Event descriptions for the Institute of Contemporary Art’s website.

January 10, 2021, 3pm–4pm

Coffee & Conversation: Milford’s Garden

“If you’re to be a master drummer, you have to know about herbs.”- Milford Graves

Milford Graves was introduced to botany by his grandfather, who used roots and herbs to make home remedies and teach self-reliance in his community. After inheriting his grandparents’ home, Graves developed a “global garden” in the backyard, mixing together plants he collected from all over the world. This continuously evolving site, and the philosophy it embodies, has played a seminal role in nearly every aspect of Graves’s prolific creative output; from music and the visual arts, to holistic medicine and martial arts. Join Narendra Haynes and Tyler Shine for an open discussion about the rich implications of Milford’s garden. All are welcome to participate in the conversation.

 Link to original listing.

April 18, 2021, 3pm–4pm

Coffee & Conversation: Art Work – Labor and Ecology

In Our Primary Focus Is to Be Successful, Jessica Vaughn engages with the physical structures that proliferate corporate culture to expose how everyday objects are laden with complex histories of class, race, and gender. Join University of Pennsylvania graduate students Tyler Shine and Narendra Haynes for an open conversation that expands on some of Vaughn’s artistic and curatorial strategies. Shine will discuss how this work participates in a critique of the art object and the gallery context through a conversation with Minimalism and Land Art. Haynes will utilize Vaughn’s research process to explore another corporate artifact with a fraught history, the recycling logo. All are welcome to participate in the discussion.

Link to original listing.

Excerpt from MFA Thesis, April 25th, 2021.

Waste Not: A Search for Grounding an Ecological Art Practice

I make my daily commute between two neighborhoods in Philadelphia. As I travel from my apartment in Kensington to my studio in Fishtown, I scan the sidewalks, stopping to grab any discarded Styrofoam I find along the way. Trash collection has been spotty in Kensington since the pandemic started, and recycling services are even more rare. After several weeks without pickup, street corners, empty lots, even entire city blocks are inundated with bulging bags, rotting furniture, and detritus of all kinds. Loose packaging, broken glass, and hypodermic needles lay scattered through the streets. I feel for the fentanyl users that gather in Kensington, victims of Big Pharma’s opioid epidemic, huddling in small groups along sidewalks and park benches. But the need to think beyond the human, grips me with a special urgency today. The pollution that surrounds us, seeping into our earth, our water, our food, and our air, is another kind of epidemic, a planetary abuse that threatens all of life.

There has been a surge in television purchases since the recent stimulus checks started hitting. Colorful boxes dropped on curbs, usually with a single piece of Styrofoam sticking out of the top or propped up against one side. I have collected packaging from six different flat screens in the past week alone. I even got an eight-footer, my largest find yet! Intercepting and repurposing these non-biodegradable throwaways is central to my art practice and the ecological concerns that inform it. How can we transform our relationship to waste? How can we confront the systems and ideologies that make such planetary abuse not only possible but permissible, even inevitable?

As I make my way south on Front Street, garbage saturated roads slowly give way to the quaint and cleanly surroundings of the more affluent Fishtown neighborhood. Here in North Philly the poor have to live amidst their waste before it gets shipped off to someone else’s backyard, while those who are of greater means still get to pretend that it just disappears to some magical elsewhere. But this privileged fantasy is imploding. My mind is flooded with images Malaysian towns overrun by western trash. Villages saturated with every kind of polymer, polyester, and polystyrene; clogging streets and rivers, devastating the environment, and introducing myriad health hazards to the residents, both human and non-human. This is the true face of recycling, the underbelly of our consumer culture, and the power relations it engenders.

I am reminded of Mukesh Ambani’s personal skyscraper. This twenty-seven-story private residence towers high above an ocean of slums whose inhabitants live in squalor, picking through the trash of Mumbai’s upper crust. This scene feels emblematic of how runaway inequality translates into spatial and material power dynamics. The “haves” live insulated, elevated and indifferent to the “have-nots,” who scrape by below in states of varying exposure. And of course there’s that great Pacific garbage patch, oozing micro-plastics that contaminate every ecosystem and organism on the planet. It was bound to happen. The petrochemical industry knew it wasn’t feasible to recycle most of the synthetic materials they cooked up in their labs. Facing mounting pushback, they launched marketing campaigns and set up recycling centers anyway to mislead the public into believing these products wouldn’t end up in landfills – a little psychic lubricant to ease us into a world of ubiquitous plastics and Styrofoam packaging. We all pay the price for unscrupulous capitalism and its demand for constant growth, and we all find ourselves entrenched in its hierarchies. But the cumulative costs of this system are becoming unbearable.

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Link to full pdf.

Poem from The Brown Book (publication pending).

The Cave

From flesh and stone to steal cut bone to copper wire and radio towers

From farm to factory to gourmet recipes delivered weekly for your pleasure

Sink your teeth into the data streaming from your wholesome pantry

What you eat is who you are with information ripe for picking

Send a message to Lord Google tell them how you feel today

Say thanks for making my life so easy in so many ways

I watched a Youtube in the mirror reflecting on your vital code

Silicon crystals sprouting roses casted into any mold

You turn the world inside out and proclaim matter doesn’t mind

From thought to flesh within a breath at least when FedEx runs on time

And who’s to say that DNA isn’t software for the living

Save the file then chop the meat for further study of the system

Sync the data run the sequence and foretell tomorrow’s weather

Sun and rain at your command as soon as we complete the network

And worry not for trees outside because we own their blueprints now

We’ll design a perfect garden worthy of your golden crown

When mortals rose from caves of old erect and with their heads held high

And seared their eyes in naked light to learn the truth and seize the day

Who stared longest at the sun and reached furthest with their mind

To conjure forth that crystal palace just beyond the horizon line

Learn more about The Brown Book.