New lecture series promotes artistic storytelling, collaboration

The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands is launching its new lecture series during the fifth annual Humanities Week.

The series combines two new initiatives, “Toward Morning — Nyamathaam’im — ‘Abini” and “The Tendency,” that invite larger artistic and scholarly communities to Arizona State University.

The group of artists and scholars will convene with a workshop on Oct. 21, featuring Māori scholar and educator Leonie Pihama and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who will use siloed fields of creativity to enrich and catalyze scholarly and educational works.

Oct. 22 will kick off the main events and will focus on lectures and performances from guests including Trinidadian Canadian poet, writer and filmmaker Dionne Brand and Pihama.

The following afternoon, on Oct. 23, a second group of artists and scholars will respond and analyze those lectures and performances in a discussion.

One of the minds behind these initiatives is Adrienne Edwards, a new professor of practice at the center. Edwards is a New York-based art curator and scholar and currently works as the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and associate director of curatorial programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Toward Morning — Nyamathaam’im — ‘Abíní” is a part of the larger 210 Project, which uses seven generations of time to imagine old and new ways of engaging communities and worlds through language and other methods. The use of “morning” alludes to action, a call to do things differently. It originates from the Indigenous practices of dawn or the arrival of the sun.

“The Tendency” initiative acts as a model for people to collectively come together and be with one another, forming a group of colleagues from across the United States. 

“We’re really lucky that we were able to bring Adrienne in as a professor of practice. She's very well known in the art and curatorial world, but also has a very deep knowledge of performance art and is this incredible scholarly writer,” said Natalie Diaz (Gila River Indian Community, Mojave), a professor of English and the founding director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. “She is doing something with the kind of vision that I think matches what we do at ASU. Being able to bring her on board to not only catalyze my own ideas, but also create these collaborative moments and put our minds together has helped us create this (initiative) that is unique.”

“By bringing artists into a scholarly conversation, I think there's a certain pressure on what knowledge is, especially when bringing in Indigenous practices. So what this does is it really allows us as scholars, colleagues and an example to our students, to show them the power of thinking alongside one another,” said Diaz. “It includes recognizing one another's knowledge systems and imagining what it looks like. Which is what we keep telling them they're doing, imagining our future world.”

In this below Q&A, Edwards and Diaz talk about this new project and the imagination behind these two larger initiatives and events.

Question: What brought you to ASU?

Edwards: ASU is really the perfect institution for me. I work full-time as a curator at the Whitney Museum, and I have always kind of had a foot in academia while I've worked as a curator. ASU is a place that really supports innovation, experimentation and rigor, which are all things that I think are hallmarks of the way that I've worked. It's wonderful to have so many different research centers and academics to be in a cross-disciplinary conversation with.

Q: This new lecture series focuses on two initiatives that you’re both overseeing. How did it come to be?

Edwards: There is this belief that as academics — whether we're scholars, artists, poets or other kinds of writers — we can bring not only our expertise but also the way we live our lives, our networks that are both personal and professional, and not have them as these distinct siloed parts of ourselves. There is a knowledge that comes from interacting with one another, which seems to be a really important and distinct dynamic to the way that we are shepherding these ideas along.

The idea is that “The Tendency” is like a think tank of collaborators and we each come with a different interest. For the launch of this initiative, we have this “towards morning” idea as our theme. It is morning as in a time of day, a time of action or a time of creativity.

Diaz: I would say our first seed of this could be begun in what we call “migrations” through the center, a migrational exchange in New Zealand with some of the best Native educational scholars in the world. We saw what happens when you can bring people together and incite them to think alongside each other and to think in those spaces that are still unknown. That felt really important to us. It came from the idea of how do we bring a group of people together and have them speak to and respond to one another. There's the emergence of individual autonomous ideas, but those individual autonomous ideas are only as important as the collective.

Q: What are some of the highlights in these upcoming events?

Edwards: We are bringing together some of the most important, creative voices. People like Ralph Lemon and Rose B. Simpson (Tewa of Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh) are incredible artists and are people who are actively drawing on very specific and very different kinds of positions in the world. They're mining their own culture and history, which then actually teaches us something about our collective histories, positionalities and seeing it in the work of art. We have them alongside really incredible scholars.

These are some of the most important figures working today from different experiences, and that's very intentional. That to me seems like a really unique opportunity to be able to hear them and be in conversation with them over the course of these two days.

Q: What do you both hope attendees take away from these events?

Edwards: I think on the one hand, it's always important to make propositions and to ask questions. I think that some of these questions are actually quite poetic, and that is how we get through our day-to-day lives if we can find a thread through which to dream and imagine. This is a time when it seems that it's important to tell a myriad of stories from different perspectives. It's a time that we create stories and we also return to stories that we inherited, we return to stories that have shaped our collective experience in the world.

So if we can create a space in which that can be shared, then to me that seems like a really important thing to do. Maybe people will then think about their own stories and work and think about how that can then unfold differently and how this might serve as an example for them to work differently.

Diaz: We're not thinking toward a theme, but we're agreeing to turn toward this idea, this kind of meditation on the power of morning, as an evolutionary moment. The power of dawn as a time of origin, right, renewal and transformation.

It's the willingness to turn from our personal perspective to turn towards each other and see where our writings and makings go. We have filmmakers, artists, writers, scholars, teachers and elders who are participating and all of those who come to the lectures are going to be invited to do that with us.