Reclaiming: 00:08:46 of JuJu
Reclaiming: 00:08:46 of JuJu
Thursday, February 8th, 5 - 8pm EST
Join us on February 8th at 5 PM at Onassis ONX Studio for a one-night-only installation of "Reclaiming: 00:08:46 of Juju" by Michael Sawyer. Alongside the installation, Michael Sawyer will engage in a public discussion in the studio’s main space with Flores Forbes, a writer and law professor from Columbia University. The scholars will discuss the artwork, the process of creating art about police violence, and related subjects.
The event will feature a panel discussion between Michael Sawyer and Flores Forbes, followed by a Q&A session and a reception.
About Reclaiming: 00:08:46 of JuJu
The world has not been the same since the reckoning that occurred in the wake of the deaths of people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. The seemingly intractable problem of police violence against Black people has garnered worldwide attention and artists have grappled with this phenomenon with work that ranges from graffiti to sculpture. This sonic exhibition wants to strip away visual stimulation and allow the listener to hear the chaos, confusion, fear, and even cruelty that attends this senseless violence. This installation seeks to move beyond mere awareness by assembling recordings of voices accompanied by a musical intervention by New Orleans composer Nicholas Payton. This opens the space for memory, memorial, reckoning, and finally reclaiming. With that in mind, the exhibit space should be as spare and minimal as possible.
About Michael Sawyer:
Michael Sawyer is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh where he is also the Director in the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies.. Michael has published two monographs, An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (Palgrave:2018) and Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto: 2020).
In addition to writing and teaching, he has co-curated several exhibitions that take up questions of Black Subjectivity most recently a sonic assemblage with Grammy Award Winning artist Nicholas Payton that interrogates police violence, and an exhibition opening in September of 2022 at the American Writers Museum called “Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice”. he spent the 2022/2023 Academic Year as Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Institute at Pennsylvania State University.
About Flores Forbes:
Flores Forbes grew up in San Diego, California. He joined the Black Panther Party at age 16 after witnessing, and being a victim of, police brutality and corruption. For 10 years, he participated in the Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program for school children and the Sickle Cell Anemia Research program. He was later recruited into the military arm of the Panthers and participated in a variety of operations with its leader Huey P. Newton. After spending three years on the run from police, Forbes chose to turn himself in and subsequently served five years in prison on a charge of second-degree felony murder. Writing about his time with the Panthers helped him realize that community development has been his passion from the beginning. It also continues to inform his criminal justice-related work at Columbia University in New York City.
Credits:
Composers: Nicholas Payton and Michael Sawyer
Engineering: Wellington Bowler, Justin Maike, Gregory Reeves
Funding: ONX and Pitt Momentum Funds