Creative Time and Governors Island Arts To Host MOVING CHAINS: TOWARD ABOLITION This May

Creative Time and Governors Island Arts announce a day of dynamic new discussions and special events in response to artist Charles Gaines' monumental public artwork Moving Chains. Hosted on Governors Island on Saturday, May 20th, 2023, Moving Chains: Toward Abolition will bring together an interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars, and educators working on strategies for abolition within art, law, education, and political action.

The event continues a critical dialogue examining the American origin story, initiated by Charles Gaines last summer with the launch of his multi-year, multi-site public art project anchored by Moving Chains, which will be activated during the event and reopens for regular public hours this summer on Governors Island.

Moving Chains is the second chapter of Charles Gaines' The American Manifest, which launched in Times Square in July 2022 with performances of Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision and Roots. The 110-foot kinetic sculpture activated by colossal chains rotating overhead anchors a public art project that addresses the reality of systemic racism in the United States of America through embodied and visual experience, and provides critical historical context on our extraordinary political division today. The American Manifest is the first major public art commission by Charles Gaines, a lauded conceptual artist recognized for his nearly 50-year career examining the nature of perception, social systems, and abstraction.

The day-long convening will take place in Castle Williams, a site located within the Governors Island National Monument near Moving Chains. A historic fort that formerly served as a jail for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, the location underscores the rehashing of American history currently galvanizing the political landscape today.

Moving Chains: Toward Abolition is organized by Diya Vij, Curator at Creative Time, with Che Gossett, scholar of abolition and contemporary Black art, co-organizing the session panels; and artist and educator Tiffany Lenoi Jones, co-organizing the drop-in workshops.

FULL SCHEDULE & EVENT REGISTRATION

MOVING CHAINS: TOWARD ABOLITION PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

Black Gotham Experience Walking Tour

10am - 10:45am | Leaves from Governors Island ferry landing

Join founder of Black Gotham Experience, Kamau Ware, for an in-person guided tour of River Years.. The pathway chosen by Ware explores the colonial patterns that have informed a cen­turies-long rela­tion­ship with what are known today as the East River, the Hud­son River, and New York Har­bor.

Abolition and the Law

Panelists: American Artist, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Albert Fox Cahn, moderated by Che Gossett

12pm | Castle Williams, Governors Island

The panel "Abolition and the Law" brings together artists American Artist and Keemalah Janan Rasheed in conversation with lawyer Albert Fox Cahn, Founder and Executive Director of Surveillance Oversight Technology Project (S.T.O.P.), moderated by Che Gossett. Together, the panelists will discuss the intersection of art, law, surveillance, and abolition. How do redaction, bracketing, and constraint exist within the context of surveillance and the legal system? How might art become a vehicle for exposing, negotiating, and moving past the structure of the law and towards new possibilities for abolition?

Drop-In Workshops

12 - 3pm | Colonels Row, Governors Island

Drop into multigenerational artmaking workshops and gatherings to collectively imagine freedom while learning about the possibility, necessity, and stakes of teaching abolition today. This program is organized by Tiffany Lenoi Jones with Akiea "Ki" Gross and Noor Jones-Bey, grantees of the Abolitionist Teaching Network.

Architectures of Freedom

Panelists: Torkwase Dyson, Saidiya Hartman, and Rinaldo Walcott

2:30pm | Castle Williams, Governors Island

Scholars Saidiya Hartman and Rinaldo Walcott will think alongside and in concert with artist Torkwase Dyson about how freedom might be actualized and spatialized, the places freedom inhabits and takes. What are the architectures and infrastructures of freedom? How might freedom be shared, rather than monetized, privatized and racialized as property? What is the role of art in making freedom(s) possible in the midst of slavery's global social and aesthetic afterlives?

In Conversation: Charles Gaines and Christina Sharpe

4:00pm | Castle Williams, Governors Island

Join artist Charles Gaines and scholar Christina Sharpe in an intimate conversation on Gaines' monumental work Moving Chains through the lens of Sharpe's groundbreaking framework of "wake work," introduced in her seminal book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016) and continued throughout her work, most recently in Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), a meditation in words and images on the contours of Black life that emerge in the wake. The two will discuss aesthetic strategies to address race and power in order to reorient our ways of seeing and being and doing in the afterlives of slavery and the United States project.

FULL PARTICIPANTS

Kamau Ware, Black Gotham Experience | Tali Keren and Alex Strada, 28th Amendment Project | American Artist | Kameelah Janan Rasheed | Albert Fox Cahn, Esq., Surveillance Technology Oversight Project | Sarah Abdelaziz, Abolitionist Teaching Network | Russell Craig, Right of Return | Torkwase Dyson | Saidiya Hartman | Rinaldo Walcott | Charles Gaines | Christina Sharpe

ABOUT Charles Gaines

A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles Gaines' body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create a series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles. He recently retired from the CalArts School of Art, where he was on faculty for over 30 years and established a fellowship to provide critical scholarship support for Black students in the M.F.A. Art program. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and around the world, most notably a mid-career survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Gallery in Claremont CA, as well as a museum survey of his Gridwork at The Studio Museum, Harlem NY, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA. His work has also been presented at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015. An exhibition of his work is currently on long term view at Dia:Beacon in New York. In addition to his artistic practice, Gaines has published several essays on contemporary art, including 'Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism' (University of California, Irvine, 1993) and 'The New Cosmopolitanism' (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). In 2019, Gaines received the 60th Edward MacDowell Medal. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design's 2020 class of National Academicians and will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2022.

Since 1974, Creative Time has commissioned and presented ambitious public art projects with thousands of artists throughout New York City, across the country, around the world-even in outer space. The organization's work is guided by three core values: art matters, artists' voices are important in shaping society, and public spaces are places for creative and free expression. Creative Time is acclaimed for the innovative and meaningful projects they have commissioned, from Tribute in Light, the twin beacons of light that illuminated lower Manhattan six months after 9/11, to bus ads promoting HIV awareness, to Paul Chan's production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, and much more. In partnership with a variety of well-known cultural institutions and community groups, Creative Time has commissioned art in unique landmark sites from the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Governors Island, and the High Line, to neglected urban treasures like the Lower East Side's historic Essex Street Market, Coney Island, and New Orleans's Lower 9th Ward. Creative Time is committed to presenting important art for our times and engaging broad audiences that transcend geographic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers.

Governors Island Arts, the public arts and cultural program presented by the Trust for Governors Island, creates transformative encounters with art for all New Yorkers, inviting artists and researchers to engage with the issues of our time in the context of the Island's layered histories, environments, and architecture. Governors Island Arts achieves this mission through temporary and long-term public art commissions, an annual Organization in Residence program in the Island's historic houses, and free public programs and events in partnership with a wide range of cross-disciplinary NYC cultural organizations. For more information, visit govisland.org.

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