Open the Door: Memory, Mourning, and the Ancestor as Foundation - M. Carmen Lane and Michael Rakowitz
February 18, 2020 marks posthumously the 86th birthday of Audre Lorde and the 89th birthday of Toni Morrison (the first since her death on August 15, 2019). M. Carmen LaneandMichael Rakowitzwill engage in a public talk on ancestry, place, dispossession, and the steadfastness of survival. Using textual prompts from both Lorde and Morrison, the artists continue a dialogue between each other that began half a decade ago and which has impacted both of their practices—which involves grief as both a material and a process that resists disconnection.
M. Carmen Lane is the February 2020Artist in Residenceof theDepartment of Art Theory and Practiceand theAlice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. This talk is also part of the Kaplan Institute's 2019-2020Memorializing Dialogue, a year-long public conversation about commemorating, contesting, and claiming from humanistic perspectives.
About the artists
M. Carmen Lane is a two: spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) artist, writer, and facilitator living in Cleveland, Ohio.https://mcarmenlane.com/
Michael Rakowitz is a Professor in Northwestern's Department of Art Theory and Practice. Based between Chicago and New York City, Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American conceptual artist who operates within art spaces and beyond them.
