Xaviera Simmons: Malleable Forms – Define Abolition at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Renowned multidisciplinary artist and 2019-20 Visiting Lecturer Xaviera Simmons is the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies’ inaugural Solomon Fellow. For her public program on November 6 at the Annex, Simmons will create an ambitious 6 hour-long participatory presentation including talks, film screenings, performances as well as group activities in storytelling, movement, and sound. Guided by students enrolled in AFVS 81R, Malleable Forms, the audience will engage questions of systemic rupture and carceral justice, the undoing of “whiteness” in its many forms, as well the idea of reparations to the descendants of American chattel slavery as the ultimate systemic shift of the American project. Simmons, her students, and her guests will collaborate with the audience to revel in, construct and contemplate on urgent topics of the day.