This video will stream from April 14th-29th, 2022

bell hooks (1952-2021) is one of history’s most important cultural voices. A prolific author, groundbreaking feminist scholar and artist, bell hooks offered pointed social critiques that illuminated how the intersection of white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal systems affect reality. Her legacy has a tremendous reach. This panel discussion will focus on bell hooks, her life and her continued influence in the work of Rochester area artists and educators. 

Texts from several essays will be discussed, along with footage from selected lectures and presentations by bell hooks. Additional resources and links are listed below.

Links to bell hooks resources:

The bell hooks Center at Berea College

bell hooks’ series of 22 public conversations during her three year residency at Eugene Lang School at The New School in New York City

Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

Happy to Be Nappy

Are You Still A Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body While a scholar-in-residence at Eugene Lang College bell hooks gathered in conversation at The New School for Liberal Arts with other leading voices in black feminism and the LGBTQ community: author Marci Blackman (Tradition), film director Shola Lynch (Free Angela and All Political Prisoners), and author and activist Janet Mock (Redefining Realness), about liberating the black female body. This conversation took place on Tuesday May 6, 2014 at 4pm.

bell hooks in an Open Dialogue with New School Students – Whose Booty is This? An open conversation for students with bell hooks, Anna Czarnik-Neimeyer (assistant director of the Cassandra Voss Center, St. Norbert College), Lynnee Denise (Founder & Vision Director, WildSeed Cultural Group), and Stephanie Troutman (assistant professor of Leadership & Educational Studies; Affiliate Faculty, Women’s Studies, Appalachian State University). Hosted by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. This conversation took place on Tuesday October 7, 2014 at 4pm.

Speaker Bios:

Hernease Davis is the Assistant Director of Education at the Visual Studies Workshop. She earned her MFA from ICP-Bard College and widely exhibits multimedia installations throughout the U.S. Using photograms, cyanotypes on fabric, crochet and sound installation, Hernease creates immersive spaces of rest for herself and others. Work from her new series, “…new love.” debuted as a part of the SHIFT Residency 2020-21 hybrid exhibition at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City. She has also exhibited with Silver Eye (Pittsburgh), Transformer Station (Cleveland), the International Center of Photography (New York City), the Houston Center for Photography, and she was named to the inaugural Silver List which recognizes emerging photo-based artists who are advancing the medium. She has been featured in Front Runner Magazine, LensCulture, and her work inspired an article in Musée Magazine that explored facets of trauma. Hernease teaches in the MFA program at the Visual Studies Workshop and served as a Visiting Lecturer at ICP-Bard where she led a course exploring empathy through art practice. Website Instagram

Luticha Doucette is an author of the groundbreaking book: Cultivating An Intersectional Mindset. She graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in Bioinformatics where she developed protein surface prediction algorithms. After graduating, she was a Fellow at the University of Rochester where she worked in a genomics lab that focused on analyzing the venom of parasitoid wasps to develop new drug therapies for various diseases. In 2017 she authored a report on wage disparities across race, gender, and disability in Rochester and Monroe County in conjunction with the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative and in 2018 authored a follow-up report on employment barriers for disabled people in Rochester and Monroe County. She is a graduate of the Leadership and Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) Fellowship program and an AUCD Emerging Leader an inductee into the Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame established by the National Disability Mentoring Coalition and the 2020 – 2021 Distinguished Alumni Awardee from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Luticha’s research and writing has been featured in various publications such as Insect Molecular Biology, Toxicon, The New York Times, and Yes! Magazine. She is a former founding member of Rochester Accessible Adventures and she helped change the landscape, and attitudes, around inclusive recreation in New York State. She is the owner of Catalyst Consulting, which helps organizations, leaders, and advocates examine equity across race, gender identity, and disability in policies, practices, procedures, and relationships. In her spare time she is a fencer, cyclist and outdoor enthusiast. Cultivating An Intersectional Mindset

Read the In This Moment chapbook featuring Luticha Doucette

MK Mehlrose is a quilter, critical writer, and book artist. Engaged in craft, queer theory, and radical archival practices, their work explores rural queerness, the spaces of home, and inherited craft practices. Employing different craft techniques, including applique, crochet, embroidery, knitting, quilting, and weaving, MK creates textiles that record the intergenerational storytelling and skill-sharing associated with their inherited quilting practice. As a current MFA candidate at Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY), MK’s thesis focus is creating a queer archive as scrap quilt through a process of auto-archiving. MK records the collecting of theory, their grandma’s stories of crafting, found scrap quilts, secondhand textiles, and other amassed objects – and their affective responses towards these materials. Central to their work is the use of theory as art practice itself. They concentrate predominately on affect theory through craft, quilt, and textile histories; decolonial studies with a focus on archival gaps and decolonizing historical narratives; and the application of queer theory as an ephemeral-based radical archival practice. MK received a BA in Visual Arts with Honors, concentrating in Art History & Books Arts, and a BA in Women’s & Gender Studies with Honors from Wells College (Aurora, NY) in 2017. Instagram

This program is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Max and Marian Farash Foundation; and Joy of Giving Something.