[30 January 2024]: KJR Studios is Live
Visual Arts Practice; Public Speaking and Programming; Orange Tangent Study; Teaching and Learning; Black Orbits; Scratch Disks Full; Ghost Chapters; Octavia Estelle Butler: "Shyness is Shit"
Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.
This is part of the newsletter’s Studio Updates strand.
These are released once a month as a round-up of current exhibitions, writing, programming, and what I am working on. Read more about the changes in the newsletter rhythm here.
Hiya!
Without realizing it, 2024 marks fourteen years in New York City. I moved here on July 4th, 2010, to become an artist and high school teacher. Fourteen years later, I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, and I’m writing to share more about my next chapter.
Today marks the launch of KJR Studios, a sprawling creative practice headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, with seasonal projects in Berlin, Johannesburg, and wherever else I am invited (hint hint: I would love to spend some time in Brazil, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Tokyo). Stewarded by me, learner Kameelah Janan Rasheed, KJR Studios is committed to exploring how we learn across species, disciplines, and states of living. What is part of KJR Studios:
Visual Arts Practice (Upcoming solos in Los Angeles and Berlin)
Public Speaking and Programming (Upcoming Talks at Several Universities)
Orange Tangent Study (My Consulting Business: yes, you can now pay me to “pick my brain.”)
Teaching and Learning (Barnard, Cooper, Yale - Critic, School for Poetic Computation, Carnegie Mellon - Mentor, A.I.R. Gallery - Mentor)
Black Orbits (Archival Platform)
Scratch Disks Full (Publishing Project)
Ghost Chapters (Time-bound Interview Series)
In the “About the Author” section of one of the many books I published in elementary school, I wrote, “… I like to read, write, and do art.” I am deeply humbled to circle back to this younger Kameelah finally. Much has changed, but a few things have not: when I smile, my eyes disappear, and I still love reading, writing, and “doing art.”
Quite honestly, KJR Studios was unofficially established in East Palo Alto, CA, in 1991 at the age of six when I began publishing books, creating home libraries according to my idiosyncratical cataloging system, designing worksheets for my disinterested peers, and curating bedtime rituals for the entire family.
Welcome to my universe!
What is KJR Studios Up To?
Visual Art Practice (2005 - present)
As a learner, I explore writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing and self-description as a “two-headed woman” piqued my interest in writing as a sacred, trickster, and fugitive ritual. The technology of writing – translating embodied and immaterial experiences into written language, introduces questions of loss, ruin, and failure.
Loss (when Pope. L reminds us that the loss we experience when describing is “the deal we make with language.”)
Ruin (when Amelia Groom reminds us of “material vulnerability” in the work of Beverly Buchannan)
Failure (when Clarice Lispector reminds us that “writing is a method of using the word as bait”)
In a month, you can read the ongoing ethos statement.
Explore all the 2023 projects. We closed out an exciting year with solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art alongside a new book, in the coherence, we weep
Check out my 2024 lineup, an ecosystem of projects exploring the interplay between writing, animism, play, and erotics.
[Solo Exhibition] - January 2024: (Boston, MA) — all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext.
[Solo Exhibition] - March 2024: (Philadelphia, PA) — not yet public
[Solo Exhibition] - March 2024: REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) — i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter
[Solo Exhibition] - April 2024: (Berlin, DE) — not yet public
[Group Exhibition + Publication] - September 2024: (Lofoten, NO) — not yet public
Public Speaking and Programming (2010-present)
(Sidenote! I was so hyped to get the Britney Spears mic!)
In the last year, I had the privilege to speak and organize programming at so many different places. Here is what I am looking forward to this year!
[19 January 2024 | John Hopkins University’s If, Then: Technology and Poetics (Online)] We had a fantastic time with the Wayward Sentences workshop!
[5 February 2024 | CODEX Foundation (San Francisco, CA)] I will be offering a keynote at The CODEX Foundation 9th International Biennial Book Art Fair & Symposium
[January - May 2024 | HoGent, School of Arts - KASK (Ghent, BE — Online), Rice University (Houston, TX), Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia (Richmond, VA), Small Schools (Raleigh, NC) University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), University of California - San Diego (San Diego, CA)
Orange Tangent Study (2020 - present)
Orange Tangent Study (OTS) is a boutique consulting firm supporting cultural producers in designing materials, experiences, and systems for expansive learning opportunities. We uphold our mission through various coaching, resource library, facilitation, and design offerings. This includes curriculum analysis, design, and revision; workshop and training facilitation; and coaching individuals and organizations to define their values, align their missions, harness and find resources, and develop strategic plans for the future.
In 2020 when OTS first launched, Sydnie L. Mosley, the Artistic Director of Sydnie L. Mosley Dances left the following Instagram comment.
