As Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal Open and member of the CAA Editorial Board, Grace Aneiza Ali will speak on the Peer Review Futures panel. By its nature, peer reviewing does not carry the same weight as (ironically) the reviewed text. How can we counter a culture of invisible or unacknowledged labor within the peer review process? How might peer reviewing be (better) recognized?  What can we glean/model from other fields (i.e. investigative journalism, curatorial) that center, make visible, and value the collective team (“the many hands”) in the work? Can we reimage how peer review counts in promotion (shifting it from service to research)? Editors of CAA journals will discuss some ideas they are piloting and welcome others to share their thoughts on the future of peer review. 

How can a house reflect migration’s arcs, its losses and gains? It is this quest for reconciliation that draws curator and scholar Grace Aneiza Ali into the “mother’s house paintings” by Guyanese-born British artist Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA (b. British Guiana, 1934). These early paintings in the artist’s oeuvre became informally regarded as the Mother’s House Paintings (1966 to 1971) as they are characterised by a singular architectural motif: a 1953 photograph of the house in which he grew up and often returned to with his family – his mother’s house (Mrs Agatha Elizabeth Bowling) – in New Amsterdam, Guyana. Notably, the black-and-white photograph itself of the three-storey clapboard colonial house was taken in 1953, Coronation Day of Queen Elizabeth II and the year Bowling, at nineteen years old, left the then colony of British Guiana for London. Throughout the series of paintings, Bowling’s varied artistic treatments renders the house as central, as silhouetted, as ghostly, as background, as foreground, as faint, as volatile, as looming, as inescapable, as fragile, as formidable. In this talk, Ali will expand on her research of these paintings, trace their scholarly and curatorial visibility, and offer the ways in which they speak to the grieved and ungrieved losses of migration.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be a speaker at On the Edge of Visibility – An International Symposium, organized by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions and Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) in partnership with Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The Symposium gathers Black and Indigenous women and non-binary artists, with special focus on photographic practices within three broad geographical zones: Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. By exploring the notions of visibility and invisibility as they relate to visual practices and dominant power structures, this symposium examines strategies of resistance as a means of reclaiming visual agency.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be a speaker at Arts of Fugitivity—an exploration of fugitivity as a concept, practice, and method in contemporary art and culture. Fugitivity is a keyword in Indigenous studies, where it asks us to think critically about the politics of movement and place and their intersections with settler-colonialism. As Fred Moten writes “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally.” What emerges when we look elsewhere, sideways, and askance for ways to survive? What happens to representation, creativity, and possibility? How do arts as object, epistemology, and method – across visual arts, music, theatre, performance, film, literary, media, and multidisciplinary arts – animate fugitive ways of being, knowing, and imagining? 

Grace Aneiza Ali will speak about her exhibition, “Are We Free to Move About the World: The Passport in Contemporary Art,” as part of the Artivism: The Power of Art for Social Transformation series that brings to light how the arts can redress inequities, reflect the voices of all and push society forward.

Roberts Projects, Los Angeles is pleased to present artist Suchitra Mattai, In the absence of power. In the presence of love. The show presents new mixed-media paintings, tapestries, and a soft-sculpture installation that evoke the artist’s Indo-Caribbean heritage.

Using the framework of “Transgressive Materiality,” curators and academics who are expert in the different fields of Craft processes, South Asian and Caribbean culture, discuss Mattai’s practice as well as other contemporary artists and how the three aspects intertwine and inform the contemporary art landscape.

Panelists include Suchitra Mattai; Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida; Joanna Robothaum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Tampa Museum of Art; Suzanne Isken, Executive Director, Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, California with jill moniz PhD, founder and creative director of Transformative Arts, moderating.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be a featured speaker at Burnaway’s AWrI. The theme this year is Critical Movement(s). The 2023 AWrI will examine the way in which art writing casts a critical eye on movement— from the body in motion, to migration or translation, as well as emotional resonance or the sensation of being moved. Burnaway has invited speakers ranging from performers, critics, interdisciplinary artists, cultural workers, and educators to speak about how movement is addressed in art writing and criticism. [Register]

As an NYU Provost Fellow, Grace Aneiza Ali, will be on the panel, ‘The Impact of Pathway Programs in Academia’ as part of the NYU Center for Faculty Advancement’s NYU Scholars Convention.

