Calendar
New museum presents DEMO 2024
Save the date for DEMO 2024 Presented by the New Museum
June 2024
As members of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology, Dark Lab looks forward with anticipation to the June showcase in New York City. For more information on last year’s exhibitions, click here. As part of the Creative Science track this year, we will present artwork engaging in re-writing methods of scientific exploration.
lines of flight: The new Laboratories
The Centre for Experimental Practices presents “Lines of Flight: The New Laboratories” at the University of Huddersfield.
Featuring Dark Lab Executive Director and Founder Tao Leigh Goffe.
Free and open to the public.
Eventbrite link tba.
Boys Club of New YORK x Dark Lab Community art workshop - Hip-hop eco-art
May 18, 12:00-2:2:30, Gerry Clubhouse 321 E. 111th Street, New York, NY, 10029.
Join the artists Tao Leigh Goffe and Cecile Chong in collaboration with the Boys Club of New York for a community day poster-making workshop for teenagers combining eco-art collage and hip hop graphic design.
Email darklaboratory2020@gmail.com to sign up. Space is limited.
Registration required and free.
Lunch provided.
Meet the Artist at Wave Hill Gardens: Tao Leigh Goffe, Kandis Williams, Maaza Mengiste
For this Meet the Artist conversation, exhibiting artist Tao Leigh Goffe has invited author Maaza Mengiste and artist, writer and editor Kandis Williams to join her to discuss the ideas that have shaped her Sunroom Project Space exhibition Plot and Provision: Crate-Digging. Goffe’s site-specific project is a climate-art, multimedia installation that explores intergenerational healing through the sounds and the soil of the Bronx. Central to the exhibition is the act of digging; sifting through history, archives, soil, and the origins of hip hop music to highlight the social, economic, and political realities that permeate our contemporary moment. Goffe’s exhibition complements the penultimate chapter of her forthcoming book After Eden (Doubleday).
This program is co-sponsored by Dark Laboratory, a creative technology organization that researches climate and race through Black and Indigenous theory and action.
Meet the Artist is an ongoing series of conversations between exhibiting artists and the curatorial team, and sometimes invited guests, at Wave Hill. This program provides an opportunity for Wave Hill visitors, the artist’s community, and others to learn more about an artist’s creative process and the themes within their work.
Glyndor Gallery is wheelchair-accessible. There is an accessible, ground-level entrance at the front of the building with an elevator that provides access to the gallery level. The Sunroom Project Space can be accessed with an ADA-compliant ramp. The restroom on the gallery level is all-gender and ADA-compliant.
Admission free with registration. Email darklaboratory2020@gmail.com for code.
Wave Hill - Gardens in the Bronx: Plot and Provision - Eco-Art Installation
Wave Hill: Sunroom Space - Plot and Provision: Crate-Digging an Installation by Tao Leigh Goffe
4900 Independence Ave, Bronx, NY 10471
Plot and Provision: Crate-Digging is a solo show by Tao Leigh Goffe slated for April 20, 2024-June 9, 2024 in New York City at Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center, Glyndor Gallery. The site-responsive installation explores intergenerational healing through sound and dirt. Plot and Provision is a bunker at the edge of the world that will draw on the Black and Indigenous vibrations and music cultures of the Bronx and Riverdale across deep time and into the far future. A critique of the violence of monocrop agriculture, it centers soil exhaustion and regeneration. Through the notion of the plot, land becomes segmented and parceled. But land has also become transformed historically by a type of plot, the gardens cultivated by enslaved Africans at the periphery of the plantation called provision grounds. How can provision grounds be a futurist space of regenerative agriculture? How is provisioning a radical and deeply archival act of preservation? Cultivating, canning, and fermenting are methods of plotting and seeding the future.
Curator: Rachel Gugelberger
Keywords: Sound Systems, Soundtracks, Archival Research, Black Feminist Archives, Memory, Trauma, Healing, Lenapehoking, Global Histories of NYC, Dutch New York, Echoes, Gender & Sexuality, Colonial Violence, Sculpture.
