Art + Design Documentary Series
2023 - 2024
Providence, RI
Storytelling Producer
Producer | Director
Videographer | Editor
Brown Arts Institute
Commissioned by the Brown Arts Institute (BAI) at Brown University, this series of exhibitions, performances, workshops and community activations document the projects and voices of international artists, designers and innovators working in performing, literary, and visual arts.
Launched with the opening of The Lindemann Performing Arts Center in October 2023, the inaugural IGNITE Series showcases the Brown Arts ecosystem, alongside projects by local and regional artists and arts organizations. The Artistic Innovators Collective is a fluid group of around forty artists from across the globe who regularly engage with Brown in a variety of ways: to push the boundaries of discipline, to teach, to work, to experiment, to safely fail and take risks, to undertake rigorous and long-term exchange with our campus and surrounding communities.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS
VARYING SHADES OF BROWN
Varying Shades of Brown is a campus-wide project featuring major installations and programs by artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953, Portland, OR), whose conceptual, image-focused work has been revered for over four decades. Through a variety of mediums and activations, including the immersive installation Cyclorama: The Shape of Things, Weems renders historical moments uncanny to draw out the complexities of racial and gendered violence, patriarchy, and unreconciled moments in global history.
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
CENTRE FOR THE LESS GOOD IDEA
Houseboy | Pepper's Ghost Residency
Embracing the central methodologies of The Centre for the Less Good Idea – collaborative making, free-spirited engagement with materials, the act of allowing oneself to be led by image, sound and impulse – William Kentridge and members of The Centre invite participants from across the Brown community to join in surfacing, rupturing, re-reading and activating the heavy histories and enduring realities. The Centre asks: How do we begin to look at an image collectively? What are the ways in which a visual archive – entrenched in the heavy histories – begins to speak? In provoking and surfacing the narratives embedded in archives, it is music, performance, improvisation and collaboration that can become vital tools for re-reading images in a contemporary way.
TANYA TAGAQ
For nearly twenty years, Tanya Tagaq has uplifted the art of throat singing while disrupting and inspiring both the pop and classical music worlds through collaborations with Bjork, Kronos Quartet, Paola Prestini, and others. An award-winning artist, composer, singer, culture-bearer, climate activist, and radical voice for her people and her lands Tagaq continues to redefine genres of music and performance boundaries. As noted in the New York Times, “This fiercely charismatic Inuk singer’s throaty voice demands full attention, whether she’s whispering in her softest register or howling at the sky."
MATTHEW AUCOIN + PETER SELLARS
Music For New Bodies
A major new work and first collaboration between American Modern Opera Company member and co-founder, composer Matthew Aucoin and director Peter Sellars is brought to life by five vocal soloists and an 18-instrument ensemble conducted by Matthew Aucoin. Music for New Bodies is inspired by the visionary poetry of Jorie Graham, addressing some of the most urgent questions of our time: In our quest for immortality, what have human beings done to the planet, and what are we doing to ourselves? What are these post-human, machine-generated intelligences that we so heedlessly continue to create, and which seem almost capable of replacing us? Music for New Bodies is a 360-degree portrait of the moment we are living in, a piece that brings together questions of environmental responsibility, scientific progress and the ethics of humanity’s questionable quest to surpass the human.