At home and throughout the Guyanese diaspora, Guyanese women navigate narrative, visual, and global trade/industry/labor ecologies. This conversation and presentation gathers two interdisciplinary Guyanese-born scholars to map Guyana’s global currents along the following axes: The art and migration narratives of women of the Guyanese diaspora in global contemporary art as they trace their departures, arrivals on diasporic soils, and returns to Guyana (Grace Aneiza Ali); and an ecofeminist analysis that parses the interplay among development dreams, ecological nightmares, and tourist fantasies within gendered migrations and concomitant global extractive industries which exploit Guyana’s women across several borders while jeopardizing fragile ecologies (Oneka LaBennett).

Part of the University of Guyana Diaspora Conference 2023

Grace Aneiza Ali will present a guest lecture on her exhibition, “Are We Free to Move About the World: The Passport in Contemporary Art,” as part of the Reimagining Representation course at Bennington College.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be part of the Future of Museums at Vanderbilt University — a panel exploring how the museum experience is evolving, becoming more interactive and self-directed, with a greater emphasis on audience engagement. As museum leaders look to the future, they envision new methods of visitor control and curation, incorporating digital engagement and self-directed entry experiences.

Grace Aneiza Ali will speak in the Collaborative Poetics class in Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU to discuss her new exhibition “Are We Free to Move About the World: The Passport in Contemporary Art” and how she uses poetry to shape her curatorial practice.

As part of NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and its Caribbean Initiative, Dantaé Elliott, PhD candidate in NYU's Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, will be discussing Barrel a come: Migratory remittance and the material aesthetic imaginaries of those who remain. Professor Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator and an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida and member of Elliott’s PhD committee will be serving as the discussant. 

Instagram Live: Curator-led walkthrough of our Art Basel Miami Beach presentation with artist Suchitra Mattai and Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and the Curator and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and in the Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies Program at Florida State University.

The pair will discuss Mattai's multi-disciplinary practice, which shares visual stories that touch on her Indo-Caribbean lineage. Blending painting, sculpture and installation with methods suggestive of domestic labor which she learned from her grandmother, such as sewing, embroidery and crocheting, the artist's work addresses such topics as the legacy of colonialism, and relationships between culture and gender roles.

Thinking and writing about Caribbean aesthetics—as such—has become increasingly respected in the academy and in institutional art world spaces. However, the history of the influence of Caribbean thought and aesthetics is long and often uncredited or sublimated in other scholarly and artistic conversations. Roundtable speakers share how they are thinking about Caribbean aesthetics in relation to the question of the avant-garde, the limit, the edge, or the horizon of creative thought. Questions include: Is it useful to think about Caribbean aesthetics as “edgy”? What is the edge between a Caribbean aesthetic and a Caribbean politics? How do Caribbean aesthetics—including literature, the visual and plastic arts, performance, and music— explore, engage with, or efface the region’s violent histories of colonialism and enslavement? How do Caribbean aesthetics explore, engage with, or support nationalist and even authoritarian discourses?

Visualizing Racial Complexity brings together art critic and independent curator Tatiana Flores and Juana Valdés, one of the featured artists in the digital exhibition, The Abyss of the Ocean: Cuban Women Photographers, Migrations, and the Question of Race. During an engaging dialogue informed by archipelagic thought and feminist practices, Flores and Valdés will share on their recent projects and exhibitions and discuss issues of race and Latinidad within the categories Cuban, Latin American, and Latinx Art. The conversation will be moderated by Aldeide Delgado, Guest Curator of The Abyss of the Ocean. CCCADI Curator-at-Large Grace Aneiza Ali will offer Introductions and CCCADI Curatorial Fellow Dalaeja Foreman will serve as the Respondent.

The Symposium, presented by The Rutgers British Studies Center and Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, brings together scholars whose work reckons with the British presence and legacy in mainland Latin America—whether in terms of formal colonial control, an “empire of neglect,” or informal empire. Grace Aneiza Ali will share her curatorial work on “Artistic Responses to Crossing the Kala Pani.”

Women and Photography from the Caribbean Region brings together visual artist Nadia Huggins and curators Grace Aneiza Ali and Tiera Ndlovu. During an engaging dialogue informed by archipelagic thought and curatorial activism, panelists will present their recent projects and exhibitions and discuss issues of Caribbean photography and the redefinition of archives. The conversation will be moderated by Aldeide Delgado, WOPHA Founder & Director.

