Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation Program (CAST)

Jaime Black | between us

November 9, 2021- February 25, 2022
Kniznick Gallery

Curated by CAST Chair Dr. Toni Shapiro-Phim

• Artist, curator, and event participant bios
• Associated events:
  
  Waltham Public Library Book Club Meeting | Polly O. Walker
  Monday, January 24, 2022
  7 - 8:30 pm (Zoom)
  
  Members of the Waltham and Brandeis communities are invited to join a Waltham Public Library book club conversation. Dr. Polly O. Walker (of Cherokee descent) will facilitate a discussion of renowned novelist Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. A story of a family on an Ojibwa reservation in North Dakota, it chronicles the aftermath of the rape of a Native American woman. Both the crime and the pursuit of justice are world-shattering.
  
  This event will be held online, via Zoom. To join, click on this link on the day of the event. Then, click the “Zoom link” listed for Monday, January 24th. Registration is not required.
  
  Sponsored by the Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation minor; the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts; and Waltham Public Library’s Initiating Inspiration Book Club.
  
  This event is part of Jaime Black's between us, curated by CAST Chair Dr. Toni Shapiro-Phim.
  
  For further information about the Library Book Clubs, please e-mail Laura at lbernheim@minlib.net. Copies of the titles are usually available through the library’s subscription to Hoopla and/or Overdrive/Libby without a wait. Members of the MInuteman Library Network can also pick up hard copies of the titles at the book club display table on the first floor of the Waltham Public Library. Anyone who needs assistance placing a hold on a title for a library book club can contact Laura for further assistance. Copies might also be available at local bookstores, such as More Than Words. 
  
  

About the exhibition:

Water. Stone. Twigs. Bodies. The color red. These elements appear throughout Jaime Black’s exhibition, between us, honoring the interdependence between humankind and the natural and spiritual worlds. The artist, of mixed Anishinaabe and Finnish descent, focuses special attention on Indigenous women’s potency in all these realms as nurturers, as trust-builders, as knowledge-holders and knowledge-givers.

The photographs, video and poems on display tell stories alongside empty red dresses, which hang facing the four cardinal directions, dresses that, with their absence of bodies, allude to the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have been missing or murdered across North America. Elsewhere on campus, clusters of such dresses will appear, a re-creation of Black’s renowned REDress Project, reminding us of the gendered and racialized violence experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. These dresses, along with Black's other work in the exhibition, ask us to consider ways to confront such injustice, while celebrating beauty, and reverencing women as the weavers of, as Black says, “the threads that bind and sustain us.”

Brandeis University is located on territories originally inhabited and stewarded by Indigenous Nipmuc, Pawtucket, and Massachusett peoples.

Kniznick Gallery exhibitions are made possible thanks to the generous support of Rosalie & Jim Shane, the Marcus Arts Endowment and the Rosenberg Arts Endowment. between us is sponsored by the Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation Program (CAST) and the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts. Additional gratitude is offered to Dr. Elaine Reuben ’63, for her generous support, and to the Departments of Fine Arts and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for their co-sponsorship.