PROJECTS

My artistic practice merges site-informed performance and curatorial methods. I approach art-making as a feminist practice, which, at its core, is about relationship building. How, for example, can an artistic project forge new, more intimate relationships between artists and an archive or participants and an idea? By centering these questions, my work prioritizes the quality of the creative process: i.e. the equability of artistic labor or the needs and ideas of a given community.

A Glossary of These Waters was a collaboratively created week (June 14-21) of experimental community-engaged programs in what is now Waterville, located in central Maine, on lands historically and currently stewarded by the Wabanaki. The project was created by the ARC-Hive Collective, a shifting group of Maine-based artists, educators, writers, scholars, performers, and archivists who Shanks brought together.

A Glossary of These Waters examined the Kennebec River and watershed, one of two primary rivers that bisects Maine, and runs through Waterville. The project was anchored by a collectively authored glossary (which took the form of a free booklet) of terms related to the River,

drawing together the many competing narratives, memories, properties, and futures of the River. While glossaries usually come at the end, and help a reader understand terms or ideas from a main text, this glossary existed without a primary text, precisely because the ARC-Hive saw it as a story that is collectively authored, ever-expanding, and still to be written.

Throughout the week, six free and accessible programs translated the glossary into different forms (sound, textile art, walking, food, conversation, and performance), inviting participants to add to, edit, expand, and re-imagine it, and, thus, the River.

In addition to these programs, the ARC-Hive created The Watershed, a community collection and library of books, objects, and interactive activities for all ages focused on the River.

Funding and support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; the Maine Arts Commission; Emergency Grants, Foundation for Contemporary Art; and Colby College.

Photos by Caitlin Penna, 2022.

Visit the event website for additional information.

A semester-long program of experimental shorts, documentaries, and feature films that explored filmic futures through race, gender, sexuality, and place. The series particularly featured works that hinge upon the evocation of ritual and performance. Co-curated with AB Brown and hosted by the Performance, Theater, and Dance Department, Colby College. Fall 2020.

Full Screening Calendar

SEPTEMBER

9/5 SAT
Rain (Nyesha) (1978)
Dir. Melvonna Ballenger

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) Dir. Barbara McCullough

Illusions (1982)
Dir. Julie Dash

9/18 FRI
Laramie Project (2000)
Dir. Tectonic Theater

9/19 SAT
Anthem (1992)
Dir. Marlon Riggs

Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018)
Dir. Tourmaline & Sasha Wortzel

Pose (pilot, 2018)
Dir. Ryan Murphy

En Vogue (2014)
Dir. Jenn Nkiru

OCTOBER

10/2 FRI
Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity (2015)
Dir. Ping Chong

10/3 SAT
Medea (1973)
Dir. Ben Caldwell

Once Upon a Time, Beirut (1995)
Dir: Jocelyne Saab

The Dérive (2017)
Dir. Tanin Torabi

10/23 FRI
Praise House (1991)
Dir. Julie Dash

Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Dir. Julie Dash

10/24 SAT
Lemonade (2016)
Dir. Beyoncé, Kahlil Joseph
Melina Matsoukas, Todd Tourso
Dikayl Rimmasch, Jonas Åkerlund,
& Mark Romanek

NOVEMBER

11/13 FRI
Space is the Place (1974)
Dir. John Coney

11/14 SAT
Until the Quiet Comes (2012)
Dir. Kahlil Joseph

Never Catch Me (2014)
Dir. Kahlil Joseph

This is America (2018)
Dir. Hiro Murai

In 1975, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a solo exhibition of Minnie Evans, an artist from North Carolina whose drawings and paintings were inspired by visions that she witnessed in her dreams. The exhibition was curated by her longtime friend and advocate Nina Howell Starr. It was one of eleven solo shows of African American artists staged in the wake of activism by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, who criticized the Whitney’s underrepresentation of black artists and curators. Then, as now, Evans’s work escapes terms such as “folk art” or ”outsider art” grafted onto it, instead producing its own internal logics.

In 1991, Evans became the primary source of inspiration for the dance film Praise House, directed by Julie Dash in collaboration with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder and artistic director of the dance company Urban Bush Women. Zollar recalls first encountering Evans’s work at the Brooklyn Museum, most probably in the 1982

exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980. Zollar and Dash’s protagonist, as well as the main character of Zollar’s theatrical work that inspired the film, is loosely based on their interpretation of Evans’s work and biography. Praise House imagines Evans as an important and, although deceased by 1991, contemporaneous creative influence. Evans’s work animates a politics of memory, inheritance, and intergenerational exchange that together create a haunt, a frequented place, across space and time that grounds the structure of the exhibition.

In 2019, against a backdrop of cultural institutions that are ever more eager to represent certain types of “fugitive” bodies, Always, Already, Haunting, “disss-co,” Haunt proposes haunting as a representational illogic, an embodied and affective practice that rejects the production of convenient or easily read narratives. Haunting aims to redress the historical violences, absences, and omissions laden in the

trappings of institutional “diversity.” Instead, this exhibition foregrounds the social worlds that surround and orbit art institutions—the club, the park, the cruising space, the archive, and the cemetery—lingering on the desires, pleasures, and mournings entangled within them.