This special Curators in Conversation public program brings together art curators Suset Sánchez and Aldeide Delgado (Guest Curator of The Abyss of the Ocean: Cuban Women Photographers, Migrations, and the Question of Race) to discuss a history of institutional and independent exhibitions that address the problem of race and racism in Cuba. Guided by discussions on curatorial activism, Sánchez and Delgado explore the challenges that Cuban curators face within the current socio-political landscape and the use of social media as a space for civil imagination. Curatorial Fellow Jasmine Chavez Helm joins as the Respondent. CCCADI Executive Director Melody Capote offers Welcome Remarks, and Curator-at-Large Grace Aneiza Ali offers Introductions.

Suchitra Mattai is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Suchitra was born in Guyana, South America, but has also lived in Halifax and Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Philadelphia, New York City, Minneapolis, and Udaipur, India. Through painting, fiber, drawing, collage, installation, video, and sculpture, she weaves narratives of “the other,” invoking fractured landscapes and reclaiming cultural artifacts (often colonial and domestic in nature). RSVP here.

What are the challenges of curating and collecting women photographers’ work? Defining feminist curating as a form of activism, these presentations compel us to displace the focus of attention from the images to the social interactions and the creative process itself. https://wophacongress.org

AMA proudly presents a book launch and talk for Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora, with editor Grace Aneiza Ali, writer Natalie Hopkinson, and artist Suchitra Mattai, as part of our public programming for the current exhibition No Ocean Between Us: Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean. The exhibition offers a glimpse of modern and contemporary art through an exploration of flows of migration from Japan, China, India, and Indonesia and the artistic impact in its host countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, of which Guyana is a striking example. Artists in the exhibition, such as Suchitra Mattai, reveal the multiple layers of complex and evolving cultural exchanges that have shaped the modern multiethnic societies of today. Watch Full Video here.

Photographer and poet Nadia Alexis will present photographs from her series, What Endures, which she deems “a form of homage to the departed and the living.” Alexis’s photographs of Southern landscapes, paired with a dual presence and absence of the self, are a statement of resistance to the erasure of the Black women lost to violence and whose spaces for mourning have been stolen. Alexis will be in conversation with Zainab Floyd, a current CCCADI Curatorial Fellow in Afro-Caribbean Art and the founder/artistic director of Caribbean Archive, which features Black Caribbean women’s scholarship on agency and resistance. The conversation will be hosted by Grace Aneiza Ali, curator of On Protest and Mourning.

Join us for a conversation highlighting the work of CCCADI’s Afro-Caribbean Art Curatorial Fellows. Jade Foster, a British curator and founder of Black Curators Collective will be in conversation with Katherine Kennedy, curator and cultural practitioner working for The Fresh Milk Art Platform in Barbados. The conversation will be hosted by Grace Aneiza Ali, CCCADI Curator-at-Large. 

Curators in Conversation is a CCCADI series dedicated to critical debate, dialogue, and engagement with curators of color committed to the artistic and cultural production of the Afro-Caribbean and its Diaspora. 

Filmmaker and photographer, Carlos Javier Ortiz will take us through his documentary film We All We Got (2014)—an elegy for the city and people of Chicago as it grappled with the scourge of violence and inconsolable loss while trying to rebuild. Ortiz, who thinks critically about place and the built environment as he examines the impact of violence in our communities, will share his work to illuminate the stories too often reduced to stereotypes. Ortiz will be in conversation with Laurence Ralph, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and Director of Center on Transnational Policing, whose research examines policing and militarization in our contemporary moment. The conversation will be hosted by Grace Aneiza Ali, curator of On Protest and Mourning.

Join us for a conversation with Dee Dwyer and Keyonna Jonesas part of our On Protest and Mourning virtual Dialogue Series. On Protest and Mourning, our current digital exhibition, is a gathering of photographers and filmmakers whose work reveals how as a community, a nation, and a diaspora we grapple with anger, loss, and grief in response to the ongoing state violence and police brutality perpetrated against Black bodies. Their poignant and timely work helps us to navigate the questions: While we engage in protest and uprising, how can we also mark the lives that have been irreparably damaged or lost? How do we create rituals and make spaces for mourning? The conversation will be hosted by Grace Aneiza Ali, curator of On Protest and Mourning.