Inhabiting Histories
About
Artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson (RISD BFA 2008, Film/Animation/Video) discusses Not Never More, a textile print/quilt installation made in response to Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord (The Views of North America), a French wallpaper designed by Jean-Julien Deltil in 1834 with Marisa Brown, Executive Director of the Providence Preservation Society. Emily Banas, Associate Curator, Decorative Arts and Design and Curator of The Art of French Wallpaper Design, moderates the conversation.
Free. Registration requested for this in-person program.
This lecture is supported by the Selma L. Bernstingle Memorial Docent Fund, named in honor of the late RISD Museum Docent, and organized annually by the RISD Museum Docents.
Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. Above all, she is interested in redistributing the privileges that allow her to maintain her creative and scholarly practice. She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, India, New York City and Providence. She has curated exhibitions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Artist Proof Studio and the ABSA Art Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; RISD Museum; and Brown University Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, where she was also a Public History of Slavery Fellow.
As the 2019 inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health she utilized the arts to confront health disparities. She was the 2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum making work in response to the collection. As a 2022 Fitt Artist-in-Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, she created Not Never More, a visual remix of the historic wallpaper Les Vues D’amérique Du Nord. At the 150th Anniversary of the Colfax Massacre she designed the Colfax Massacre Memorial—etched in granite, it honors and centers the stories of the Black victims of the tragedy. She is the illustrator of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, adapted for young readers by Ibram X Kendi.
Jazzmen is currently working on a series called Contraband, which focuses on how the industry of slavery laid the blueprint for drug crimes, illicit economies, substance use disorder, and mass incarceration in Black communities in Baltimore, based on her research as artist fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.
You can find her work in public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, RISD Museum, Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College, Mt Holyoke College Art Museum, the Joshua Hempsted House Museum and many others.
Marisa Angell Brown is the Executive Director of Providence Preservation Society (PPS). She is an active speaker and writer on preservation, American architecture, and social practice art and design. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Places Journal, Perspecta, Manual, Buildings and Landscapes, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and her curatorial projects have been featured in Metropolis, Architectural Record, the Associated Press, the Providence Journal and the Public’s Radio.
Brown teaches courses at the women’s prison in Rhode Island with College Unbound, and previously taught at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design on social practice art/design, community heritage practices, preservation, and public humanities. Before joining PPS in 2023, Brown was Associate Director of RISD’s Center for Complexity, and prior to that, served as an Assistant Director at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. Brown received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Yale University and has an MA from the University of Chicago and an AB from Princeton University. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and on the boards of Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and the Rhode Island State House Restoration Society. She is Korean-American and grew up in Dubai and New York.
Emily Banas is the Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the RISD Museum. Her most recent exhibition, The Art of French Wallpaper Design, opened in November 2024 and explores the design, production, and use of French 18th and 19th century wallpapers. She received an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in 2015, and an MA in Art and Museum Studies from Georgetown University in 2012. Her interests span from 18th-century decorative arts to 21st-century craft and design, and everything in between.