Duration: April 20, 2024-June 19, 2024
Admission: Complimentary with admission to garden grounds ($5)
Special Events: May 11 - Meet the Artist , May 18 - Community Art Workshop with Boys Club of New York
New museum presents demo2023, Columbia university Artist-in-Residence Exhibition walkthrough - Tao Leigh Goffe
A private ticketed exhibition tour and conversation with Columbia University Artist-in-Residence Tao Leigh Goffe on her climate sound sculpture. Part of the DEMO2023 Festival presented by the New Museum.
Mangrove as Caribbean Method in Two Acts (Stanford University, Global Studies Co-Keynote)
This dual keynote by Tao Leigh Goffe and Eddie Bruce-Jones examines the mangroves as Caribbean studies method and is situated at the intersection of environmental/ecological issues and epistemology. It is part of Stanford University’s Global Studies Department’s Caribbean Epistemologies Symposium.
Asian Masculinities Workshop (Boys Club of New York Event)
During this virtual Young Men’s Group workshop, guest panelists Dr. Oeur and Dr. Goffe will engage members to explore the intersection of race and gender. Discussion topics will include Asian identities and Asian and Black Solidarity Movements throughout history. BCNY’s Young Men’s Group (YMG) is a supportive space where members (6th-12th grade) share their experiences and discuss issues that are important to them.
Artist Talk: Performance Artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow (Digital Junkanoo Event)
In the inaugural virtual event of the Dark Lab initiative, Digital Junkanoo, performance artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow will discuss her creative practice and ongoing work on Junkanoo in conversation with Digital Junkanoo Director Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe.
Vital Alignments: Towards Reparative Caribbean Ecologies (New School Symposium)
This interdisciplinary symposium probes the scope and scale of present-day Caribbean social emergencies brought about by climate colonialism and centuries of racial capitalism. Panelists assess the opportunities for regional transformation, transnational accountability, and reparative ways of knowing and dwelling amid crisis. They focus on what climate repair looks like today -- the emerging vital alignments that seek to interrupt capitalist systems of death and environmental destruction.
A Sea Change - Coral reef regeneration Collage Workshop and climate lecture (Columbia University Climate Imaginations Network x Dark Lab)
In this hands-on workshop Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University Climate School, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe will present on climate crisis and what it means to listen underwater. Drawing from research for her forthcoming book AFTER EDEN on race and climate crisis, she will explore possibilities for regenerative aquaculture.
A Mother Is a Mountain (bell hooks center Event)
Climate justice requires racial justice, which Dr. Goffe explores in this talk by tuning into Black, Indigenous, and Asian traditions of mountain ballads. Listening to the life mountains give birth to and what they have witnessed of conquest across the Americas, she proposes a way to hear the multi-layered soundtrack of the co-production that exists in the natural environment. Reflecting on her practice as a DJ and sound artist, she shares techniques and modes of sound mixing and experimentation. Looking to the reverberations of Black feminist poetics on rural life in Toni Morrison’s Sula and bell hooks’ Appalachian Elegy, she will explore how many mountainous landscapes hold ancestral songs that echo freedom and possibility. How, she asks, can we understand “telling it on the mountain” as a strategy of witness for a shared future?
DJing As Black Technology & Method of Worldbuilding (Princeton Guest Lecture)
In this guest lecture for Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s course, “Methods of Worldbuilding,” at Princeton University, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe presents on dj’ing as a Black method and Black technology.
Teaching to Transgress: a Tribute to bell hooks (Pomona College Conference Panel)
This panel gathers writers, scholars, and organizers in memory of bell hooks (1952-2021). We will speak to the far-reaching legacy she has left to those who strive to counteract the “politics of power” in the classroom and on the page. Panelists will address hooks’s critique of contemporary masculinity and racial representation, her expansive theories of “multicultural education,” the sound of Black geology in her dirges and mountain songs, and her wide-ranging, ongoing preoccupation with love in its many forms. This will be an opportunity for panelists and participants alike to discuss not only how we teach, read, and write about hooks’s work, but also how education can be a “practice of freedom” in the twenty-first century.
