Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. -Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging
Scholars such as Katherine McKittrick have argued that Black lives are shaped by a logic of racial discrimination-a series of violent geographies based on an American caste system laid out centuries ago. From policing and surveillance to housing and education, we are living in what scholar Christina Sharpe describes as “the afterlives of that brutality that is not in the past.” Coinciding with the installation of In the Room, a group exhibition on collective memory and contemporary photography, Sarah Lawrence will host a special conversation with featured artists Jonathan Mark Jackson and Ashley M. Freeby, along with Professor Mary Dillard and Ashley Hart Adams, who leads the Enslaved People Project at the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance. Moderated by curator Frances Cathryn, panelists will discuss the practices of critical remembering, preserving Black landscapes, and how art can be a tactic of intervention in histories of collective forgetting.