Art Talk
By Adrian Keller Feld
19.Feb.24
“Don’t Be Scared: A Talk on the Art of Collaboration by Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi”
Photo Credit Adrian Keller Feld. Participants watch the newspaper chain they created be rolled into a massive ball by Hassinger (right of ball) and others.
In a talk full of joy and connectivity, artists Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi discussed their work, led the audience in collective creation, and brought on curators Dr. Leslie King Hammond and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims to reminisce on the many decades of work and partnership they have all done in the difficult art space. The talk, titled “Don’t Be Scared: A Talk on the Art of Collaboration by Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi” took place on Saturday, 17 February 2024 2:00-4:00pm in the packed PAB Atrium as part of the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors in the Visual Arts series. This talk was tied with the recent opening of their exhibition in the Cooley Gallery, Las Vegas Ikebana, which is open until May 19, 2024. The Cooley Gallery, located in the Reed Library, is free and open Thursday-Sunday, 12:00-5:00pm. To learn more about the gallery, pay a visit and look at its section on the Cooley Gallery website.
The talk began with opening remarks from the exhibition’s curator, Allie Tepper, who is an Assistant Curator at the Cooley Gallery. Tepper, talking to Hassinger and Nengudi, praised their “artistry” and “lifelong friendship,” saying they used “friendship as form.” She also mentioned their “interdisciplinary way of working,” with mediums such as sculpture and dance weaved with many others in their work. Tepper stressed the inspiration of Kellie Jones’ book South of Pico on the exhibit. Per Duke University Press, the book “explores how the artists in Los Angeles's Black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism,” and includes the work of the featured artists.
Hassinger stressed her advice to young artists to “not stop,” to keep pushing their work, with Nengudi mentioning how hard it was for herself and Hassinger, and other African American artists, to get their work in galleries. Nengudi then discussed one of her most famous works, R.S.V.P., which translates to répondez s'il vous plaît in French. She explained how the title is an invitation to the audience to respond to the sculptures, forming a give-and-take interaction with the piece. Tepper mentioned that Nengudi invited Hassinger to interact with the piece, and she danced in it, a performance captured by a photo that is used on the Reed Events website to show the exhibit. The R.S.V.P. pieces were made out of pantyhose, and one is available to see in the exhibit. While Hassinger and Nengudi began their collaborations while both living in Los Angeles, once they moved away they continued to work together through different means and mediums. Nengudi mentioned how they would keep notebooks by their beds, to write down anything they had, as the “goal was to do something new, something different than anything else that was going on.”
At the start of the talk, all audience members were given newspapers, then later Hassinger led the group in a creative exercise where everyone ripped the newspaper into column-wide strips, before twisting them and knotting them together to form a very long chain. With levels of audience, the rope of newspaper was lowered down the balconies to the people below to be tied in, newspaper traveling through everyone, an expression of joyful chaos. Once all together they were rolled up, with the assistance of Hassinger and Dr. Hammond. Hassinger explained the exercise at the end: that it was a simple material, with many people working together to form it, and the material itself held the world in the news, with all of it working together. She said it was “symbolic of ultimate connection,” but said “Just remember it's a symbol. You’ve got to do the work to make it real.” This was followed with an exercise led by Nengudi, a verb-along, where each row chose a verb, and then she called on groups in a 4-beat rhythm to act out their verbs. This had people laughing, borrowing, embracing, and microwaving in a similar collective joyful chaos to the previous newspaper project.
After this, the audience settled back down to hear from the two curators, Dr. Leslie King Hammond and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, on their own collaborative work. The two have known each other since they were children in the Girl Scouts, and have since gone on to have incredibly successful careers independent of, and within, their collaborative efforts. Dr. Sims was the first African American woman to be a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Dr. Hammond worked at the historic Maryland Institute College of Art, though both have worked at other places as well in their long careers. Dr. Hammond said the “way we survived in this world is we would collaborate,” of the difficulties of being in the art world, especially as an African American person, a feeling that Nengudi corroborated, saying how the curators’ job is especially difficult because they have to work with institutions. The two curators talked mostly about their 1988 exhibition Art as a Verb: The Evolving Continuum, a collaboration in which Hassinger and Nengudi were both artists involved. While not much is available about the exhibition online, The New York Times does have an archive of a story about it available on its website.
Dr. Hammond ended the talk by discussing the difficulties of communication about history, and how things are often ignored or deemed too uncomfortable to talk about, but are necessary to discuss, especially in regard to the issues faced by African American people, and especially women, in this country – issues that all four speakers attested to. Dr. Hammond emphasized that “change does not happen without partnering,” and ended the talk with a call for attendees to form collaborations in their own communities.