OTS is excited to finally adopt this beautiful doula language three years later. We use the language of doula work to describe what we do: providing continuous care and support before, during, and shortly after birth. In this case, birth refers to the ideas, movements, and projects you are trying to bring into the world. They are life, not static. These ideas are dynamic, living creatures interacting with the world, and we should honor them as such.
Some past clients/co-learners: The New York Public Library’s Center for Educators and Schools, Booklyn, New Schools Venture Fund, and Paper Camera Press.
Teaching and Learning (2002 - present)
Post-Secondary Teaching (2000-present)
I teach at museums, traditional high schools, after-school programs, undergraduate and graduate programs, and experimental schools.
Currently, I am teaching Pedagogy of Play at Barnard College (2024), Teaching and Learning as Social Practice at Cooper Union (2022-present), and I am a critic at Yale University MFA Sculpture Critic (2022-present) alongside teaching a range of courses at the School For Poetic Computation (2020-present).
School for Primitive Hypertext (SPH) (formerly Night School) (2020 - present)
School for Primitive Hypertext (SPH) is an itinerant learning community hosting seasonal classes focused on a current obsession. “Primitive Hypertext” is a process first described by Octavia Estelle Butler in a 1998 interview with Samuel Delany at MIT. Butler explains: “I don't have access to this kind of thing on computer but, oddly enough, what you're talking about sounds very much like the way I start looking for ideas when I'm not working on anything. [...] I generally have four or five books open around the house--I live alone; I can do this--and they are not books on the same subject. They don't relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another… So, I guess, in that way, I'm using a kind of primitive hypertext.”
Following up the 2020/21 season on countersurveillance, the 2024 season is Scams! Bootlegs! Dupes! – a series of workshops exploring our relationship to authenticity, capitalism, and belief formation.
Black Orbits (2016 - present)
Black Orbits is a platform for digital archives exploring Black cultures that uses orbits as a conceptual framework to consider modes of gathering and dispersal in archival practices. Black Orbits is in conversation with a specific “haunting,” or as Avery Gordon names a “something-to-be-done.” The haunting, or “unresolved social violence,” is the circulation of Black material culture and its associated histories as decontextualized commodities. Black Orbits is interested in browser-based rituals of care and the long-form.
Current Projects:
Mapping the Spirit (live)
Mapping the Spirit is a digital archive documenting how Black faith lives, shifts, and self-revises. The first chapter, released in 2017, explored the Moorish Science Temple of America. The upcoming chapter explores the Shrine of the Black Madonna.
Black Printed Matter (live, March 2024)
Study East Palo Alto (live, June 2024)
981 (live, August 2024)
Scratch Disks Full (2024 - present)
Scratch Disks Full asks, in the spirit of Sankofa: What did you leave behind? What would happen if you went back and got it? Scratch Disks Full is a publishing project for those with leaky sensory gating, sprawling interests, kinetic brains, and “too many ideas.” We publish the excess, the dirty data, the spillage, the noise, the leftover, and the unfulfilled.
A scratch disk is a hard disk used as a workspace to store data temporarily. In applications like Adobe Photoshop, the scratch disk is used to hold the data being edited. When an error reads “... the scratch disks are full.” it means there is not enough space on the drive to perform the upcoming task. The users need to find space elsewhere or end the process; they are left holding the excess energy of an unfulfilled action.
Scratch Disks Full is a publishing project producing readers, workbooks, and lo-fi playthings exploring the excess of an exhibition, piece of writing, lecture, performance, or even other publication. By excess, we do not mean process work leading up to a final work; we literally mean the embodied experiences you could not give yourself over to due to spiritual unreadiness, the sentences you had to blunt because there was not enough time for further editing; the feral idea that blossomed during a performance and began to shape you as much as you shaped it.
Our first publication is out in March! An excess of notes, images, and sketches from my show at Emerson College.
Our Open Call for our first anthology, Compost, is live in late February!
Ghost Chapters (2024-2025)
Ghost Chapters is a 12-month-only digital publication that explores co-reading, speculative intertextuality, and annotation through six close-reading interviews with peers where we co-write a ghost chapter.
In The Role of the Reader (1979), Umberto describes two concepts – inferential walks and ghost chapters. These concepts are an articulation of very specific intertextuality where a reader walks through a range of associations (peritext, epitext, other writing) to make sense of the text and, in the process, creates a ghost chapter or a speculative textual intervention that could part of the original text.
P.S. I am very proud of this email. Not because of the accomplishments but because I have finally stopped hiding. Here is to coming home to seven-year-old Kameelah, who, with all the exuberance in the world, was never shy to share. Something happened through the socialization of being a “weird” Black girl where I just stopped sharing and went into my own little world. But I am emerging and excited to share.
I want to offer an excerpt from Octavia Estelle Butler’s essay Positive Obsession.
[…]
[…]
“Shyness is shit.”
Thank you for reading,
Kameelah 👽
Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this wee little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at $70 USD :)
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL
It is so beautiful to see your ecosystem flourish !!!!