Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) in collaboration with Studio Magazine presents Soft Topics, a series of events on the power of craft to subvert and persevere in times of crisis.
Making Grief explores the relationships between the body, craft, and loss. Artists Anthea Black and Azza El Siddique join Studio magazine editor-in-chief Nehal El-Hadi for a thoughtful exploration of grief and making. Through the artists’ bodies of work, the wide-ranging conversation will reflect on how craft can express, challenge, process, and contend with grief, especially during a period of ongoing losses at intimate and global scales.
Panelists:
Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, writer, and curator based in Toronto and the Bay Area. Their studio practice addresses queer-feminist archives, collaboration, and artist-publishing, moving between representation and abstraction. Recent exhibitions include Looking at the Invisible, KALA Art Institute, Berkeley, Loosely Assembled: The HIV Howler Intervention, SBC Gallery, Montréal, HARDCORE EINDHOVEN, Van Abbe Museum, Netherlands, Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, and the Independent Curators International touring exhibition Publishing Against the Grain. Black’s ongoing engagement with contemporary craft includes The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design (Bloomsbury, 2020), “Craft and the Polymorphous Perverse” and Pleasure Craft (Carleton University Art Gallery, 2016) and SUPER STRING (Stride Gallery, 2005). Black’s new curated exhibition The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artists’ Book will tour through 2023, with a publication released by Women’s Studio Workshop. They are an Assistant Professor of Printmedia, Craft Theory, and graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.
Nehal El-Hadi is the Editor-in-Chief of Studio Magazine, a biannual print publication dedicated to contemporary Canadian craft and design. She is a journalist, researcher, and editor whose work explores the relationships between the body, place, and technology. Her hybrid digital/material research methods are informed by her training and experience as a science and environmental journalist. Currently, Nehal is researching sand as a material through which to understand social, cultural, environmental, and geographical issues.
Azza El Siddique (b. Khartoum, Sudan) received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2014. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, Amant Foundation, NY, and Harbourfront Center, ON. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Canadian Art, Border Crossings and Artforum. Past exhibitions include In the place of annihilation, MIT List Center, Cambridge MA, Begin in smoke, End in Ashes, Helena Anrather, NY, Material Tells, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, RAW, The Gardiner Museum,
Toronto, and GTA 2021, The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto.
Soft Topics introduces local and national craftspeople in the disciplines of pottery and textiles to new forms of exploratory practices and artist-led pedagogies. This program series is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and is built to facilitate an intersectoral, intergenerational dialogue, contextualizing the significant history of craft at the Gallery while introducing new audiences to traditions of material fluency and application.
This panel will be on November 30th, 2022 from 1 - 2 pm EDT.
Sign up here:
https://agb.life/learn/community/making_grief