“Reimagining Queen Nanny of the Maroons” (New York University Screening & Panel)
In celebration of Women’s History Month and its theme of “Women Who Tell Our Stories,” NYU Liberal Studies invites you to join Dr. Leo Douglas at a screening and panel discussion for the launch of his documentary short, Reimagining Queen Nanny of the Maroons. This event features LS professor Jacqueline Bishop, Dr. Marcia Douglas, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, and Dr. Thera Edwards.
Insurgent Diasporic / Indigenous / Afro-Asian Ecologies (Association for Asian American Studies Event)
This panel explores intersections between (anti/de)colonial ecologies across the Caribbean, Oceania (Hawaiʻi), and the Philippines. Unsettling discourses that de-historicize the relationship between colonialism and our contemporary climate crises, we highlight insurgent diasporic, Indigenous, and (Afro) Asian negotiations with ecologies of extraction and racial capitalism. In doing so, we aim to respond to climate justice scholarsʻ calls to attend to the interlapping relationship between the making of colonial earth (Yusoff) and uneven experiences of climate injustice. We ask: How might bringing Caribbean, Pacific, and Asian geographies expand conversations on colonial ecologies? How might our understanding of Black, Indigenous , Diasporic and Asian ecologies expand in thinking archipelagically about various sites of U.S. empire? What kinds of futurities might we glean from engaging diasporic / Indigenous / Asian / Black epistemologies and everyday acts of refusal?
The Aydelotte Foundation (Swarthmore) : A Conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe and Krystal Tsosie
The Aydelotte Foundation is pleased to host a conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe (Cornell) and Krystal Tsosie (Vanderbilt) on developing projects and programs that address historic and present violence with respect to race, indigeneity, and science and technology. Krystal Tsosie will be talking about her work with IndigiData, while Tao Leigh Goffe will discuss Dark Laboratory. Both of these projects challenge long-standing academic management of data and storytelling by foregrounding the knowledge, training, and education of Black and indigenous people.
The event is open to all in the Swarthmore community and to the public. Those who wish to attend can register here.
This event is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how Black people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, indigenous people, and people of color.
More information about the featured speakers can be found below. Please visit our website for updates on this research initiative, including additional events and publications.
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Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history. She has a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization. At the intersections of the environmental humanities and science and technology studies, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound editing, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Amerasia Journal, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. She is the founder of Dark Laboratory, an engine for collaboration, design, and study of race, ecology, and creative technology.
Krystal Tsosie (Diné/Navajo) is an indigenous geneticist-bioethicist, co-founder of the Native BioData Consortium in Phoenix, Arizona, and a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University. She has provided commentary on issues related to DNA, politics, and identity in her articles published in The Atlantic and others worldwide. Her work has also been featured in a number of articles on data sovereignty and indigeneity in The New York Times, Forbes, and NPR. She co-leads a genetics study investigating genetic determinants of pre-eclampsia in American Indian women, constituting one of the few community-based genetics studies including Tribal communities. As one of few Native American geneticists, she also continues work from her Masters in Applied Ethics from Arizona State University, which examines medical ethics in the context of indigenous beliefs and genetic rights. After devoting several years to developing a technique to target small drugs to cancer cells, her newest endeavor is to ameliorate the health disparities gap in genetics through community-based participatory research.
See here for more info: https://aydelotte.swarthmore.edu/events/
DESIGN LAB (UC San Diego) - Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial
Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial
The Western hemisphere is a haunted house built on the foundation of stolen land and stolen life. Considering the entanglement of the dispossession of Native sovereignty and African enslavement across deep time, in this talk Tao Leigh Goffe will present elements of a sound sculpture produced with collaborators. As a multimedia reckoning with the ongoing colonial present, Dirge explores Black and Indigenous burial rites, rituals, and futurism.
