Forbes Graham
Image Credit: Forbes Graham, Reflections: A Sonic Laboratory, St. Augustine's Church in Cambridge, MA. Photo: Anya Guyer.
Forbes Graham (b. 1977) is a composer, musician, sound artist, and visual artist whose work explores themes of simultaneity, perceptibility, transformation and collage. His work Encounters I for trumpet, electronics, and voices premiered at Roulette in 2019. In 2020, he was selected to work with the JACK Quartet as a part of JACK Studio. The JACK Quartet premiered String Quartet no. 3 that year, which was dedicated to LaToya Ruby Frazier. The Overlook Quartet performed his string quartet Crossing in 2021 at Mass MoCA amongst Linda Sormin's installation Stream. The piece For Sam Gilliam I, meant to be a tribute to the pioneering painter as well as a meditation on color, was premiered by loadbang in 2022. Earlier that year, [Switch~ Ensemble] premiered Inflection: Beacon Hill/Roxbury, which was commissioned by a LAB Grant from The Boston Foundation. Inflection: Beacon Hill/Roxbury, was written in honor of the migration of the last African American institution to leave Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, the Charles Street AME Church.
Tufts Resource
In the Break by
TUAG Recommendation: Moten, Fred. “Chapter 2: In the Break”
Investigates the connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on "The Burton Greene Affair," exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance--culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself--is improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten's concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten's wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines--semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis--to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten's ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition
Call Number: Tisch and ebook: E185 .M895 2003
Open Access
Aki Sasamoto
Photo Credit: Aki Sasamoto, Squirrel Ways. Installation View, Arts and Letters, 2023. Photo: Charles Benton.
Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York.
Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980, Kanagawa, Japan) is a New York-based artist working in performance, dance, installation, and video who is currently teaching at Yale School of Art’s Sculpture Department. Sasamoto received the Calder Prize in 2023. Her institutional solo exhibitions include those at Para Site, Hong Kong (2024); Queens Museum, New York (2023-2024); the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2023); The Kitchen, New York (2017); and SculptureCenter, New York (2016).
She has participated widely in international exhibitions including the San Jose Museum of Art (2024); 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Aichi Triennale (2022); Busan Biennale (2022); Okayama Art Summit (2022); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016); Yokohama Triennale (2008); and the Whitney Biennial (2010). Forthcoming, Sasamoto will be the subject of survey exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in 2025 and HangarBicocca, Milan, in 2026.
Tufts Resources
Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection by
Spiraling snail shells form the basis for Sasamoto's latest performance and installation works Published on the occasion of her standout solo exhibition at the Queens Museum, Point Reflection is the first major volume devoted to the work of New York-based artist Aki Sasamoto (born 1980). Conceived as an artist's book, Point Reflection centers on Sasamoto's major installation Sink or Float, first presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Building on the artist's idiosyncratic research into snail shell chirality--the direction in which the shell coils--as a cypher for thinking through questions of change, aging, (non)normativity, vulnerability and natural processes, Point Reflection brings together the diagrammatic visions, narrative experimentation, structured improvisations and stream-of-consciousness monologues characteristic of her performances and installations. The book features writing and drawings by Sasamoto, a critical essay by Lumi Tan, interviews with biologists conducted by the artist and an afterword by Queens Museum curator Hitomi Iwasaki.
Call Number: SMFA: N7359.S27 A4 2024
How Does It Feel? by
How Does it Feel? is the third book in the series, Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture, produced in partnership with SculptureCenter, New York. This volume examines the sensory aspects of contemporary sculpture. Taking into account artists who incorporate touch, smell, and taste in their work, the various contributions investigate experiential factors that are beyond the three-dimensional. Comprising of essays, short reflections, and illustrated throughout, How Does it Feel? is a comprehensive and insightful exploration, with contributions from an international assemblage of artists, writers, art historians and curators working in the field. Following on from the first two highly successful books Where is Production? and What About Power?, this title adds further insight into the dynamic sphere of contemporary sculpture. Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture is one of many partnership series of books published by Black Dog Publishing, with others including titles with Art in General, Royal College of Art, London, and Fondazione Antonio Ratti.
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: NB198.6 .H69 2016
Open Access
Lani Asunción
Photo Credit: Lani Asunción, Dole House (Self Portrait). Pigment print on α-cellulose paper, 2021. Photo: by Rita Lombardi.
Lani Asunción (they/she) is a Filipinx interdisciplinary artist exploring the intricacies of identity and belonging, confronting the inner weaving of intergenerational trauma with ritualized performance and public art that serve as acts of reclamation. Asunción has had solo exhibitions at the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts (2024), Real Art Ways (2022), Brookline Arts Center (2020), Boston Children’s Museum Art Gallery (2019). Their augmented reality and public performance project Revolutionary AYAT was awarded the Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant (2022) from New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), and their public art project WAI Water Warnings commissioned by The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy was awarded a 2024 Neighborhood Activation grant from the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and a 2025 Expand Massachusetts Stories Climate Track Grant from Mass Humanities, which provided funding through the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC).
