Postpartum Aesthetics in Art and Practice

Speakers include artists Fay Ray, Analia Saban, Kim Ye. Moderated by curator Cèsar García-Alvarez.

Curatorial Perspectives on Postpartum Aesthetics Panel Talk

Speakers include curators Grace Aneiza Ali and Laura Copelin. Moderated by Compound’s new curator, Aj Girard.

This event is in conjunction with our current exhibition, Fay Ray: Puerperal, on view until August 31, 2025. Puerperal features Ray’s iconic two and three dimensional monochromatic sculptures as well as newly commissioned work throughout Compound’s 14,000 square foot creative complex. The forms, sculptures, photographic collages, and architectural interventions will explore the material realities of the postpartum condition. In these works, Ray takes the period of the “fourth trimester” – a term used to refer to the period of postpartum repair and restoration after giving birth – as a provocation toward a new aesthetic.

Join Haitian American artist and photographer Vanessa Charlot for a conversation with Grace Aneiza Ali, curator of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice and Katie Delmez, Frist Art Museum Senior Curator. 

Through her lens, Charlot explores the intersections of Black identity, migration, and spirituality, moving between the waters of the Mississippi Delta, Haiti’s shores, and Florida’s coastlines. 

This conversation has been planned in conjunction with the Frist’s current exhibition What the Body Carries, featuring Haitian American artists M. Florine Démosthène and Didier William, whose work explores how they navigate spaces beyond Haiti while remaining deeply informed by the country’s cultural and spiritual traditions.

Join us for the opening reception of Between Rivers and Revolutions. Vanessa Charlot’s lens moves between the waters of the Mississippi Delta, the tides of Haiti, and the currents off Florida’s coast. She traces the spiritual, cultural, and revolutionary ties that bind these landscapes—a journey shaped by her own lived experience as a Miami-born Haitian American, now rooted in Mississippi. 

The exhibition is part of  Somewhere We Are Human, the 2024-2025 Public Programs and Engagement Series of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ) at Vanderbilt University, curated by Grace Aneiza Ali. It is organized around the thematic north star—Somewhere We Are Human—a collective vision for a time and space where no one’s humanity is ever in question. The year-long series looks at the city of Nashville and the American South through a lens of migration, exploring the ways immigrant communities have shaped the region’s history and are envisioning its future through art and activism.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be the Keynote Speaker for RAW 2025 Conference at the Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at University of Texas, Dallas, a vibrant platform created by and for graduate students, scholars, and artists. It fosters transdisciplinary dialogues across the fields of arts, humanities, and emerging technologies. The annual Spring conference, organized by the Bass Association of Graduate Students, attracts graduate students from across Texas and the U.S.

Join us for Conversations at MOCA featuring a panel discussion with exhibiting artist Andrea Chung, alongside creatives Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Grace Aneiza Ali. This conversation will be moderated by cultural curator and writer Lise Ragbir. Each panelist brings a unique perspective shaped by their Caribbean heritage and global influences, connecting the personal with the universal.

Join us for a conversation between renowned Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke whose work explores empire and power, and Guyanese-American curator Grace Aneiza Ali. The landmark exhibition, Donald Locke: Nexus, curated by Ali and on view at Atlanta Contemporary, honors the life and legacy of Guyanese-born artist Donald Locke (1930–2010), one of Atlanta’s most influential artists. It focuses on how the concept of “nexus” permeates his artistic and intellectual journey and his engagement with themes of migration, cultural hybridity, and the histories of colonialism.  
As the eldest son of Donald Locke, Hew Locke will expand on his father’s influence, offering an intimate perspective on how his groundbreaking work and artistic philosophies shaped his own career and curiosities. The conversation will delve into how Donald Locke’s innovative approach to materiality and form bridges cultural narratives, from his Guyanese heritage to his experiences in Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States. With a particular focus on the crucial role of the archive in legacy building, Ali and Locke will discuss the ways his father's legacy resonates across generations and geographies.
 
This program is co-hosted with Atlanta Contemporary, and Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum and Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library.  

Join the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice (EADJ) Team, Curator Grace Aneiza Ali, and founder María Magdalena Campos-Pons as we share our gratitude for a year of impactful exhibitions, public programs, and community partnerships. We invite you to our Closing Reception and End-of-Year Celebration on December 20, 2024, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The celebration will take place at Begonia Labs: 2805 West End Ave. 

The evening will include a closing celebration of our exhibition featuring James Kuol Makuac with a Sudanese Tea Pouring at 6:30 p.m.

Join us for a discussion celebrating the artistic legacy and impact of Guyanese-born Donald Locke (1930–2010), one of Atlanta’s most influential visual artists. This event brings together contemporary artists Paul Stephen Benjamin, Kevin Cole, Shanequa Gay, Masud Olufani, and Ato Ribeiro to examine Locke’s impact on their art practice and the ways in which his work continues to have enduring relevance for a new generation of artists. The conversation will be moderated by artist, scholar, and curator Kevin Sipp.

