For the first of two events to accompany Rowan Renee’s exhibition at Smack Mellon, Airport Beach, Renee host a virtual conversation with scholar Stacy Braukman about her research into the Johns Committee—an investigation committee established by the Florida legislature in 1956 to investigate the “subversive” activities of the civil rights movement, homosexuality and communist political groups. Together, they will discuss Braukmans’s work linking the McCarthy Era to the present through the still-unfolding conservative political agenda that has grouped Southern white anxieties around race, sexuality, and political leftism. Through their different practices as artist and scholar, Renee and Braukman will explore their relationship to archival material as representative of communities that they are both part and peripheral to, addressing the risks and limits on artistic interpretation.
Stacy Braukman is a senior writer and editor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. She previously worked as an editor at the Atlanta History Center and was the assistant editor of Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 2005), a four-year project whose home base was the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Braukman is the coauthor of Gay and Lesbian Atlanta (Arcadia Publishing, 2008) and author of Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956 – 1965 (University Press of Florida, 2012), winner of the Florida Historical Society’s Rembert W. Patrick Award and the Willie Lee Rose Prize, presented by the Southern Association for Women Historians. She holds a BA from Vanderbilt University, an MA from the University of South Florida, and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She grew up in St. Pete Beach, Florida, which continues to hold a special, and sizable, place in her heart.
Rowan Renee (b. 1985, West Palm Beach, Florida) explores how queer identity is mediated by the law. In their research-led practice, they collect imagery, text and documents from State records and family archives to understand the intergenerational impact of gender-based violence, incarceration and family secrets. Through craft techniques – including kiln-formed glass, printmaking and loom-weaving – they bring personal themes of memory, grief and shame to bear on larger issues of harm and accountability in order to dismantle carceral logics of punishment and create a more nuanced framework for understanding what transformative justice asks of us.
Their work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Anchorage Museum of Art (2021), Five Myles (2021), Aperture Foundation (2017), and Pioneer Works (2015), with reviews in publications including VICE, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times. Currently, their project Between the Lines, in collaboration with We, Women Photo, runs art workshops by correspondence with LGBTQ+ people currently incarcerated in Florida. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood at MoMA PS1.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Stephen Levin, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., and Exploring The Arts. In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
Smack Mellon would like to extend a special thanks to all of the individuals, foundations, and businesses who have contributed to the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund.
Airport Beach is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council. The artist would also like to thank the Textile Arts Center and the Center for Book Arts for their support in the production of this project.