Migration, Boundaries and Belonging: Oppositional Histories on Glass and Race

GEEX Talks Q&A Podcast

What does it mean to learn, think with, and remember the Middle Passage? Artist KING COBRA and Dr. Kerry Sinanan discuss contemporary and historic glass, the violence of consumption, and the transatlantic slave trade.

“Art, craft, glassmaking: we need multiple points of reconnection to these deliberately obscured and submerged memories. I'm in a state where they're about to legislate so that we cannot teach any of these things — they’ve done it in Florida, Alabama, Georgia [and] Arizona. We're about to see a rollout across the United States of a deliberate attempt to excise thinking of that violence, people's own histories, stories, and facts. So it's become rather urgent.”

Transcript available on the GEEX website.

Made possible by the Center for Craft. Thanks to Wet Dog Glass and Vetro Vero for sponsoring this episode!

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Featured Speakers:

• KING COBRA (@the_silicon_don and @flesh_and_fluid): sculptor and body modifier. Visit KING COBRA’s website.

• Dr. Kerry Sinanan: Assistant Professor of Transatlantic Literature from the 18th and 19th centuries at the University of Texas-San Antonio. Visit Kerry’s website.

Additional Links:

• “Heterogeneous Blackness: Peter Brathwaite’s Eighteenth-Century Re-portraits”

• “In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the 18th-Century British World”

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Theme music by Podington Bear. Additional music in this episode by Otis McDonald.

Edited and produced by Emily Leach and Ben Orozco.

geex.glass/

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Selected questions from the audience:

• REMEMBERING: Can you talk about memory? Through your work, what does it mean to learn, think with, and remember the Middle Passage?

• VIOLENCE: We received a few questions about the representation (or glorification) of violence. One of the key links between your talks is an insistence on perceiving and remembering historic and ongoing violence. With that in mind, what is the value of creating representations of and critically engaging with violence?

• HISTORY: How do you look at, consider, or perceive representations of glass (or consumption) from the 18th to 19th century? How does this impact your perception of objectivity and the framing of history?

• LUMINOSITY: How would you define the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment? What are some key philosophies and ideas that continue to inform how we perceive the world today?

• PANDEMIC: Can you talk more about disease relative to your work? Thinking about the visibility of disease, both historic and ongoing, and the cultural differences that can perpetuate and foster infectious disease.

• STRENGTHS: What tools and skills and resources have you found within your neurodivergence that make you exceptional in the glass studio?

• WHY GLASS?: What is it like to learn about contemporary glass or glass-adjacent art practices? What is your material relationship to glass?

• GUIDANCE: What would you say to young artists who don't believe in their work and don't believe they are good enough?

Thanks to educators and learners from Urban Glass and Hastings College for sharing questions!