Donald Locke: Nexus, currently on view at Atlanta Contemporary, is curated by Grace Aneiza Ali with support from Brenda Locke, the Locke Family, and the Estate of Donald Locke.

In honor of Native American Heritage Month, Dr. Kristin Dowell with the FSU Art History Department will screen the film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance by world-renowned filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. This groundbreaking film documents the 1990 fight for Indigenous land in Canada, capturing in harrowing detail the 78-day stand-off for Kanien’kehá:ka lands in Oka, Quebec.

Following the screening, there will be a Q&A with Dr. Andrew Frank, Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Center, and Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator and Assistant Professor.

This discussion will focus on Donald Locke's penchant for the literary, poetically abstract, and unknowable. Family members Brenda Locke, Jonathan Locke, Corinne Locke, and Brandi Locke, Ph.D., will share personal stories and insights about his time at Nexus, the grassroots artists’ cooperative that later became Atlanta Contemporary. They will also reflect on Donald Locke’s life, creative journey, and the profound impact of his work on the community and beyond. Moderated by Grace Aneiza Ali.

Donald Locke: Nexus, currently on view at Atlanta Contemporary, is curated by Grace Aneiza Ali with support from Brenda Locke, the Locke Family, and the Estate of Donald Locke.

In 1992, when then 61-year-old Donald Locke (b. Guyana, 1930-2010) artist, teacher, critic, and poet, moved into his new brick-wall warehouse studio space at Nexus, the grassroots artists’ cooperative that would later become Atlanta Contemporary, he remarked, “I feel that this is the beginning, the nucleus of something.” Honoring Locke’s penchant for the literary, the poetically abstract, and the unknowable, 𝐃𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐝 𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞: 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐮𝐬 returns to the site of Nexus and probes the ways a pursuit of the idea of nexus itself permeated Locke’s work.

Donald Locke: Nexus, currently on view at Atlanta Contemporary, is curated by Grace Aneiza Ali with support from Brenda Locke, the Locke Family, and the Estate of Donald Locke.

The Begonia | Curatorial Lab is a platform for research, collaboration, and artist and curator exchanges about pressing local and global issues. In the Curatorial Long Table, local and global curators with projects invested in The Global South(s) discuss formative and current projects and their visions for the role of the 21st century curator.

Invited Curators include:

• María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ríos intermitentes (Matanzas, Cuba); Tennessee Triennial, RE-PAIR

• Grace Aneiza Ali, Somewhere We Are Human, EADJ

• Mark Scala, Chief Curator, Frist Art Museum

• Katie Delmez, Florine Démosthène and Didier William, Frist Art Museum

• Elena Bally, Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, Adam Szymczy (Zurich Curatorial Team), Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House, Fisk University Galleries

• Jamaal Sheats, Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House, Fisk University Galleries

• Vesna Pavlović, IMS Solidarity

• Raheleh Filsoofi, NIRMA Projects

my heart is strong because I walked on blistered feet features the vibrant and expressive paintings of James Kuol Makuac (b. South Sudan, 1976; lives in Nashville) whose work reflects a life spent navigating between worlds. For nearly twenty years, Makuac has cultivated a practice of contemporary Sudanese painting that tells impossible stories of human tragedy and simultaneously speaks to survival and hope, grief and joy, surrender and determination.

The exhibition is part of  Somewhere We Are Human, the 2024-2025 Public Programs and Engagement Series of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ) at Vanderbilt University, curated by Grace Aneiza Ali. It is organized around the thematic north star—Somewhere We Are Human—a collective vision for a time and space where no one’s humanity is ever in question. The year-long series looks at the city of Nashville and the American South through a lens of migration, exploring the ways immigrant communities have shaped the region’s history and are envisioning its future through art and activism.

This conversation gathers four interdisciplinary scholars/curators to map Guyanese women’s global currents along the following axes: the art and migration narratives of women of the Guyanese diaspora in global contemporary art as they trace their departures, arrivals on diasporic soils, and returns to Guyana (Grace Aneiza Ali); narratives of Guyanese culture warriors who demonstrate the insistent role of art in contemporary politics and life (Natalie Hopkinson); an ecofeminist analysis that parses the interplay among development dreams, ecological nightmares, and tourist fantasies within global extractive industries which exploit Guyana’s women across several borders while jeopardizing fragile ecologies (Oneka LaBennett); and an intersectional analysis of the body that tracks racial difference, gendered violence, and indigenous dispossession in extractivist geographies (Shanya Cordis).

This interdisciplinary group of scholars from the fields of visual art, anthropology, American studies, and communication studies will center on the following primary question: How do art and environment converge within the global political economies that shape Guyanese women’s lives at this pivotal moment?

As Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal Open and member of the CAA Editorial Board, Grace Aneiza Ali will speak on the Peer Review Futures panel. By its nature, peer reviewing does not carry the same weight as (ironically) the reviewed text. How can we counter a culture of invisible or unacknowledged labor within the peer review process? How might peer reviewing be (better) recognized?  What can we glean/model from other fields (i.e. investigative journalism, curatorial) that center, make visible, and value the collective team (“the many hands”) in the work? Can we reimage how peer review counts in promotion (shifting it from service to research)? Editors of CAA journals will discuss some ideas they are piloting and welcome others to share their thoughts on the future of peer review. 

