Guest curator Rachel Gugelberger will lead a tour of Bound Up Together: On the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment, along with local exhibiting artists LuLu LoLo, Shellyne Rodriguez and Yvonne Shortt. The walkthrough will take place in-person at Smack Mellon and will also be streamed live on Zoom, starting at 1:00 PM ET.

Organized in the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests across the country, Bound up Together centers on the achievements that granted some women the right to vote and the pervasive and enduring sexism, misogyny and racism that disfigures American culture and society. Speaking directly to the absence of monuments to women, LuLu LoLo revisits her 2015 public art performance Where are the Women?, when, as Joan of Arc, she collected nominations from passersby for monuments to women in New York, highlighting a longstanding gender and race imbalance. The drawings of Shellyne Rodriguez, many of which were made during the COVID-19 pandemic, depict psychic spaces inhabited by Bronx community members engaged in strategies of survival: the labor of “essential work” and organized activism. Yvonne Shortt captures the faces of women of color from her community and from the streets in the African American Marbleization series of white marble bust sculptures intended to be installed guerilla-style in public spaces. 

Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger is a New York-based curator with a focus on place-based practices around social, cultural, and civic issues. She is a former curator at No Longer Empty (NLE), a non-profit that curated site-responsive and community-centered exhibitions, education and programs in unique spaces, where she was also director of the NLE Curatorial Lab. Gugelberger has also served as the Residency Program Director and Curator of Public Programs at Residency Unlimited, curator at Exit Art, and as co-director of Sara Meltzer Gallery.