KODA at Ornithology: Rowan Renee

KODA at Ornithology

Leading up to Domestic Violence Awareness month, KODA is collaborating with Gotham Yardbird Sanctuary, a jazz nonprofit organization headquartered in Ornithology Jazz Club. Our Domestic Violence (DV) Safe Sanctuary Campaign aims to create a grassroots community of advocates with critical information on Support Systems and Human Rights for Domestic Violence Victims and Survivors in NYC.

Join us on Sundays this September at 5-6pm! KODA is organizing three events with artists Rowan Renee, Ewa Harabasz and Toisha Tucker. Their work relates to such topics as domestic violence, trauma, healing, border and boundaries.

Full Program

• Artist Talk with Rowan Renee: Sunday, September 10, 2023 at 5-6pm
• Catalog Launch with Ewa Harabasz: Sunday September 17, 2023 at 5-6pm
• Artist Talk with Toisha Tucker: Sunday, September 24, 2023 at 5-6pm

Speakers

Rowan Renee is a genderqueer artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. Their work addresses intergenerational trauma, gender-based violence and the impact of the criminal legal system through image, text and installation. “In 2018, I acquired the contents of my father’s criminal case file from the Florida State Attorney who prosecuted him. The file included the official records used to condemn my father – court records, witness statements and police evidence photographs. Through these documents, I was able to track how the justice process failed in a case that the State hailed as an example of justice served. Using lithography, weaving and metalwork, I re-presented over 1,000 pages of these records as “hanging files” in a fictitious police evidence room. The repetitive motions of printing 1,000 pages through an etching press, of tracing the shapes of redaction on the loom, of welding dozens of steel joints was a method to use my body – the site of violence – as a vehicle for justice.”—Rowan Renee about No Spirit For Me series (2019). Their current exhibition The Perimeter Path at the Green-Wood Cemetery is on view until September 4. Their piece No Spirit For Me (2019) piece can be viewed in the group exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, until December 4 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Ewa Harabasz is a Polish-born artist whose works in multiple media have been exhibited internationally. Best known for her large-scale drawings and paintings, Harabasz’s work explores trauma, war, race, displacement, domestic abuse, and loss. After studying medicine and art conservation in Poland, she helped restore medieval paintings, icons, and frescoes in churches in Poland and Italy. She then earned a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and an MFA at Wayne State University in Detroit. Before joining the Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty in 2012, Harabasz taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Ewa's Monograph Ewa Harabasz was published with KODA in 2022 and it features nearly 20 years of her oeuvre.

Toisha Tucker is a New York based interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer. Their work explores three often-overlapping veins of critique. They use art as a mode of cultural organizing illuminating social constructions of gender, race, and identity. They posit incisive critiques of contemporary and historical events of Western society. They delve into the anthropomorphic relationship between technology and humans, contemporary dystopia and human empathy. Their practice is process and research based and manifests through text-based prints, photographs, video, participatory works, sculptural installations, analog and virtual physical labor, crafting, repetition, and other media that aim to directly engage with the body. Many of their pieces are ongoing or mutable. Tucker is current KODA Borders + Boundaries Artist in Residence. Their exhibition Toisha Tucker: It’s a most peculiar sensation; or that time Virginia Woolf wore Blackface is on view at KODA/RU House on Governors Island until September 24, 2023.

Organizer

KODA is a social practice nonprofit arts organization focusing on conceptual mid-career artists ingrained in social justice. KODA offers survey exhibitions as well as tailor-made and community-based artist residencies, through collaborations with socially engaged partners. The nonprofit serves the community with contemporary art events and outreach to strengthen arts education. In its overall mission to support the artistic and professional growth of artists, KODA acts as a laboratory for creative concepts, reflecting its core values of curiosity and collaboration. Instagram: @koda.lab.

Campaign Partners

Gotham Yardbird Sanctuary (GYS) is a not-for-profit 501 (C)(3) organization that was founded in response to the 2020 global pandemic and its impact on NYC’s Jazz community and local businesses. GYS provides free-to-all Live Jazz performances in various places all over NYC, such as restaurants and bars, art museums and galleries, food courts, churches, and organic rooftop gardens. etc. GYS creates immediate jobs for Jazz musicians, supports hard-hit local businesses and brings Jazz back to the people to reach wider audiences. GYS will revive NYC with the great unifying power of Jazz and rebuild this city as a sanctuary for Jazz musicians and aspiring artists from all over the world.

Ornithology Jazz Club is a bohemian Jazz performance space with a beautiful Bechstein Grand Piano in vibrant Bushwick, where like-minded creatives seek the “inner flight” through Jazz and cocktails.

Womankind is a non-profit organization, founded by a group of volunteers led by Pat Eng in 1982, aims to empower Asian survivors of gender based violence. In the 40+ years since, the agency has grown to become a leader in providing multilingual and culturally-responsive services to help survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual violence rise above trauma and build a path to healing. Womankinds dedicated team of 70 staff and 150 volunteers collectively speaks 18+ Asian languages and dialects. Through their programs, they offer survivors access to a safe place to live, counseling, legal assistance, wellness activities, and so much more. Though they are an expert in serving Asian communities, Womankind’s services are valuable and available to all.

Center for Anti-Violence Education (CAE) works to prevent hate violence in our communities through educational programs that center the experiences of the people most marginalized. Programs combine awareness raising, physical empowerment, leadership development and activism. CAE centers the needs of women, girls, people who are Trans, Gender-Non Conforming and LGBQ, especially those at increased risk from racism and xenophobia. Through Empowerment Self-Defense programs, people targeted with violence learn evidence-based methods to stay safer. Upstander workshops move anyone from being a bystander to violence, to becoming someone with tools to actively intervene, disrupting violence against others and helping communities heal.