Curator Talk with Rachel Nelson & Luke A. Fidler, The Writing on the Wall

705 Front Street,Santa Cruz CA 95060

21 April, 2023

Description

Join curators Rachel Nelson and Luke A. Fidler, from UCSC's Institute of the Arts and Sciences, as they talk about the MAH's current exhibition The Writing on the Wall. Emulating a prison cell, The Writing on the Wall at the MAH recreates these largely unseen spaces in a public sphere. The Writing on the Wall is organized by Rachel Nelson and Gina Dent in partnership with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History as part of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at UC Santa Cruz designed to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education. Funding for Visualizing Abolition is provided by the Mellon Foundation. ________ Image: The Writing on the Wall exhibition (installation view), photo by Daris Jasper @culturesaving. Dr. Rachel Nelson is director and chief curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. She has curated and organized exhibitions including Barring Freedom, a group exhibition engaging art, prisons, and justice; Carlos Motta: We The Enemy; jackie sumell: Solitary Garden; Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison: Future Garden, and other projects with artists including Sadie Barnette, Maria Gaspar, Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Nelson also writes and publishes extensively on contemporary art and geopolitics, including exhibition catalogue essays, journal articles, and reviews in Journal of Curatorial Studies, Public History Weekly, Brooklyn Rail, NKA, Third Text, Savvy, and African Arts. She teaches in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UC Santa Cruz. Luke A. Fidler is curator at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and program manager of the Visualizing Abolition initiative. He received his PhD in art history at the University of Chicago.