Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

Join me, Barrie Cline, Dennise Redmoon Darkeem and Kameelah Janan Rasheed in the second of two panel discussions at ABC No Rio featuring artists that that engage the arts in ways that address social issues, providing them an opportunity to articulate their practice and pursuits with other artists and the community at large.

Part of Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces. Funded in part by the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs. Wed, October 14th, 7pm
ABC No Rio
156 Rivington Street, NYC

BARRIE CLINE engages diverse communities in a collaborative art practice through projects created in the public realm. In the 1980s she was a homesteader and a housing advocate for people battling mental illness on the Lower East Side. She developed participatory arts models for Community Access, the Young Adult Institute, and for graffiti writers at the Hub in the South Bronx. In the late 1990s she created a child-directed, free-play oriented digital media center for an after school arts program on the Lower East Side.

Since 2006 she has taught public art to union electricians and plumbers, working with them to create exhibitions that make their labor, craft, and being more visible to one another and to a wider public. She is currently the Kelber Fellow at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies. Barrie is also a scholar of the New York City Subway Graffiti Movement and has lectured on graffiti here and abroad.

With an allied group of construction workers, Barrie formed the Workers Art Coalition in 2014. Together they created a Workers Pavilion for the anniversary of the World’s Fair and a 24 foot labor float with the People’s Climate March. They are engaged in an ongoing solidarity project for the US Social Forum; and with Greg Sholette, created a Precarious Workers Pageant to protest the conditions of migrant labor building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

DENNIS REDMOON DARKEEM is a multimedia artist, crafter, photographer, and performer; a Native American and Brazilian artist living in New York City. Tradition and customs are the foundation for much of his work and he incorporates a craftwork aesthetic to connect tradition to the contemporary, evoking an historical memory and questioning the status quo. Much of his work focuses on issues like institutionalized racism and classism, jarring stereotypes, and the displacement of people of color. Dennis frequently recycles unconventional items in his work to critique problems faced by Native Americans in the US. For example, in certain pieces using alcohol paraphernalia (can tabs, beer bottle caps, etc.) along with traditional Native American symbols like feathers, shells, and bones to analyze alcoholism in the Native American community and how it has replaced tradition. Dennis strives to be a voice for indigenous people.

Dennis is an active member of the Wind Clan within the Yamassee Yat’siminoli tribe. He has exhibited throughout New York including Rush Art Gallery; ABC No Rio; AiOP (Art in Odd Places); Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ EMERGENYC program; Wave Hill; Bronx Museum; Bronx Art Space; Casita Maria Gallery; Queens Museum; and the Bronx Academy for Art and Dance (BAAD). Dennis is an art educator for NYC public schools and the former curatorial director of The Point’s “Live from the Edge” Gallery in the South Bronx.

VICTORIA LAW is a journalist, a long-time volunteer at ABC No Rio, and a co-founder of Books Through Bars–NYC. She has curated several exhibitions of art by people in prison, is the editor of the zine “Tenacious: Art & Writings by Women in Prison” and the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. She also writes extensively about conditions in women’s jails and prisons as well as resistance and organizing to change these realities.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED is a research-based conceptual artist, writer and educator. Her work reckons with the complexity of memory, ritual, historiography, and archival practices as they relate to the construction of both personal and social histories. She creates archival installations, prose, conceptual poems, text-based prints, photographs, audio mixes, and public programming that consider the archive as a site of agency to explore our active and passive roles in both the production and consumption of hermetic private histories as well as larger public histories.

Kameelah has exhibited her work in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces including Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, and the Weeksville Heritage Museum. Recent residencies, fellowships and honors include: Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue Grant, A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship, and the Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship.

Currently, Kameelah is the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry. In the past, she has been a museum educator at Brooklyn Museum, worked as a member of East Palo Alto’s city planning commission and taught social studies to high school students.