MassArt Art Museum (MAAM) & The Liberal Arts Department
Are proud to present
Creative Counterpoints 2021: Uprooted/Translated
Artist Scherezade Garcia and Writer Valeria Luiselli
Wednesday April 14, 2021 6:30-8pm (EST)
A Livestream Reading & Artist Talk
Massachusetts College of Art & Design
Creative Counterpoints 2021: Uprooted/Translated features a conversation between two prominent women creatives, who employ their talent to tell contemporary postcolonial narratives of border-crossings, voluntary and forced uprooting, and transplanting: Artist Scherezade Garcia and writer Valeria Luiselli. Their work bears witness to the agency and transformation that are possible through creative acts of translation.
Creative Counterpoints (CC) is the annual MassArt series devoted to the intersections of narratives of creativity and difference as investigated by visual artists, writers, public intellectuals, and other culture makers. The program was founded in 2016 by Marika Preziuso, Associate Professor of World Literature, thanks to a MassArt Foundation Fellowship Grant.
Register to attend on the MAAM website here
CC21 Speakers
Scherezade Garcia
Scherazade Garcia is an Interdisciplinary visual artist born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and based in New York. In her work, she addresses contemporary allegories of history and processes of colonization and politics, which frequently evoke memories of faraway home and the hopes and dreams that accompany planting roots in a new land. By engaging collective and ancestral memory in her public intervention and studio-based practice, she examines quasi-mythical portraits of migration and cultural colonization.
https://www.scherezade.net/
Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Writer in Residence at Bard College and lives in New York City.
Tell me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017)
The essay draws from Luiselli’s experience working as a court interpreter for child refugees from Central America in 2014 and is structured around the questionnaire she would guide them through as part of their application for asylum in the USA.
The tension between the “complex aliveness” of the children’s stories and the impersonality of the immigration system yields in the book compelling questions about the competing forces at play in translating lives, geographies and trauma.