TISA BRYANT: Evidence of Things Not Seen: Conjuring Past Futures
Friday April 1, 2-3pm
As creative people, we have to find ways to trust in the forces—curiosity, intuition, dreamlife, compulsion—that drive our desires to make worlds, experiences, objects for others. Perhaps another mysterious phenomena urges us on as well: the residual substance of unknown, unsung, or unanticipated forebears of contemporary artistic thought and practice, positively charging our seeking minds into future makings. Let us try to manifest these figures as expressions of the archive. In this workshop we will invent methodologies, work with artifacts and objects of contemporary arts, and conjure personas and histories as yet unaccounted for in our personal cosmologies of influence, truth, fiction and chance.
Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature, and visual art, and co-editor and publisher of The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Viz. InterArts: Interventions, Body Forms: On Queerness and the Essay the Reanimation Library's Word Processor series, the new arts blog contemptorary, and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women, among others. She is currently working on a novel, The Curator, and a work of nonfiction on grief, desire, longing and the archive. Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.