Louis
Place
Publishing is ours!
A keynote
with Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Saturday, March 22 - 1pm ET
What you’ll learn
In this keynote, learner Kameelah Janan Rasheed shares the role writing and publishing can play for a lifelong learner.
With Kameelah, you’ll learn how writing and publishing can play a critical role in artistic practice—to keep us humble, to reconnect us to our ongoing love affair with research and discovery, to remind us of the possibilities of experimentation with material and form (from substance to monograph to zine), to help us remember not to wait for opportunities but instead to create them.
You’ll also learn about the importance of owning your own means of production and how to build ethical collaborations with institutions—while building your own to take care of you and yours.
About Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Image description: A black and white, slightly hazy headshot of Kameelah gazing serenely into the camera. She wears a dark hijab along with dark, impeccably lined, lipstick, a septum piercing, and nose stud.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (كاميلا جنان رشيد) “complete(K-M-L) – hidden/obscured (J-N-N) – rightly guided(R-SH-D)” is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA. A language and text-based artist, she is most curious about lifecycles – the life, death, afterlives, and hauntings – of Black knowledge production as expressed through physical spaces, spiritual beliefs, and written materials. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; learning environments, and other forms yet to be determined.
Her most recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024, i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter; Los Angeles, CA); KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023, in the coherence we weep; Berlin, DE), Art Institute of Chicago (2023, Unsewn Time; Chicago, IL), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022, I am not done yet; Hannover, DE). Most recently, she is a recipient of the 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship; a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; the 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Betty Parsons Fellow – Artists2Artists Art Matters Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext(Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. Before her adult publishing, she authored half a dozen books as a six and seven-year-old at James B. Flood School.
She is a full-time instructor at the Yale School of Art in the Sculpture Department and seasonally teaches courses at the School for Poetic Computation. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Barnard College - Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the School of Visual Arts. Since 2022, Rasheed co-teaches a writing and publishing intensive to Bennington College (formally affiliated with the University of the Arts) MFA dance students at the Institut Chorégraphique International (International Choreographic Institute) summer conference in Montpellier, France. She has delivered visiting artist lectures at various institutions, such as Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, Rutgers University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Rice University, University of California at San Diego, University of Maryland, Northwestern University and more. She has delivered a series of keynotes including the Information+ Conference (2021) Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference, as part of Printed Matter Art Book Fair (2022); and CODEX Foundation (2024). In 2021, she was invited to present at the Xerography. Women Artists 1965-1990 Symposium with the Getty Foundation and Institut National d’histoire de l’art in Paris, France.
Alongside her work within existing institutions, she experiments with institutional design and community building through the many projects she stewards through KJR Studios. She founded The Little Octopus School (est. 2024), a roaming learning laboratory and publishing imprint (Scratch Disks Full) rooted in play, curiosity, and collaboration. She is also the founder of Orange Tangent Study (est. 2020), a consultancy reimagining the design of learning experiences and dispersing over $10,000 in unrestricted microgrants for artists on the cusp of new ideas. In 2016, with the support of the Magnum Foundation, she founded Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive exploring Black spiritual practice in North America —not as fixed destinations but as dynamic movements, iterative revisions, and emergent ways of knowing. By 2022, with funding from Creative Capitol, Mapping the Spirit was absorbed into a larger project, BLACK GATHERINGS, a hub that hosts four Black North American archival projects