No New Theories
By Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Jessica Lynne
Printed Matter Inc., 2019
Paperback, 9 x 6 in.
256 pages
$30.00
WPA Note:
This limited edition text is a collaboration between an artist and critic, positioning the artist as both intellectual and researcher. It aligns with WPA's values and process.
Description:
No New Theories builds on Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s accretive and associative installation work, bringing together xerox abstractions, poetic text fragments, and found as well as original photography to explore learning and unlearning as a spiritual, socio-political, ecological, and cognitive process.
At the heart of No New Theories is an expansive interview between Rasheed and Jessica Lynne, co-founder of the art criticism journal ARTS.BLACK. The conversation attempts to document their intellectual partnership, constructed through a layering process by which the original exchange is reworked and expanded with annotations, citations, and excerpted texts from writers Samuel R. Delany, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Emily Dickinson, and others.
Rasheed and Lynne take on questions of epistemology and pedagogy, the nature of research, knowledge-acquisition, as well as patience and fatigue. Building on the notion of the ‘organic archive’ — both as a fictional organizing framework and as a score for possible experiences — the two consider various historical, sociological, and cultural facets of Americana, proposing a multi-directional discourse around the wide permutations of Black experience. The book’s title — No New Theories — locates Blackness as a multivalent and porous experience that cannot and should not be neatly theorized.
About the Author(s):
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA, living in Brooklyn, NY. Rasheed’s work grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished. Engaging primarily with text, Rasheed works on the page, within digital interfaces, on walls, and in public spaces. She is invested in Black storytelling technologies that invite us to consider ways of [un]learning that are interdisciplinary, interspecies, and interstellar.
Rasheed’s work has been exhibited nationally at the Brooklyn Museum; the New Museum; MASS MoCA; the Queens Museum; the Bronx Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; the Brooklyn Public Library; and the Brooklyn Historical Society, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally at NOME; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Kunsthalle Wien; Bétonsalon Centre d'art et de recherche, Paris; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Artspace Peterborough; the 57th Venice Biennial; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, among others. Her public installations have appeared at Ballroom Marfa; the Brooklyn Museum; For Freedoms x Times Square Art, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; The California Air Resources Board; and several others. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.
Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, The Believer, Frieze,The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about faith, art, and the U.S. South.