ART PAPERS Art Writing Workshop
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Registration opens September 8
ABOUT
This program is for New Orleans-based Black writers: primarily emerging ones, but attendance is also open to experienced arts writers. Participants will leave the program with strategies for writing about contemporary arts and culture topics, pitching to editors. They will create connections to a network of writers, editors, and publications. The initiative seeks to increase the quantity and visibility of arts writing that covers New Orleans and the Gulf South region. The workshop is FREE and open to writers based in New Orleans.
Participants will learn about a variety of art writing forms including interpretation of community-centered artistic practices, formal analysis (describing artworks), and curatorial statements. Sessions will address pitching to publications, working with editors, and how to find publishing opportunities. The program’s goal is to develop diverse Black underrepresented voices in art writing, increase awareness of writing opportunities, build community among New Orleans-based writers, and encourage inclusive practices that can undo existing norms informed by structural inequity and exclusionary practices.
This program is designed by Sherae Rimpsey, the inaugural Mildred Thompson Editorial + Arts Writing Fellow and Art Papers staff in partnership with the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane. Rimpsey has worked closely with ART PAPERS staff for the past year. About her intentions for the workshop, Rimpsey says, “The hope for this program is to create a space where writers and artists alike be heard and seen, to support their intellectual curiosity about art, to open up ways of looking at and thinking about art as a point of access for anyone, and for the participants to feel encouraged to contribute to the field of art writing.”
INSTRUCTORS
- Ryan N. Dennis (The Black School curator-at-large and senior curator + director of public initiatives Contemporary Arts Museum Houston)
- Ed Hall (copy editor ART PAPERS)
- Sarah Higgins (editor + artistic director ART PAPERS)
- Lydia Nichols (writer)
- Sherae Rimpsey (Mildred Thompson Editorial + Arts Writing Fellow, ART PAPERS, Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane)
- Renee Royale (writer, independent curator, visual artist, founder Support Black Art)
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Thursday, November 9 – Sunday, November 12
- Welcome Event: November 9, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
- Workshops: November 10 – 12, 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM
LOCATION
Various locations in New Orleans: The Black School (Xavier University satellite studio), Community Book Center, and Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane
Thursday, November 9th Welcoming Event at The Black School (Xavier University satellite studio)
TO APPLY
- Write a 300-500 word statement of interest describing your interest in participating in the workshop and what you hope to get from it. Tell us about your previous experience with arts writing, or writing in an arts-adjacent context.
- Use the link below to complete an applicant form (LINK AVAILABLE SEPT 8) and submit your statement of interest
Space is limited to 15 participants. Applications will be accepted until the program fills, after which time we will offer a wait list option.
Please note that accepted participants are expected to attend the welcome event (Nov 9, 6:00 PM) and all three days of the Arts Writing Workshop (Nov 10–12, 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM) to ensure that attendees get the most out of the experience and can learn, share, and connect with facilitators and fellow attendees in a meaningful way.
About Ryan N. Dennis: Ryan N. Dennis is Senior Curator and Director of Public Initiatives at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Her recent projects include Leonardo Drew’s City in the Garden (2020), Betye Saar: Call & Response (2021), Dusti Bonge: Piercing the Inner Wall (2021), and organizing CAPE Artist-in-Resident Shani Peter’s Collective Care for Black Mothers and Caretakers with the local Jackson community. She is the co-curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. Prior to joining the MMA, she served as the Cura¬tor and Programs Director at Project Row Houses (PRH) in Houston, where she worked with over 100 BIPOC artists to exhibit their work in the shot-gun houses, she led the creation of the 2:2:2 Exchange Residency Program with the Hyde Park Art Center in Chi-cago and established Project/Site, a temporary, site-specific, commission-based public art program. In 2017, she launched the PRH Fellowship with the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the University of Houston’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. Dennis earned her master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute with a focus in Curatorial Practice. Her writings have appeared in online and print catalogs, journals and publications nationally and internationally. She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at a number of art schools and institutions and has taught courses on community-based practices and contemporary art at the University of Houston. Most recently she was the co-curator of the 2021 Texas Biennial titled A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon (2021) and the guest art editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.
About Ed Hall: Ed Hall has worked with ART PAPERS since 2013. He contributed fiction to the publication’s 2017 issue on visionary author Philip K. Dick, which he also co-edited with Victoria Camblin. As Edward Austin Hall he co-edited the 2013 anthology Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, which The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction suggested might be “one of the most important sf anthologies of the decade.” His first novel, Dread Isle, was published by Gumbohaus in December 2020.
About Sarah Higgins: Sarah Higgins is Editor + Artistic Director of Art Papers. Previously, she was curator at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University from 2015-2018. There, she produced catalogs and exhibitions including Gut Feelings, Tomashi Jackson: Interstate Love Song, and A View Beyond the Trees. She has curated over 40 exhibitions featuring a diverse range of emerging, established, and international artists for institutions such as the Hessel Museum of Art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and Atlantic Center for the Arts.