**Due to COVID restrictions, only UCSD students and employees will be allowed to attend the class in person. All others must attend remotely via Zoom. Capacity is limited to first-come first-serve.
For more information: https://designlab.ucsd.edu/events-all/design-at-large/
Mortgaged Futures: Debt and Disaster Capitalism in Puerto Rico.
In this co-sponsored event Dark Laboratory co-founder Tao Leigh Goffe will moderate a conversation on the film Landfall that looks at Puerto Rico beyond Hurricane María.
Masterclass with Khalik Allah
Director of Black Mother (2018), @criterioncollection film, Khalik Allah will lead a virtual masterclass on method, Black diaspora, camera techniques, and metropolitan representation in Prof. Tao Leigh Goffe’s Cornell University grad seminar @cornellaap “Black and Indigenous Metropolitan Ecologies”
By May 4th, to apply send a paragraph of intent addressed to Khalik Allah explaining your interest in his work and the ethos of the Dark Laboratory + cv to DarkLaboratory2020@gmail.com. All are welcome to apply!
Earth Day Fete: Dark Laboratory Photographic Narrative Virtual Exhibition Launch
Join the Dark Laboratory for a celebration and virtual gallery debut of photographers who are the winners of the inaugural Dark Laboratory Photo Essay Prize. Ranging from portraiture to landscape, each work touches on the intersections of Black and Indigenous life across the Western hemisphere. Curators, jurors, and prize winners will speak about the artwork and essays to honor how our ecological futures depend on reckoning with the crossroads of Black and Native life.
Free and Open to the Public.
Masterclass: Curating Indigenous Art and Archives with Ned Blackhawk (Yale University)
Yale professor Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) will lead a virtual masterclass on archiving Indigenous art and archives from his experience with the recent exhibition Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art, the culmination of three years of work by Yale University student curators—Katherine Nova McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa-Cree) ’18; Leah Tamar Shrestinian, ’18; and Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojbiwe) ’19.
To apply send a paragraph of intent addressed to Professor Blackhawk explaining your interest in curating Black and or Indigenous archives and art and a cv to DarkLaboratory2020@gmail.com.
A Virtual Event with Two-Spirit Performance artist Ty Defoe
The Dark Laboratory is honored to co-sponsor an invited Cornell University virtual performance by Indigenous performance artist Ty Defoe, organized by Professor Sara Warner (PMA).
Events details to be announced.
Black and Indigenous Futures (Society of Black Archaeologists Event)
Our co-founder Tao Leigh Goffe will participate in a webinar organized through a partnership with the Society of Black Archaeologists, Indigenous Archaeology Collective, Cornell Institute of Archaeology & Material Studies, SAPIENS, The Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Moderator: Ayana Flewellen, PhD, co-founder of Society of Black Archaeologists, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC-Riverside
Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD, co-founder of Dark Laboratory, assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history
Mohamed Ali, PhD, founder of AMSARC (American Sudanese Archaeological Research Center), Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology at International University of Africa in Khartoum, Sudan.
Keolu Fox, PhD, (Kānaka Maoli) founder of the Indigenous Futures Institute, Assistant professor at University of California, San Diego.
Rae Gould, PhD, (Nipmuc) Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, Brown University
Grace Dillon, PhD , (Anishinaabe) professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies program at Portland State University
Black and Indigenous Metropolitan Ecologies
Connecting the metropolitan geographies of Atlanta and Portland, join Holiday Simmons and Melanin Mvskoke in conversation on Black and Indigenous identities. Presented by Tiffany Lethabo King and Tao Leigh Goffe of the Dark Laboratory.
Holiday Simmons, MSW is the founder and Lead Practitioner of Southern Soul Wellness, a holistic mental health and spiritual wellness practice for the liberation of mind, body, community and planet Earth. He is also the Director of Healing and Resilience at the Campaign for Southern Equality, and is a consultant with Black Emotional and Mental Health (BEAM). Holiday is a Black Cherokee transmasculine earth-bottom that makes his home in Atlanta, GA and finds beauty in soccer, the ocean, and hugging moments of liberation.
