orientation Week/ june 6-11, 2023
Ariana white
The Culturally Expansive Nooks and Crannies of NYC
The Dark Laboratory Internship Orientation Week took us on a journey throughout New York City from Midtown, to the Lower East Side, to brownstones in Brooklyn Heights. Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe dedicated this week to orienting myself, and fellow intern Kendall Greene, to the inner workings of the Dark Laboratory and Afro-Asia Group, and conjuring goals and “dreams” for the summer’s initiatives. We were introduced to our workspaces throughout the city, including the stomping grounds of New Inc., and enthralled by the resources of The New York Society Library, the oldest cultural institution in NYC.
Following our visit to the Asia Art Archive, located in Brooklyn, NY, I was left with questions about how to continue increasing accessibility and allowing the public to grow comfortable in archival spaces, especially those of marginalized groups with a historically decentralized narrative. The Asia Art Archive is a global non-profit organization founded in Hong Kong, dedicated to preserving and sharing art across the Asian diaspora. We visited the first Asia Art Archive located in America, chaired by Jane DeBevoise, and facilitated by Furen Dai and Christina Ko. Asian sculptures, paintings, zines, books, and journals, held by Asia Art Archive, lined the walls of the once-old carriage house, filling the space with history and community through a diverse perspective on the vastness of Asian culture and multimodal art. Over 80% of the archive and exhibitions are accessible online, actively increasing accessibility, and gave me hope that traditional lines of thought within classic art spaces can and will be transcended and re-written.
We were introduced to the work of New Art City, an online art forum encouraging public engagement with multi-sensorial digital art, and allowed to visualize Dr. Goffe’s vision for her upcoming exhibition on June 21st with ONX studio at the Onassis Cultural Center Gallery. ONX Studio is an innovative space dedicated to creating immersive experiences with extended reality, technology, and artistic practice, and will be showcasing various artists as part of New. Inc’s creative festival “DEMO2023-Extended Realities”. Dr. Goffe’s exhibition space allows her creative freedom, as she works to portray the life, history, and global importance of coral reefs as indicators of the climate crisis and witnesses to transatlantic injustices.
Our week culminated with a visit to Nadia Huggins's exhibition, “Coral & Ash”, with the Hemispheric Institute, giving us interpersonal insight into Huggins’ relationship with the sea, the life and despair it holds, and the people that depend on it. As a Trinidadian native, raised and based in St. Vincent, Huggins provided a purposeful perspective on marine life through comparisons between coral reefs and the communities that engage reciprocally with the reef’s environment. Her work was vulnerable, as each image highlighted a new relationship she had or witnessed, whether it be between the sunlight and the waves or her perspective whilst capturing the movement of a school of fish underwater. We ended the day by crossing the street to Washington Square to capture some official portraits and fun selfies by the fountain.
Kendall Greene
We began the week with introductions to the workspace and the team working both remotely and in person. The first day was fully packed as Dr. Goffe and I visited a coral reef housed in Pratt Institute’s Writing Center. Randy, the caretaker of the reef, gave us a tour of the space, and a warm welcome to the campus. Both the coral and the fish were illuminated by the blue lights above the tank, and I watched Dr. Goffe feed an eel with two rows of teeth. We contemplated the stakes of aquariums and zoos. The fish and coral will never be able to experience life in the ocean but at least they are not subject to ocean acidification. How worth it is a life in captivity?
Later in the day we visited the Asia Art Archive in Brooklyn and attended a meeting for the Asianish collective. Each of the attendees was so friendly and welcoming, and we had the opportunity to learn about the origins of the space that was once a barn that is a nexus of Black, Indigenous, and Asian histories. On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to join a Game Theory workshop hosted by NEW INC. with a game titled Oracle Hotline Bling. I learned about quadratic voting that allows for democratic art-making and organizing. We finished the session with an AI-generated Drake song amalgamating stories each participant wrote based on a tarot card. (It was as complicated and fun as it sounds.)
Toward the end of the week, our site visits centered on art exhibitions. We first met at the exhibition space for New Inc’s upcoming DEMO day to better visualize how the event will run on June 21st. We also visited Nadia Huggins’s exhibition, Coral and Ash, housed at NYU’s building neighboring Washington Square Park. The images were complemented by a video that allowed Dr. Goffe, Ariana, and I to reflect on Blackness that transcends borders and connects us through our waterways, ecologies, and histories. On Saturday, we visited Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s collaborative exhibition in pieces where she offered an introspective look into Black solidarities through weaponry, sugar, and storytelling. The week was rich and incomparable to any other work that I had done in the past, and I am looking forward to so much more.