Tufts Resources
Aloha Betrayed by
In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.
Call Number: Tisch: DU625 .S49 2004
The Diaries of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, 1885-1900 by
Queen Liliuokalani, the eighth monarch of the Hawaiian Islands, is known and honored throughout the world, even though she was never ceremonially crowned. Published here for the first time, the Queen's diaries, which she penned between 1885 and 1900, reveal her experience as heir apparent and monarch of the Hawaiian Islands during one of the most intense, complicated, and politically charged eras in Hawaiian history. The practice of keeping journals and diaries was well established among the Hawaiian alii, or chiefs, when Lydia Kapaakea Paki, later known as Liliuokalani, was a child. In most cases, however, only fragments of alii diaries have survived. Those of Queen Liliuokalani are the sole--and striking--exception. The Liliuokalani diaries for 1887, 1888, 1889 (short version), 1893, and 1894 are a part of the group of documents known as the "seized papers" that are now held by the Hawaii State Archives. These are among the records seized by order of Republic of Hawaii officials in 1895 with the intent of obtaining evidence that she had prior knowledge of the 1895 counterrevolution. The government eventually turned these documents over to the territorial archives in 1921, four years after the death of the Queen. Four of the diaries transcribed here were not seized and remained in the Queen's possession; today these are in the Bishop Museum. The important 1889 (long version) diary is now in the private collection of a member of her family and its contents appear here in publication for the first time Collectively, the Queen's diaries, introduced, edited, and annotated by David W. Forbes, provide the reader with invaluable insights into Liliuokalani's private life, thoughts, and deeds during her rule as sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands; the overthrow of her government in 1893; her arrest, imprisonment, trial, and abdication in 1895; and her efforts in Washington, DC, to avert the 1898 annexation of her beloved islands to the United States. David W. Forbes is an internationally recognized historian specializing in the written and pictorial history of Hawaii. He is the author of the four-volume Hawaiian National Bibliography 1780-1900 (University of Hawai'i Press and Hordern House, 2003), as well as numerous books, essays, artist monographs, and catalogues. The Forbes Collection in the Hawaii State Archives includes his transcriptions and notes regarding significant documents of the Hawaiian kingdom's last royal family.
Call Number: Tisch: DU627.18 .L55 2019
From a Native Daughter by
Since its publication in 1993, From a Native Daughter, a provocative, well-reasoned attack against the rampant abuse of Native Hawaiian rights, institutional racism, and gender discrimination, has generated heated debates in Hawai'i and throughout the world. This 1999 revised work published by University of Hawai'i Press includes material that builds on issues and concerns raised in the first edition: Native Hawaiian student organizing at the University of Hawai'i; the master plan of the Native Hawaiian self-governing organization Ka Lahui Hawai'i and its platform on the four political arenas of sovereignty; the 1989 Hawai'i declaration of the Hawai'i ecumenical coalition on tourism; and a typology on racism and imperialism. Brief introductions to each of the previously published essays brings them up to date and situates them in the current Native Hawaiian rights discussion.
Call Number: Tisch: DU627.8 .T73 1999
Open Access
Takahiro Yamamoto
Photo Credit: Takahiro Yamamoto. Photo: DJ Schaller.
Takahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer. His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He has received support from New England Foundation for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, MacDowell, NCCAkron, National Performance Network, Japan Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium and others. His performance works have been presented at On the Boards, the Chocolate Factory Theater, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Diverseworks, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, The Henry Art Gallery, GoDown Arts Centre Nairobi, among other venues. Yamamoto holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR. He is part of the Portland-based group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim. Yamamoto is currently a visiting professor at Studio for Interrelated Media department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.
Tufts Resources
- Nothingbeing by "NOTHINGBEING is a project initiated by choreographer Takahiro Yamamoto, and developed in collaboration with Samita Sinha, David Thomson, and Anna Martine Whitehead. This work investigates ways to embody the presence of nothingness and 'being,' breathing spaces that we could easily dismiss and considering possibilities for the unfiltered self. Based on philosophical and physical research on the approaches to nothingness as well as extensive discussions and reflections with participating artists about their own sense of existence in the society, their needs in life, and their embodied daily experiences, this work will invite the viewers to 'be' in the space together as they witness the performers engaging in questions of not thinking, feeling, surrendering, transforming, conjuring, and forgetting. Placing three performers in the center, this project addresses the notion of nothingness and 'being' from multiple modalities such as moments of highly physical movement, a communal meditation, and internal activation of sensory memories. How can we allow ourselves to shed our protective layers to feel our core existence? How could we unlearn together? What does the presence of nothingness and 'being' feel like? In this multifaceted process, this project hopes to underline the value in nothingness to re-recognize the complex presence of our subjectivity, the consequences of forced dismissal/erasure in society, and the importance of our agency in nothingness to empower our way of 'being'"-- Provided by publisher.Call Number: Tisch: N6512.4.C64 N68 2023
Open Access