Amber Starks (aka Melanin Mvskoke) is an Afro Indigenous (African-American and Native American) activist, organizer, cultural critic, decolonial theorist, and abolitionist. She is an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and is also of Shawnee, Yuchi, Quapaw, and Cherokee descent. Her passion is the intersection of Black and Native American identity. Her activism seeks to normalize, affirm, and uplift the multidimensional identities of Black and Native peoples through discourse and advocacy around anti-Blackness, abolishing blood quantum, Black liberation, and Indigenous sovereignty. She hopes to encourage Black and Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from compartmentalizing struggles. She ultimately believes the partnerships between Black and Indigenous peoples (and all POC) will aid in the dismantling of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and settler colonialism, globally.
Register for Zoom link.
Free and open to the public. All are welcome.
https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/4716169825679/WN_KHW28959RSi7YzuMEiuSGw
“Black and Indigenous American Relations” Panel at the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS)
Please join co-founders Tao Leigh Goffe and Jeffrey Palmer for the AAIHS Panel - Black and Indigenous American Relations
Moderator: Kyle Mays, UCLA
Meta Carstarphen, University of Oklahoma Between The Lines: Reading Black Presence in Oklahoma's 19th Century American Indian Newspapers
DeLisa Hawkes, University of Texas at El Paso The Other Great Migration: The Black Indian and ‘State Negro’s’ Search for Home and Community
Alexander Hyres, University of Utah “African People Have No Need to Be Ashamed”: Dr. Asa Hilliard III, the Baseline Essays, and Urban Education Reform in the West, 1964-2001
Tao Leigh Goffe, Cornell University "Go West Young Man": The Dark Laboratory and Black Indigenous Entanglements
Keynote Speakers: Robin D.G. Kelley and Tiya Miles
Stanley Nelson (Dark Laboratory Advisory Board Member) is also a Featured Guest Speaker on his new documentary Crack.
Register for the virtual conference to attend.
Dark Laboratory Photographic Essay Prize Announcement
The winners of the inaugural Dark Lab Prize in Photography will be announced by press release. The ceremony will take place in April (Earth Day).
Taller Electric.Marronage x Dark Laboratory: A Black Indigenous Studies Roundtable with Tiffany Lethabo King, Tao LEigh Goffe.
RSVP. Open to the Public.
https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/2016110971132/WN_gYt2I9i2Q7GmGhdgGK0HOQ
Mellon Humanities Laboratories Panel, University of Iowa
Closed event.
See here for more information.
Panel Discussion
Tao Leigh Goffe (Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) and Jeffrey Palmer (Performing and Media Arts), Dark Laboratory: Black X Indigenous Media Ecologies, Cornell University
Christina Chia (Associate Director, John Hope Franklin Humanities Center) and Deborah Jenson (French and Caribbean Studies and Global Health Humanities), Health Humanities Lab, Duke University (also an earlier Haiti Humanities Lab)
Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (History and American Culture) and Rebecca Ontiveros-Chavez (Staff Attorney, Michigan Immigrant Rights Center), Immigrant Justice Lab, University of Michigan
Max Liboiron (Geography) and Kaitlyn Hawkins (Laboratory Manager and Researcher), Civic Laboratory for Environmental Research, Memorial University
Indigenous Hip Hop
A Dark Laboratory co-sponsored event on Indigenous presence in Hip Hop in honor of legendary photographer, Brother Ernie Paniccioli with a special virtual panel discussion. Tune in Friday Dec. 4th at 8pm EASTERN, at bit.ly/erniepanel
On the panel: Supaman (@supamanhiphop), Remind (@bstarremind1977), Drezus (@drezus, Ojibwe Cree), Sewa (@mi_xantico, Chef, Birthworker), Prophecy (@prophecy_antithesis, of Antithesis), and Taboo (@taboo, of the Black Eyed Peas).