Image courtesy of how to perform an abortion (Maureen Connor, Eugenia Manwelyan, Landon Newton)
Join us for On Visibility and Restoration, a panel discussion featuring five artists exhibiting pieces at Owning Earth, opening this fall in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts.
Our panel will feature artists jackie sumell, Maureen Connor, Eugenia Manwelyan, Landon Newton, and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. They will discuss the ways their land-based proposals for Owning Earth aim to expose, and perhaps heal, deep-seated injustices.
Speaker Bios:
jackie sumell
jackie sumell is a multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Her work has been successfully anchored at the intersection of activism, education, mindfulness practices and art for nearly two decades, and it has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, a Source Fellowship, A Blade of Grass, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, an Eyebeam Fellowship, a Headlands Residency and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s collaboration with Herman Wallace (a prisoner-of-consciousness and member of the Angola 3) was the subject of the Emmy Award-Winning documentary Herman’s House. sumell’s work with Herman has positioned her at the forefront of the national campaign to end solitary confinement and seek humane alternatives to incarceration.
Landon Newton
Landon Newton (she/her) is a Brooklyn based artist and gardener. She is interested in the relationships between plants and people. Her current research-driven practice explores the history of herbal medicine, specifically the use of plants and herbs for birth control and abortion. She has participated in the EcoFutures, Deep Trash and Queer-feminist Ecocriticism conference, London, UK, Open Engagement, SUSTAINABILITY, Featured Project: The Abortion Herb Garden, Queens Museum, Queens, NY, and is a member of the collaborative how to perform an abortion. In 2018 she was a visiting artist fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has held residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA and Elsewhere Studios, Paonia, CO. She has a BA from Smith College, an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and studied horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden.
Maureen Connor
Working in NY as artist and educator since 1970, Maureen Connor’s collaborative projects have focused on human relationships and social change for more than 20 years. Internationally recognized for her feminist work from the eighties and nineties, she received grants from the Guggenheim, the NEA, NYFA and Anonymous Was a Woman, among others. Co-founder (2016) of reproductive justice collaborative how to perform an abortion, they recently created Reproductive Justice Garden and Waiting Room, ongoing on SUNY Purchase campus. Her podcast Shouldn’t We Talk, launching in Summer, 2020, features interviews and discussions about the beginning of the end of patriarchy.
Eugenia Manwelyan
Eugenia Manwelyan (she/her) is a director, choreographer, and planning practitioner who arrived in the US from Russia at the age of six. She is the founder of Eco Practicum desk-free school for arts and ecology, founding faculty of School of Apocalypse, and a member of collectives and working groups including Bodies Intersect Buildings, Choreographies for Survival, and how to perform an abortion. As a visiting faculty at Columbia University, Eugenia has worked on environmental planning and arts projects in the New York bioregion as well as India, Vietnam, and Jordan. She was a recent SU CASA fellow and her work has been supported by NYSCA, LMCC, Pioneer Works, Columbia University and shared at venues including the Martha Graham Dance Studio, New Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and AIR Gallery.
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
Jean-Marc is a multidisciplinary artist whose work deeply involves the community around him. Among an array of public art projects, Jean-Marc has built and toured a Tiny House of Steel, staged a neighborhood portrait drawing-as-oral-history storefront, constructed a brick wall with a built-in hole, produced videos of his doppelgangers and given guided tours of NYC housing projects. His work has been exhibited at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Manifesta 8 European Biennial. He is the illustrator of several award-winning novels by Julie Chibbaro. He lives and works with Julie in Beacon, NY.