Director of Zen Softball

[breannetrammell]

🌈 So excited to roll out a new multi-faceted collaboration—TO MUNCIE, WITH LOVE—made with students and faculty at Ball State University and commissioned by @munciearts!!! If you’re in the area come fly kites with us on Sunday! Materials and instruction provided, no experience necessary. #tomunciewithlove 💫 special thanks to Kim & Rob at Tribune for this poster magic 🌈 (at Muncie, Indiana)

[breannetrammell]

💚💚💚 NYC pals, tonight’s the night for DUTCH MASTERS at Mrs. Gallery!!! 💚💚💚 bucket list group exhibition in most excellent company alongside Caroline Wells Chandler’s GREEN GODDESS and the rest of this crew ✨✨✨🙈🙈🙈🌲🌲🌲☄️☄️☄️💫💫💫👽👽👽🍀🍀🍀

[breannetrammell]

👀 Another sneak peek at High & Outside Vol. 2 👀 featuring @alexgartelmann as the inaugural Stamp Artist-In-Residence 🖤🖤🖤 Get a copy this weekend at the 🌈 @cincinnatiartbookfair 🌈 hosted by @anytimedept ☄️💲1️⃣0️⃣, proceeds donated to criticalresistance.org 〰️ #chubbyhenryrollins (at Camp Washington, Cincinnati)

[breannetrammell]

HAPPY FAILURE (at University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning)

[breannetrammell]

Finally updated this T during the Crafting Resistance sesh that @rez_id_deux & I hosted in the print shop today. I ordered it after the election then wore it to school not thinking about what it might mean to one of my graduate students who was just starting the process of transitioning. (Also 🖤 @jessicacaponigro's version of this) I regularly think of the "family meetings" my dad would call when I was a teenager to address my "bad attitude" and demand that my mom buy me dresses because "we don't even know what you are." I didn't have the language or the support to know how to fully express who I was... and I will forever be deprogramming from that experience. If anything, those family meetings pointed me in a direction towards a definition of self that I have only recently been able to begin to articulate and ultimately showed me what kind of human I never want to be. White faculty: we need to SHOW UP for our students of color and LGBTQ students and we need to continuously do the work that dismantles white supremacy in the classroom. #BEARCATSRESIST #TOGETHERISBETTER (at University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning)

[breannetrammell]

Ugo Rondinone’s “Seven Magic Mountains”

[breannetrammell]

[breannetrammell]

Louise Bourgeois — Nature Study (Velvet Eyes), 1984

[breannetrammell]

Cincinnati, OH

[breannetrammell]

XXXXL toilet paper flag prototype for my September show with STNDRD at DEMO Project in Springfield, IL

[breannetrammell]

"The paper was the lifeblood of the party. That's how we survived..." — Omar Barbour, from the @pbs documentary, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (at Portage Country Club)

[breannetrammell]

Outrunning Clouds

A video of myself trying to outrun a cloud. (This video was not digitally altered or manipulated.)

[breannetrammell]

BLESSED BE THE FRUIT (at Portage Country Club)

[breannetrammell]

XXXL JUICY JAY (three color silkscreen on mulberry)

[breannetrammell]

My show “Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole” opens on June 2 at the Box Gallery in Akron. All-new work including these white line woodcuts, zines, more prints, objects, a wall drawing and I think that’s it. (at TV2 KSU)

[breannetrammell]

ODB @ CMA

[ourrisd]

Propelling History Forward

“I want to eliminate this era,” Dread Scott declared in opening his talk at the RISD Auditorium last Friday (April 21). Invited to campus by the Center for Student Involvement, RISD’s Black Artists & Designers (BAAD) and the Brown University Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the guest speaker discussed three decades of making “revolutionary art to propel history forward” and encouraged students to channel their outrage over current national and global affairs into their creative practices. “I actually do have hope for the future,” he insisted – “but the hope comes from confronting the horrific present.”

Scott spoke about how reactions to his 1988 work What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? continue to motivate him. Made while the artist was an undergrad at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the installation sparked such furor that President George HW Bush called it “disgraceful” and the US Senate voted to outlaw public placement of the flag on the floor or ground. “‘The flag and the artist, hang them both high,’” he recalled protestors chanting outside the Institute at the height of the controversy. 

Since then Scott has based his career on “looking at how the past sets the stage for the present – and how it exists in the present in a new form” through works like On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide (above). Staged in NYC in 2014, the performance piece involves the artist walking into the stream of high-pressure fire hoses, uniting the struggle of Civil Rights-era activists against racial discrimination with the Ferguson, MO, protests against police brutality. 

“To make the new, we need to get beyond the old,” Scott said of works like Burning the US Constitution (2011), which exemplify how he uses art to confront history. 

During the Q+A that followed, he urged students to aspire to be “emancipators of humanity” – especially while “the orange Voldemort” is in the White House. “This is a pivotal era and what people do in it is going to matter,” he said (while also acknowledging how digital surveillance makes protest art an increasingly risky activity). “My shield as an artist might soon become a liability,” he admitted, “but I have an obligation.”