Conversation

Ecology, Ancestral Healing, and Visual Art: A Conversation with Alexandria Eregbu & Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier

Mon, Apr 19, 2021

5:00 PM–7:00 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below. This event will be closed captioned.

Watch the video recording of this event here:

Join multimedia artist Alexandria Eregbu and Black feminist ecocritic Chelsea Mikael Frazierin a conversation about the intersections of ancestral healing, visual art, and the environment. As all these themes recur in both their work, this discussion will explore the motivations behind their individual creative and intellectual processes while investigating their collective understanding of the importance of visual art in current ecological discourse.

This event is free and open to the public. Please click here to register and for access to the Zoom link.

Alexandria Eregbu. Water Women, collage on paper, 2017.

Participants Bios:

Alexandria Eregbu is an artist and educator whose practice draws from craft, material histories, and surrealist activity to deepen her connectivity to the natural world. Her work is often driven by notions of ‘home’— studying African stories and objects of familial and ancestral origin between West Africa, the Caribbean, and her hometown Chicago. Her creative platform, Finding Ijeoma offers curated experiences and consultation for clients engaged in the arts, multimedia storytelling, and learning centered on African art and literature through commissions, workshops, exhibitions and events. Most recently Alexandria released ‘The Reason Why We Hunt,’ prologue for her film MMIRI: Origin Stories. Currently, Alexandria teaches as a lecturer in the department of Fiber & Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Chelsea Mikael Frazier is a Black feminist ecocritic—writing, researching, and teaching at the intersection of Black feminist theory and environmental thought. As Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Ask An Amazon she designs educational tools, curates community gatherings, gives lectures, and offers consulting services that serve Black Feminist Fuel for Sustainable Futures. She is also a Faculty Fellow in the Cornell University Department of English and in the Fall of 2021 she’ll begin her tenure-track appointment as an Assistant Professor of African American Literature. Her scholarship, teaching, and public speaking span the fields of Black feminist literature and theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, African art and literature, political theory, science and technology studies, and Afrofuturism. She is currently at work on her first book manuscript—an ecocritical study of contemporary Black women artists, writers, and activists.

This event is co-sponsored by the Faculty and Staff of Color Collective (FSOC) at LaGuardia College, CUNY, and by the Environment Community Humanities Oasis (ECHO) project led by Ryan Mann-Hamilton as part of the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center CUNY.