About this Event
Join us for a conversation between artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed and curator Wendell Marsh as they explore themes from the exhibition Powers of the Unseen. Rooted in the Islamic concept of al-ghayb (the Unseen), this talk delves into how Rasheed’s practice engages with spiritual abstraction, language, and the limits of perception.
This event is part of the programming for Powers of the Unseen, currently on view at Express Newark’s Paul Robeson Galleries, which highlights global artists engaging with the concept of the Ghayb (the Unseen) in Islamic thought.
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from one of today’s most compelling contemporary artists in an intimate setting.
RSVP now to secure your spot!
Image: Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Spirit, 2021
Credit: Christopher Gregory for The New York Times
About Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (كاميلا جنان رشيد) “complete (K-M-L/ كاميلا) – hidden/obscured (J-N-N/ جنان) – rightly guided (R-SH-D/ رشيد)” is a learner and seeker from East Palo Alto, CA.
A language and text-based artist, she is most curious about the life cycles—the life, death, afterlives, and hauntings—of Black knowledge production as expressed through physical spaces, spiritual beliefs, and written (marked) materials.
A death doula in training, her work is produced alongside and in conversation with her study of necropolitics, death-worlds, and post-Earth repositories of human knowledge; southern Black writers working in the tradition of “spirit writing”, glossolalia, asemics and hermetic language systems; the material science of writing and publishing (pressure, viscosity, velocity, gravity, etc.); mystical Medieval Islamic diagrams and divination publications; quantum mechanics (uncertainty principle and quantum superposition); transitional encounters like multiphase materials (foam, bubbles) and ecotone ecosystems like wetlands, and synesthetic perception; and her genealogical history as the descendant of enslaved West African people on Turtle Island.
Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Her work has also been presented in group exhibitions at Studio Museum, Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. Before her adult publishing, she authored half a dozen books as a six and seven-year-old at James B. Flood School.
She is a full-time instructor at the Yale School of Art in the Sculpture Department and teaches courses at the School for Poetic Computation. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Barnard College - Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the School of Visual Arts. Since 2022, Rasheed has co-taught a writing and publishing intensive to Bennington College (formally affiliated with the University of the Arts) MFA dance students at the Institut Chorégraphique International (International Choreographic Institute) summer conference in Montpellier, France. She has delivered visiting artist lectures at various institutions, such as Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, Rutgers University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Rice University, University of California at San Diego, University of Maryland, Northwestern University and more. She has delivered a series of keynotes including the Information+ Conference (2021) Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference, as part of Printed Matter Art Book Fair (2022); and CODEX Foundation (2024). In 2021, she was invited to present at the Xerography. Women Artists 1965-1990 Symposium with the Getty Foundation and Institut National d’histoire de l’art in Paris, France.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Shine Portrait Studio @Express Newark, 54 Halsey Street, Newark, United States
USD 0.00
