On Sunday, July 18th artist Savannah Knoop will be joined by ritualist Elana June Margolis to mark the physical and spiritual closing of Knoop’s exhibition Soothing the Seams at the Bell. Margolis will situate this ritual within the heart-map provided by the Jewish calendar: July 18th, 2021 is also the 9th of the month of Av in the year 5781 AKA Tisha b'Av, a day set aside to honor the collective broken heart through grief ritual. Participants are encouraged to bring a candle, some fabric to rip/tear, a bowl of water, paper, and something to write with.
While acknowledging that the pandemic is ongoing, this collective ritual marks the official end date of the exhibition and allows for closure to Knoop’s process and by extension acknowledges the trauma, challenges, and other closures that the pandemic has brought into all of our lives. Participants will be invited both to witness and to step into active, intimate engagement with multiple grief technologies, creating space for personal healing towards collective liberation.
Elana June Margolis is a Queer Jewish teacher, writer, ritualist and performing artist. Her life's work is dedicated to liberating texts and ritual/pedagogical technologies towards access, relevance, and healing in service of collective liberation. Elana June has been making and playing with Knoop for fifteen years; she is honored and excited to continue the antics and plunge the depths with her beloved co-conspirator.
Savannah Knoop is an artist and educator working in film, sculpture, writing, and performance. They have exhibited and performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Movement Research, and Leslie Lohman Museum, New York. Their solo exhibition Savannah Knoop: Soothing the Seams closes at the Bell Gallery at Brown University on July 18th.
Register HERE to attend this virtual event live.
RAYMOND HOOD AND THE AMERICAN SKYSCRAPER
Katherine Solomonson, Professor University of Minnesota
Who was the winner? Hood, Howells and the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition
Isabelle Gournay, Associate Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
An American in Paris: Raymond Hood and the Ecole des Beaux Arts
Wendy Edwards in Conversation with Ruth Fine
Reception to follow
CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTISTS
moderated by guest curator Heather Bhandari
Reception to follow
A lecture by Chris Elphick
Principal Investigator, SHARP (Saltmarsh Habitation and Avian and Research Program)
Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut
With rising sea levels, tidal marshes and species such as the saltmarsh sparrow that depend on them, face many threats. This talk will describe the status of tidal marsh birds in the northeast, the ways that marshes are changing, and the role that humans play in protecting coastal ecosystems.
Photographer and Brown alum Bill Jacobson is best recognized for his ghostly, out of focus images of people. Begun during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the images evoke both loss and the futility of capturing true human likenesses in portraiture and memory. In recent years, Jacobson has investigated geometry and space —particularly rectangles, which he notes do not exist in nature—in natural and man-made settings.
Jennifer Betts, University Archivist and Assistant Director for the John Hay Library
Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery
Reception to follow