Events

Radically reimaging Archival Practice with the blackivists

Reed College, April 14-16, 2022

Hosted by Tracy Drake and sponsored by the College Library and Office for Institutional Diversity, members of the Blackivists will participate in a series of events with students, faculty, staff, and community members at Reed College.

On April 14, the Blackivists will be joined by Sixty Inches From Center co-founder Tempsett Hazel for a panel discussion about their joint Diamond in the Back initiative, community archives, and documenting marginalized communities.

On April 15, the Blackivists will have a Kitchen Table Conversation with student leaders and groups led by student workers from Reed’s Special Collections and Archives.

On April 16, the Blackivists will host archiving workshops for invited BIPOC and LGBTQ artists and community members in the Portland area. Attendees will learn about the basics of archiving, digital preservation, and conducting archival research.

Diamond in the Back: Excavating Chicago’s Black Cultural and Material Heritage

Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar in Book History

November 9, 2021, 5:00-6:30PM (EDT)

Steven D. Booth and Raquel Flores-Clemons will discuss The Blackivists’ origin story and their archiving work with Chicago-based groups as part of “New Directions: Black Print Culture and Archives,” the first of two linked roundtables with Nicole Aljoe and Laura Helton.

Issues in Black Archival Work 

Zimmerli Art Museum, October 21, 2021, 7:00-8:30 PM (EDT)

To celebrate American Archives Month this October, the Zimmerli is hosting a series of virtual discussions in conjunction with the exhibition Angela Davis - Seize the Time. Blackivists Tracy Drake explores contemporary models of memory work and archival practices with Zakiya Collier and Lisbet Tellefsen, moderated by Dr. Alexandria Russell.

The exhibition is centered on a rich archive including magazines, posters, booklets, flyers, vinyl records, legal documents, and court sketches collected by the Oakland-based activist/archivist Lisbet Tellefsen. This material is intertwined with artworks that speak to Angela Davis’ story, and history and memory more broadly. This series of online events in Archives Month looks at broader issues of Black memory work and archives. It brings together professionals archivists, scholars, activists, musicians, and artists to discuss the challenges posed by social erasure and institutional entombment and to consider ways in which individuals and communities can gather, sustain, and give life to Black material culture both tangible and intangible. The series is organized by Professor Gerry Beegan, of the Department of Art & Design, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. Beegan is a design historian and co-curator of the exhibition.

Living Room Light Exchange

Curated by Aggregate Space Gallery, October 19, 2021, 7PM (PST)

Tracy Drake joins Tempestt Hazel and Courtney Fink in a discussion on how artist-run organizations use their archives in their programming and how that type of content can help organizations in terms of growth. Organizations with rich archives will be the primary focus but other organizations will benefit from the talk because they can learn how they can organize, grow and nurture their own archives.

Aggregate Space Gallery (ASG) is a charitable, artist-run exhibition and performance space in West Oakland making immersive conceptual art experiences accessible to our community. ASG envisions an Oakland where a diverse community of artists can make and experience art in a safe space with access to production tools and hands-on guidance, creating work that fuels critical dialogue in a time when it is desperately needed.

Attending to the Self and Other Modes of Care in Archival Praxis

Weeksville Heritage Center’s The Legacy Project presents “Sensing History”

OCTOBER 25, 2020, 2:30pm-4:00pm (EDT)

How do Black archival practitioners center modes of care when doing archival work under their various contexts that they navigate in the larger world? What evidences of care have practitioners come across in the archives? How do we center healing and transformation while engaging our legacies? To engage with these questions, three Black women archivists, Skyla S. Hearn, Tracy Drake and Raquel Flores-Clemons, will build on their “No Ordinary Pain: Invisible Labor and Trauma, Radical Empathy, and Self-Care in Archival Work” education session presented last year at the Society of American Archivists conference.

Digital Surveillance, Privacy, and Preservation in Community-based Archives

Visual AIDS, October 22, 2020, 6:30pm–8:00pm (EDT)

A conversation and interactive workshop considering the ethics of digital archiving, with Steven Booth & Stacie Williams, Marika Cifor, Yo-Yo Lin & J. Soto, and Yvette Ramírez, moderated by Tracy Fenix.

In this interactive program, archivists and audience members will critically examine how concerns around surveillance and privacy intersect with archival practices, and discuss how living, community-based digital archives can build caring policies that best serve BIPOC and marginalized communities.

The event will begin with a panel discussion, followed by breakout sessions where attendees will be invited to collectively reimagine and rescript digital preservation policies for the Visual AIDS' Artist+ Registry.

All Power to the People: Centering Collections and Communities in the Archives

2020 New York Archives Week Symposium,

October 22, 2020, 1:30-3:30 PM (EDT) 

In this session, Steven D. Booth, Tracy Drake, and Raquel Flores-Clemons will lead attendees in a conversation focused on centering collections and communities in archival work. Using case studies from their collaborative projects and other institutions, they will provide examples and resources that will encourage attendees to think differently about how to amplify heritage and culture that traditionally has been at the margins within archival institutions.  

Digital Preservation for Community-Based Archivists

Community Archives Collaborative (CAC), September 29, 2020

This training is being organized by the Community Archives Collaborative (CAC). Formed in 2019 with a planning grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the CAC creates a space for community-based archives practitioners across the country to collaborate, share skills, trainings, and best practices, leverage pooled resources, and provide peer-to-peer mentoring in order to support long-term sustainability and growth at our institutions. The CAC currently includes SAADA, Densho, TAVP, and Interference Archive and will be expanding further in 2021. Learn more.

This training will be led by Stacie Williams and Skyla Hearn, co-founders of the Blackivists Collective.

Love Can't Turn Around™: Evidences of the Belief in the Power of Our Collective Social Experiences as Sites of Pleasure, Purpose and Politics

Archives*Records 2020 SAA | COSA, August 8, 2020

The Blackivists™ collaborated with Honey Pot Performance on a series of programs for the Chicago Black Social Culture Mapping Project, which exists to preserve Chicago's black social cultural lineage through fun and informative experiences focused on a Chicago based cultural art form: House music.

ARCHIVING PROTESTS, PROTECTING ACTIVISTS

Documenting the Now, June 19, 2020

The recent wave of protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, have been inspiring and have renewed calls to dismantle the racist systems that inflict so much harm on Black people and other marginalized people. While the protests seemed to have ignited a shift in public opinion towards finally doing what is right, the violent reaction from law enforcement to the protesters has been disturbing and yet an unsurprising aspect of the recent events.

As archivists, activists, and other memory workers attempt to document these protests, it is vital to consider how protestors can be protected from further harm by police while they are taking part in actions or when information about them is found in archives at a later date.

In this conversation, Documenting the Now, WITNESS, Texas After Violence Project, Blackivists, and Project STAND discussed actions that protestors and memory workers can take and resources they can use to safely and ethically document the extreme police violence we are seeing towards protestors.

Event flyer created by Blake Paskal, Programs Associate at Visual AIDS.