How can a house reflect migration’s arcs, its losses and gains? It is this quest for reconciliation that draws curator and scholar Grace Aneiza Ali into the “mother’s house paintings” by Guyanese-born British artist Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA (b. British Guiana, 1934). These early paintings in the artist’s oeuvre became informally regarded as the Mother’s House Paintings (1966 to 1971) as they are characterised by a singular architectural motif: a 1953 photograph of the house in which he grew up and often returned to with his family – his mother’s house (Mrs Agatha Elizabeth Bowling) – in New Amsterdam, Guyana. Notably, the black-and-white photograph itself of the three-storey clapboard colonial house was taken in 1953, Coronation Day of Queen Elizabeth II and the year Bowling, at nineteen years old, left the then colony of British Guiana for London. Throughout the series of paintings, Bowling’s varied artistic treatments renders the house as central, as silhouetted, as ghostly, as background, as foreground, as faint, as volatile, as looming, as inescapable, as fragile, as formidable. In this talk, Ali will expand on her research of these paintings, trace their scholarly and curatorial visibility, and offer the ways in which they speak to the grieved and ungrieved losses of migration.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be a speaker at On the Edge of Visibility – An International Symposium, organized by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions and Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) in partnership with Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The Symposium gathers Black and Indigenous women and non-binary artists, with special focus on photographic practices within three broad geographical zones: Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. By exploring the notions of visibility and invisibility as they relate to visual practices and dominant power structures, this symposium examines strategies of resistance as a means of reclaiming visual agency.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be a speaker at Arts of Fugitivity—an exploration of fugitivity as a concept, practice, and method in contemporary art and culture. Fugitivity is a keyword in Indigenous studies, where it asks us to think critically about the politics of movement and place and their intersections with settler-colonialism. As Fred Moten writes “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally.” What emerges when we look elsewhere, sideways, and askance for ways to survive? What happens to representation, creativity, and possibility? How do arts as object, epistemology, and method – across visual arts, music, theatre, performance, film, literary, media, and multidisciplinary arts – animate fugitive ways of being, knowing, and imagining? 

Grace Aneiza Ali will speak about her exhibition, “Are We Free to Move About the World: The Passport in Contemporary Art,” as part of the Artivism: The Power of Art for Social Transformation series that brings to light how the arts can redress inequities, reflect the voices of all and push society forward.

Roberts Projects, Los Angeles is pleased to present artist Suchitra Mattai, In the absence of power. In the presence of love. The show presents new mixed-media paintings, tapestries, and a soft-sculpture installation that evoke the artist’s Indo-Caribbean heritage.

Using the framework of “Transgressive Materiality,” curators and academics who are expert in the different fields of Craft processes, South Asian and Caribbean culture, discuss Mattai’s practice as well as other contemporary artists and how the three aspects intertwine and inform the contemporary art landscape.

Panelists include Suchitra Mattai; Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida; Joanna Robothaum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Tampa Museum of Art; Suzanne Isken, Executive Director, Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, California with jill moniz PhD, founder and creative director of Transformative Arts, moderating.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be a featured speaker at Burnaway’s AWrI. The theme this year is Critical Movement(s). The 2023 AWrI will examine the way in which art writing casts a critical eye on movement— from the body in motion, to migration or translation, as well as emotional resonance or the sensation of being moved. Burnaway has invited speakers ranging from performers, critics, interdisciplinary artists, cultural workers, and educators to speak about how movement is addressed in art writing and criticism. [Register]

As an NYU Provost Fellow, Grace Aneiza Ali, will be on the panel, ‘The Impact of Pathway Programs in Academia’ as part of the NYU Center for Faculty Advancement’s NYU Scholars Convention.

At home and throughout the Guyanese diaspora, Guyanese women navigate narrative, visual, and global trade/industry/labor ecologies. This conversation and presentation gathers two interdisciplinary Guyanese-born scholars to map Guyana’s global currents along the following axes: The art and migration narratives of women of the Guyanese diaspora in global contemporary art as they trace their departures, arrivals on diasporic soils, and returns to Guyana (Grace Aneiza Ali); and an ecofeminist analysis that parses the interplay among development dreams, ecological nightmares, and tourist fantasies within gendered migrations and concomitant global extractive industries which exploit Guyana’s women across several borders while jeopardizing fragile ecologies (Oneka LaBennett).

Part of the University of Guyana Diaspora Conference 2023

Grace Aneiza Ali will present a guest lecture on her exhibition, “Are We Free to Move About the World: The Passport in Contemporary Art,” as part of the Reimagining Representation course at Bennington College.

Grace Aneiza Ali will be part of the Future of Museums at Vanderbilt University — a panel exploring how the museum experience is evolving, becoming more interactive and self-directed, with a greater emphasis on audience engagement. As museum leaders look to the future, they envision new methods of visitor control and curation, incorporating digital engagement and self-directed entry experiences.