The exhibition featured works by Julie Dash, Minnie Evans, Félix González Torres, Green-Wood Cemetery, shawné michaelain holloway, Nina Howell Starr, Asif Mian, Guadalupe Rosales, Mariana Valencia, Julie Tolentino, The Whitney Archives, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

Performance & Programs

May 24: All That Can Happen, performance by Mariana Valencia and Guadalupe Rosales

June 1: Site activation at Green-Wood Cemetery focused on the public lots and their histories

June 3: Screening of Praise House and discussion with Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Co-curated with Nia Nottage and Simon Wu

Additional funding provided by Emergency Grants, Foundation for Contemporary Art

Photos by Jason Hirata

Untitled: a procession on the borders of something that has already shifted used fences to explore questions around privacy, private property, privilege, displacement, and belonging. Shanks, in collaboration with Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, examined what it means to pass through a neighborhood, lingering in the histories, communities, materials, textures, and memories that make up such spaces.

Taking the form of a public program and procession through private and public spaces in Echo Park, Untitled featured the voices of invited collaborators, including a landscape architect, an academic expert on residential zoning laws and the history of racial dispossession in Echo Park, a Chicanx artist whose drawing practice includes portraits of East Los Angeles’s residential landscape, and Echo Park residents who explore their memories and connections to the neighborhood. The performance culminated in an empty lot marked for residential development, a space understood as nascent with potentiality and conflicting desires.

Collaborators

Text by Gwyneth Shanks and Sarah Lewis-Cappellari

Performance Guides Dorit Cypis and Loren Fenton

Recorded speakers and additional text by Dana Cuff, David Godshall, Vincent H., Grace Lara, Manuel Lopez, Jesenia R., and Gabriela R.

Additional Performances by Vincent H., Grace Lara, Jesenia R., and Gabriela R.

Untitled: a process on the boarders of something that has already shifted was commissioned by Materials & Applications for the exhibition, Privacies Infrastructures, and was funded in part through the Emergency Grants, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Graham Foundation.

Photos by Aurora Tang

passing through the bars and over is a short dance film devised and directed by Gwyneth Shanks, shot in Echo Park, and produced in conjunction with untitled: a procession of the borders of something that has already shifted. It had its premiere at the Echo Park Film Center and was subsequently shown at Highways as part of their inaugural dance film series in January 2019.

passing through the bars and over was commissioned by Materials & Applications for the exhibition, Privacies Infrastructures, and was funded in part through the Emergency Grants, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Graham Foundation.

Collaborators

Devised and directed by Gwyneth Shanks

Cinematography by Mobolaji Olaoniye

Movement generated and performed by Loren Fenton, Ali Kheradyar, Zena Bibler, and devika v. wickremesinghe

Steady camera operation by Robert Arnold and Nick Mullercine

First assistant Daniel “Ash” Asmelash

Edited by Alex Germanotta, Mobolaji Olaoniye, and Gwyneth Shanks

Costumes by Gwyneth Shanks

AGAIN WE ARE DEFEATED

Dec 20, 2018–Mar 1, 2020 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Again we are defeated presents a selection of new works by Rabih Mroué. Mroué’s work engages with the contemporary politics of the Middle East and the enmeshed history of discord in the region, often drawing from his personal experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). In this installation, the Berlin-based artist considers the repeated cycles of violence affecting people of the region by examining his own encounters with the conflict as mediated through the news.

The works on view explored Mroué’s ongoing resistance to ways that images of war are circulated and absorbed by the public. By selectively obscuring content culled from newspapers and engaging with the intimate and meditative act of drawing, the artist offers his own reading of these events and another way of processing the everyday atrocities of war.

Co-curated with Allie Tepper

Photos by Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center

In the 1980s and 1990s, amid the growing visibility of issues such as gender inequality, LGBTQ rights, and queer politics, performance art became an important medium for protest, expression, and catharsis. Ron Athey, Karen Finley, and Ron Vawter, among others, exposed themselves physically and emotionally in works that ranged from darkly funny to heart-wrenching to enraged. They each used their performances to tell stories about personal experiences, revealing intimate details of their lives to reflect on larger issues affecting the country, including the HIV/AIDS epidemic and LGBTQ persecution. The pieces they created offered bold, sometimes visceral representations of sexuality, death and dying, and social justice.

Taking a distinctly progressive stance, the Walker Art Center championed these individuals and their desire to address politically charged or taboo topics through programs such as Cultural Infidels and Dyke Night. With materials drawn from the Walker’s archives, A Different Kind of Intimacy explores these groundbreaking series, highlights several noteworthy performances, and discusses both the support and critique these artists faced—providing a renewed understanding of this radical moment in performing arts history.

Curatorial essay and interviews with Lisa Sloan, Patrick Scully, Eleanor Savage, P. staff, and Sean Metzger.

Photos by Gwyneth Shanks

Laure Prouvost produces absorbing moving image and sound installations in which she conflates reality with fiction and art with everyday life. Prouvost’s environments often confound expectations through a rapid-fire succession of sound and image. Narrated in the artist’s soft, seductive voice, they are interspersed with spoken and written instructions that directly address the viewer. Combining painting, sculpture, and found objects alongside her projected images, Prouvost lures the viewer-turned-participant into an abstracted, preverbal state of consciousness from which to rediscover the joy of learning language, words, and meanings.

In conjunction with her gallery installation, Prouvost created a theatrical performance work commissioned by the Walker with Sam Belinfante and Pierre Droulers that drew on similar thematic elements.

Co-curated with Victoria Sung (gallery) and Philip Bither (performance)

Equal parts living sculpture and ecstatic performance catharsis, this work by Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen, which translates to crows, is grounded in a set of simple scores: the eyes remain closed, performers vocalize for the length of the performance, and upon entering the performance space, each performer continuously nods their head back and forth. Presented in nontheatrical spaces with a 22-member collective of Moroccan and Minnesotan women.

Performances

September 23
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, 12 noon & North Commons Park, Minneapolis, 4 pm

September 24
Rice Park, St. Paul, 1 pm

Curated with Philip Bither and Julie Voigt