Interpreting Site

The ubiquitous site visit, traditionally entailing physical displacement to an actual place in order to observe its context and conditions, might now mean observing various phenomena related to site—anything from analyzing a televised spectacle to dissecting an object or deconstructing a text.

—Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, Asymptote: Architecture at the Interval

For Interpreting Site, artists, writers, architects, and art historians were asked to consider a hermeneutics of place, the body, and the built world. Site interrogates history. Site is a compulsion of the mind at work in the body. To use pre-emptive language here, site as “dispensable structures” has the power to confound. And to unify. The contexts of ritual and peril frame entry into these texts, but also site as it’s taking shape—in the body and in the world. All of the pieces are unequivocally in relation to one another while giving way to marked approaches of grappling with form.

I am indebted to these contributors for their collective inquiry and envisioning around sites of consciousness (Kamau Amu Patton’s “Afterlife Geographies: The Past & Other Dreams”); sites of self-determining and resistance (Kendyll Gross’ “Africatown”); sites of undoing (Lin Hixson’s “A Site of Evanescence”); the body’s articulation through memory (Felli Maynard’s “Por ti, me doblo / Junto, te aplico”); and land spiraling, spoiling (Charlie Hailey’s “spoil”). You give way to form—thinking, dreaming. A means for living. I must also thank Tirzo Martha, Tiffany Smith, and Shana M. griffin for offering me space to reflect upon their vivid work.

I am so grateful to have had the chance to work closely with the ART PAPERS team, whose efforts are tireless and unwavering. My time at the Newcomb Art Museum has been incredibly rewarding and affirming. I’m excited for the year ahead in my role as arts writer and editor for the museum. My fellowship is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the fearlessness of Maurita N. Poole PhD, director and chief curator of Newcomb Art Museum, and Sarah Higgins, executive and artistic director of ART PAPERS. I appreciate you both for championing my ideas, my writing. This issue is the culmination of our endeavor to reimagine the field of arts writing.

The cover image is a film still from i wish it were a murmur, oh frog head. It offers the view of the tops of trees from where Denmark Vesey is standing (Hampton Park in Charleston, SC).

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 out now 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.

The Mildred Thompson Arts Writing and Editorial Fellowship is a collaboration between Art Papers and Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University. Funding for the two-year editorial position was provided to Newcomb Art Museum by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for an emerging Black arts writer/editor to gain hands-on experience as part of Art Papers’ editorial team. The fellowship also honors and builds upon the legacy of Mildred Thompson, associate editor of ART PAPERS from 1989 to 1997.

Conceptualized as part of Art Papers’ Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility efforts, the fellowship received seed funding from AEC Trust and The Homestead Foundation to pilot the program in 2022.