Troutbeck Symposium — in conversation with photographer Nona Faustine —April 2022

Standard Space curator, Douglas Turner in conversation with photographer, Nona Faustine, for the second day of the Troutbeck Symposium at 11:30am.  Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Faustine is a graduate of The School of Visual Arts and The International Center of Photography at Bard College MFA program in 2013. Her work focuses on identity, representation, and our collective relationship to history. Mac Books recently published Faustine's White Shoes, a collection of self-portraits taken in locations around New York that were central to the city’s once pivotal – and now largely obscured and unacknowledged – involvement in the slave trade. Nona Faustine depicts herself at the sites of slave auctions, burial grounds, slave-owning farms, and the coastal locations where slave ships docked, posing nude apart from a pair of white high-heeled shoes. Documenting herself in places where history becomes tangible, Faustine acts as a conduit or receptor, in solidarity with people whose names and memories have been lost but are embedded in the land.

The Troutbeck Symposium is a student-led collaboration uncovering our local history through student-authored documentaries, art exhibitions, and conversation. In continuation of the unique legacy of hosting creative thinkers and activists, it is with great pride that Troutbeck hosts the Troutbeck Symposium on April 28th and 29th – the culmination of a nearly year-long project involving over 150 local students from regional public, independent, middle and high schools.  

After months of investigation, students will present their historical research related to Troutbeck and the significant role the Spingarn Family played in the Civil Rights Movement and the Harlem Renaissance; revealing stories of famous and lesser-known activists, renewing significant but untold stories and narratives from this region all relating to our BIPOC community.  Visiting speakers and special guests will share their reflections and work throughout the symposium. We are proud to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr. David Blight, Artist Nona Faustine, Silas Munro of Polymode Studio, and author Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries. 

AOT Project Salon: Our Elements – Queer and Feminist Art Biennial – January 2019

In this second iteration of Our Elements, we explore the oppression and emancipation of our bodies and perceptions, the gift of sight afforded by being an other, love and connection, loss, and moving on.

A collaborative exhibition of queer and feminist artists, in its second iteration, working in a variety of mediums whose work interacts with the political, social, and cultural conditions of gender, sexuality, economics, and politics and exploring ideas of bodies, time, emotional labor, place, and the interplay between identity and medium. This project aims to think about what it means to be an individual, in a collective, and find a safe space to process the political trauma that is wreaking havoc on intersectional bodies. This means women, queers, immigrants, people of color, folks with different ability statuses, among other factors under current political, economic, and cultural conditions. The artists employ different tools including sculpture, spatial intervention, illustration, video, audio, text, performance, and social media to explore such ideas and how it relates to them.

Standard Space: ART in Place: Projections – Ayana Evans and Tsedaye Makonnen, ‘Inserting Ourselves’ – July 2020

While at a residency on the Vineyard during 2019, Evans and Makonnen visited the Reliable Grocery Store, Inkwell Beach, Tabernacle Stage, and the clearing near Shearer Cottage. This was done while thinking of borders, space and the small social restrictions we often adhere to that are not necessary, using objects from their individual practices and travels, including African fabric from their collaboration in Ghana in 2017. 'Inserting Ourselves' (2019) was edited by Eva Yuma and performed by Ayana Evans and Tsedaye Makonnen in Oak Bluffs, MA.

Standard Space’s ART in Place: Projections is a response to COVID-19 Quarantine restrictions. The gallery is using its storefront windows to display video-based works.

AOT Project Salon: Queer and Feminist Art Biennial – 2017

Our Elements is a collaborative consideration by three individuals whose work interacts with the political, social, and cultural conditions of gender, sexuality, economics, and politics and exploring ideas of bodies, time, emotional labor, place, and the interplay between identity and medium. This project aims to think about what it means to be an individual, in a collective, and find a safe-space to process the political trauma that is wreaking havoc on intersectional bodies. This means women, queers, immigrants, people of color, folks with different ability statuses, among other factors under current political, economic, and cultural conditions. Each of these three artists employs different tools including sculpture, spatial intervention, illustration, video, audio, text, performance and social-media to explore such ideas and how it relates to them. We, the artists, experience the project as a re-interpretation of home, to create a sense of purposeful community engagement. We seek to embrace the space. We question our ideas of home and the systems in which we live. We desire to deconstruct these ideas in order to reconstruct anew with each other, together.

Positive/Negative: Women Of Color and HIV/AIDS – 2017

Conversations and discourse highlighting the contributors and the work yet to be done to fight the fear and stigma around AIDS will be shared at the reception, which begins right at 7 p.m. Join them in shedding light on the continued need for the importance about keeping the engagement of the work about HIV/AIDS and other social topics addressed in the public domain. The core contributors and co-editors of Positive/Negative: Women Of Color and HIV/AIDS, published by Aunt Lute (2002) are delighted to reunite in solidarity at AOT. Join the meaningful dialogue and conversations (with your participation) about today’s culture of HIV/AIDS and other social and political relevant topics that are addressed in the Anthology and are also highly topical and relevant today, such as the issues of sexuality, race, class, gender, violence, stigma, and even immigration will take place.

Courtney Alexander: Lower East Side Girls Club Artist Residency & Open Studio - Winter 2020 (The Residency concluded with a booth at the Art on Paper Fair) – 2020

Courtney Alexander is the Lower East Side Girls Club’s Winter 2020 Artist-in-Residence. Courtney’s current series of paintings "From Dust to Onyx '' uses tarot as an avenue to visually explore the rich and complex layers of Blackness. The series contains 78 paintings created through mixed media collage, layering materials from paper clippings to sand and glitter. These applications are a way of exploring the intersections of Black identity while featuring historical facts, cultural myths, traditions, symbolism, and icons throughout the Black Diaspora. She collects the shards of her own identity as a black/fat/queer woman and pieces them into a mosaic of works that present blackness as a universal spirit—in contrast to the idea of whiteness and light that formed a wedge between her personal experience of higher consciousness and ancestral connection. Using mixed media collage, Courtney explores the complexities of blackness as a human experience and as a color story wrought with negative connotations. In turn, she re-imagines a timeless world that feels deeply ancient yet intrinsically intertwined in this modern realm, birthed from a place of nothingness that is also simultaneously everything. A non-binary world where she sees herself, reflections of blackness, and darkness, as powerful and eternal.

Debra Bermingham: Life History of the Toad – 2017

Debra’s new works represent a very personal exploration, differing from the dreamy ethereal landscapes she is known for. The new works are constructed pieces, artifacts gathered from her ancestral lineage (book covers; their pages; mementos), and ephemera of the Finger Lakes. All reconstructed in rectangular forms, perfect squares, and heavy frames made from scraps from the land, pages touched by the artist’s hands, and the hands of its former owner—these works are very intimate and personal and will be accompanied by short-short stories to welcome the viewer in.