From 2013-2015, Higgins worked as graduate program coordinator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She was exhibition coordinator for the 2013 MFA Thesis Exhibition, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, a member of the curatorial team for 199A–199B, a retrospective of works from the 1990s by Liam Gillick in the Hessel Museum of Art, and curatorial fellow under Lauren Cornell at the New Museum, NY. She was community arts director and curator of Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Harris House in New Smyrna Beach, Florida from 2007–2011. There, she developed multidisciplinary arts and residency programs, community outreach and educational programming. Before 2007, she worked as an Educator at Artpace, in San Antonio, Texas. Higgins holds a BFA in Printmaking & Sculpture from the Atlanta College of Art and a M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
About Lydia Nichols: Lydia Y. Nichols is a writer native to New Orleans. Her work blends critical theory, empirical research, and creative non-fiction in examining images and language in visual art, literature, film, and vernacular culture.
She writes the Modern Maroon living anthology that explores the relationship between contemporary aesthetics and traditions of Black survival independent of the State. Modernity is an aesthetic conveyed through the material culture of the First World, the “developed” Global North, the three most prominent symbols of which are the skyscraper (post industrial intellectual labor-based economy), the car (mobility), and the computer (automated communication and documentation) – with the photograph as an auxiliary through which these symbols have been consecrated and disseminated. Marronage is the practice of escaping enslavement with no intention of return or of eventual integration into the dominant social fabric.
About Sherae Rimpsey: Sherae Rimpsey is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, most notably at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland; the Zentral Bibliothek in Zurich, Switzerland and National Library of Buenos Aires, Argentina as a contributing artist in Luis Camnitzer’s El Ultimo Libro – The Last Book project. Her work has also been exhibited at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, where she was awarded the prestigious Solitude Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Philadelphia Foundation Grant as a Flaherty Fellow. She has participated in residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center.
Rimpsey has presented her drawing, writing, film, performance, and sound work at Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, PA; Sector 2337 in Chicago, as part of the Poets Theatre Festival; and at Elastic Arts, Constellation, Lithium Gallery, Comfort Station, Film Front, Experimental Sound Studio, and Harold Washington Library, all also in Chicago.
Along with Clifford Owens, Rimpsey is a featured artist on Kamau Amu Patton’s Second Mind/Alto Age, a limited-edition artwork and recording commissioned by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in conjunction with their exhibition Terry Adkins: Resounding. She has published her poetry in the Oyez Review, Collected, and Homonym Journal. Her first full-length book of poetry—neon neon—is forthcoming from Shinkoyo/Artist Pool.
Rimpsey holds a BFA in Technology & Integrated Media with an emphasis in Visual Culture from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
About Renee Royale: RENEE ROYALE (b. 1990) is an artist, writer, independent curator, and digital strategist. She is the founder of Support Black Art, an online platform that champions the visibility of Black artists across the diaspora. Her writing has been featured in various publications including Burnaway, YARD Concept, Departures, the Observer, and the International Review of African American Art.
Born in New York, she is a dual citizen of the United States and Barbados, and recently moved to Chicago from New Orleans. She endeavors to diversify the experiences and relationships we have with art, utilizing innovative methods and modern technology to break down socioeconomic and institutionalized barriers for a more equitable, authentic art world.
About Art Papers: Atlanta-based and globally engaged, Art Papers serves the creative community and the culturally curious by expanding the dialogue around contemporary art and culture, exploring the ways they affect and reflect human experience. We do this through publishing and public programming. We support the careers of working artists and writers and are committed to creating space for and amplifying diverse voices especially those that have historically been marginalized by the art world. We are empowering these contributors and artists to share a perspective on the art world that does not center Whiteness, heteronormativity, and ableist narratives. We represent the American South globally and offers an underrepresented perspective on the global art world, one that does not center the market and the usual suspects, but rather provides a community for artists outside of traditional cultural centers.
About Community Book Center: Community Book Center is more than just a bookstore, we are a social hub of the Seventh Ward. We host local events and feature African-centered books, art, fabric, jewels and an assortment of gifts and trinkets. For nearly 40 years, Community Book Center has been the oldest, and until recently, the only, Black bookstore in the New Orleans area.
About The Black School: The Black School is a Black-Centered experimental art school teaching BIPoC and ally students to become agents of change in their communities through art & design education and programming based in radical African diasporic histories, prioritizing local community needs. We facilitate this work via a growing list of programs currently including workshops, a youth-staffed in-house design firm, a festival, and a community garden. The Black School uses art and activism to transform social realities through Black Love, healing, and self-determination.
About The Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane: The Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University builds on the Newcomb College legacy of education, social enterprise, and artistic experience. Presenting inspiring exhibitions and programs that engage communities both on and off campus, the Museum fosters the creative exchange of ideas and cross-disciplinary collaborations around innovative art and design. The Museum preserves and advances scholarship on the Newcomb and Tulane art collections.
This program is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Art Museums Futures Fund, the Elyse Levy Steiner Fund, and Ruth Dermody Sterling Fund.