otherwise arts lab is a space in which scholars, artists, musicians, and community members exchange ideas, concepts, and practices.
art practice as an occasion for gathering people, to serve community as a resource hub, to practice care.
we are currently seeking to expand into a physical space from which programming and community engagement can occur.
we will host an after school program for youth, allowing them to explore a range of artistic practices rather than having to choose one—visual, or music, for example.
we will have an exhibition space for art installations and gallery shows.
we will host age-responsive and appropriate community workshops on a range of topics—from gender justice and food insecurity to histories of black radical movements and digital, analogue and mixed reality design.
we will host residencies for multidisciplinary artists and writers, artist talks and workshops, literary readings and practices, and sound experiments and public installations.
we will invite speakers, performers, artists and scholars that are likewise engaged in work that explores the intersections and margins of audiovisual experimental art practice.
we will have a garden, community kitchen and distribute food, medical and other resources to community folks in need.
under the direction of ashon crawley, otherwise arts lab will invite artists and scholars that are leaders in their fields to engage various communities. and working with students, college faculty, young people, artists, community members and others, otherwise arts lab uses immersive, multimedia experiences in sound, visuality, performance and theatricality to experiment with ways to address local needs.
we believe art matters
we believe in sharing resources gathered for the entire community
we believe access to art practices is a fundamental right
we believe art opens to worlds of possibility for care to be enacted, practiced and sustained
we believe everyone has something to contribute, and something to receive
we value black life, queer life, and the flourishing of all difference
make art…find joy.
in search of our mothers’ gardens, the multiphase, interdisciplinary project and living installation is based on Alice Walker’s essay of the same name. in the essay, Walker discusses the difficulty, if not impossibility, for enslaved black women in the United States to practice art making: “what did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? in our great–grandmothers’ day? it is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.” but she finds the garden the place her mother practiced her artistic imagination, and goes on a search for that imagination everywhere. “i notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye.”
“in search of our mothers’ gardens” culminates as a multi–site living, growing art installation with public programming and community engagement as feature components. addressing ecological, racial, and social problems, the project uses the garden and the practice of gardening as a space for imagination, wonder and repair to flourish and flower and unfurl.
an audiovisual artistic comment on, and critique of the shamed queerness of black church practices. an installation that honors musicians that made evident and explicit the presence of queerness in the churches because of the brutality of the public health crisis—musicians living with HIV and dying with AIDS-related complications between 1980 to 2005—the installation is a comment upon homophobia and religious violence. but is also about how musicians made things within the context of an epidemic that was not understood, difficult to name one’s relation to and to contend against. “loss. nothing. memorial.” stages a confrontation with grief, shame and silence. it is a means to honor the dead.
