Unpacking the Exhibition: Artist Panel Discussion INT 100/201 APPROVED!

Friday, January 27, 2023
12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Allendale Campus
Alumni, Community, Faculty, Staff, Students

Join us for a conversation with artists in the exhibition Convergence: Cracks in the Glass Ceiling about their work, inspirations, and views on navigating life as creative professionals; Jasmine Bruce, Bryce Detroit, and Tashif "Sheefy McFly” Turner. The exhibition is now on view in the GVSU Art Gallery (PAC 1121) through March 31, 2023. In this conversation, we'll unpack the ways in which artists of color challenge systems of privilege and oppression that control the creative economy. We'll also discuss how they use personal and pop cultural imagery to explore psychology, politics, identity, and cultural and social norms. This conversation will serve as a lens through which to view the work in the exhibition.

Jasmine Bruce is a visual artist whose work emphasizes the healing power of creating. Currently based in Grand Rapids, Michigan she obtained her BFA from Grand Valley State University. Her versatile and powerful style tells the story of a universal trauma which plagues the entire human race. This trauma, ancestral and ancient, is a pain that carves deep into the veins beneath the skin and surfaces as blemishes of the Ism: racism, alcoholism, narcissism. It surfaces as insecurities, anger, abuse, violence, imbalance. Her work aims to draw out this pain, restoring balance and connection with the inner, outer and divine self.

Bryce Detroit is a cultural designer, a national award-winning music producer, performer, and curator. Through his practice, Bryce Detroit demonstrates the power of using music entertainment arts and native legacies to design cultural infrastructure for preserving, producing, and promoting new Diasporic Afrikan narratives, cultural literacies, and cooperative neighborhood-based economies. He is a 2019 New Museum Ideas Cities Fellow and a 2017 Knight Arts Challenge award winner. He was also selected as music curator for the 10th St Etienne International Design Biennale, representing Detroit as a UNESCO City of Design. curating and producing all of the live music programming for the event’s opening two-weeks, and becoming the first person to curate live music programming in the Biennale’s twenty-year history. A prominent community activist and advocate, Bryce Detroit grows intersectional self-determined communities as a founding member of Oakland Avenue Artists Coalition, co-founder of Detroit Community Wealth Fund, director of Culture at Center for Community Based Enterprises (C2BE), and international delegate for East Michigan Environmental Action Council.

Tashif "Sheefy McFly” Turner has swiftly risen to become a promising and commercially successful American artist, muralist, rapper, and DJ. As a painter, he belongs to the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionist art movement. Emerging from a long line of street-smart graffiti artists who successfully crossed over to the international art gallery circuit, McFly has established a dialogue with the traditions of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. An alumnus of Detroit’s College of Creative Studies, McFly, very skillfully and purposefully brings together in his art, a host of disparate traditions, practices, and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving in part, from his Michigan-based origins, and in another by his African American heritage.

Space is limited. RSVP required.

This event is approved for INT 100 and INT 201 courses.

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Location Information

GVSU Art Gallery, Haas Center for Performing Arts, room 1121

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Contact Information

Art Gallery exhibitions, programs, and virtual programs are free and open to anyone. For additional program offerings or for more information on these events please visit gvsu.edu/artgallery. If you have questions, need assistance or accommodations, or to schedule a group visit, please call us at 616.331.2563 or email [email protected].

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This event was added to the calendar by Amanda Rainey (raineyam@gvsu.edu) on Tuesday, January 10, 2023 and was last updated on Thursday, January 19, 2023 at 9:09 a.m.