Radio Resistance

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Radio Resistance is a limited series produced by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in conjunction with the exhibition Stories of Resistance. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Co-produced and hosted by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Michelle Dezember, and Misa Jeffereis. read less
ArteArte

Episodios

Defiant Writing with Banu Cennetoğlu and Treasure Shields Redmond
29-07-2021
Defiant Writing with Banu Cennetoğlu and Treasure Shields Redmond
What is the power of writing to carry a voice, or many voices, particularly defiant ones? In this final episode, we return to the impetus for this series, the exhibition Stories of Resistance, as an invitation to consider the medium of words and storytelling. Artist Banu Cennetoğlu and poet Treasure Shields Redmond discuss their work attending to the writings of American Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and Kurdish freedom fighter Gurbetelli Ersöz, respectively. They acknowledge the responsibility of caring for the words of activists, especially those who gave their lives to struggle for what’s right.Banu Cennetoğlu is a cross-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates methods of collecting and archiving and enquires into the politics of the production, classification, and distribution of knowledge. Her work Gurbet’s Diary (27.07.1995–08.10.1997) inscribed words from Gurbetelli Ersöz’s diary—which Ersöz kept while she was a Kurdish freedom fighter before she was killed—onto 145 press-ready lithographic limestone slabs. Cennetoğlu lives and works in Istanbul, where she founded BAS, an artist-run space dedicated to artists’ books and printed matter.Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond is a St. Louis metro-based poet, performer, and educator. She has been featured at the Nuyorican Poets Café, and published poetry in such notable anthologies as Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Breaking Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cane Canem’s First Decade, and in journals that include Obsidian and The African American Review. A Cave Canem fellow, Treasure has received an MFA from the University of Memphis, and a PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Ancestors and Testimonies with Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and Gwen Moore
15-07-2021
Ancestors and Testimonies with Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and Gwen Moore
How can we move beyond the dominant narrative, to hear stories that have been erased? Artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and curator and public historian Gwen Moore find similarities in growing up in communities that were violently transformed or completely erased. Building on earlier discussions of trauma in this program, the two talk about how their practices of storytelling and public memory are a response to damage leveled on Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Mill Creek Valley in St. Louis. Their mutual interests point to listening to the voices of ancestors, the testimonial power of objects, and our collective responsibility to understand history.Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s artistic practice explores strategies of political resistance enacted through counter-memory and post-memory. Extracting and re-working narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and fiction are both held accountable. Gwen Moore is the Curator of Urban Landscape and Community Identity at the Missouri Historical Society focusing on race, ethnicity, race relations, and social justice issues in St. Louis. An important part of her work has been documenting the Ferguson protest movement, which includes a collection of physical materials along with an oral history project. Gwen was also the curator for the Missouri History Museum exhibition, #1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis. -As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Forms of Liberation with Torkwase Dyson and Geoff Ward
01-07-2021
Forms of Liberation with Torkwase Dyson and Geoff Ward
This episode explores historic and contemporary failures of infrastructure, racial capitalism, and climate change and how these current dysfunctions are intertwined. Our guests discuss ideas of spatial justice, St. Louis’s ongoing engagement with confronting its past, and how to work across disciplines to envision possible futures.Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways Black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives, seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies.Geoff Ward is Professor of African and African-American Studies and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship examines histories of racist violence, their legacies, and implications for repair.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Women As Activists with Jen Liu and Candace Borders
17-06-2021
Women As Activists with Jen Liu and Candace Borders
What would it mean to live out a fair and better future, right now? Join artist Jen Liu and scholar Candace Borders as they explore the complex role that women have played in labor rights and activism in both the US and China. This episode digs into the history of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project and the African American women who lived there, organized, and performed everyday acts of resistance. Our guests unpack the radical idea of building community and the immense possibilities that open up when we think together beyond our current circumstances.Jen Liu is a visual artist based in New York and Vermont, working in video/animation, genetically engineered biomaterial, choreography, and painting to explore national identities, gendered economies, neoliberal industrial labor, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts.  She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, and 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video.  She has presented work at The Whitney Museum, MoMA, and The New Museum, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Royal Academy and ICA, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunsthalle Wien; Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, León; UCCA and A07 @ 798, Beijing; Times Museum Guangzhou, and the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and 2019 Singapore Biennale.Candace Borders is a PhD student at Yale University in the departments of American Studies and African American Studies. She also works as a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery. Currently, her dissertation focuses on the experiences of African American women who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Through the use of oral history and Black feminist methods, the work accesses Black women’s everyday experiences at the nexus of race, gender, class, and public assistance in the mid-20th century. More broadly, Candace is interested in Black Feminist theory, the politics of knowledge production, public humanities, and the intersections between race and architecture. Prior to starting her graduate studies, Candace was the PNC Arts Alive Fellow at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Collective Healing with Guadalupe Maravilla and Dr. LJ Punch
03-06-2021
Collective Healing with Guadalupe Maravilla and Dr. LJ Punch
What it would mean to reset our understanding of health and well-being as an entire community, especially now? In this episode, artist Guadalupe Maravilla and trauma surgeon Dr. LJ Punch speak to the effects of untreated, unhealed trauma in the body. They explore deep connections between the body and the mind, between physical and spiritual realities, and the power of ancient and traditional medicinal practices from across the world. Ultimately, they advocate for the importance of bringing healthcare to the community and offering people better access to alternative ways of healing.Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a US citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgement of his own migratory past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, particularly those belonging to Latinx communities. Dr. LJ Punch is an American critical care surgeon, an associate professor of surgery, and a scholar within the Institute for Public Health at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. Punch is also an activist in the fight against gun violence and directs StopTheBleedSTL, located at "The T" anti-violence center, which runs programs to educate the community on how to reduce the impact of trauma, injury, and violence in St. Louis. As a physician, educator, and activist, Punch aims to propagate the idea of “Radical Generosity” as means to better his community and the lives of those around him.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Insisting on Our Humanity with Hank Willis Thomas and Congresswoman Cori Bush
20-05-2021
Insisting on Our Humanity with Hank Willis Thomas and Congresswoman Cori Bush
In this episode, artist Hank Willis Thomas holds space for Congresswoman Cori Bush to share vulnerability around the intense battles that have shaped her public career: the Ferguson uprising, personal traumas, the road to Congress, and the violent insurrection she confronted in her first weeks in office. Thomas shapes an empathetic conversation, taking a moment to recognize Bush and show an appreciation of Black women throughout history. Their conversation asks us to consider how we can care for front-line activists, bring joy to the center, and insist on our humanity.Congresswoman Cori Bush is a registered nurse, community activist, organizer, single mother, and ordained pastor for the people of St. Louis. Congresswoman Bush is serving her first term as the representative of Missouri’s 1st Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. She is the first Black woman and first nurse to represent Missouri; the first woman to represent Missouri’s 1st Congressional District; and the first activist from the movement fighting for Black lives elected to the United States Congress.Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), Writing on the Wall, and the artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement For Freedoms. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Public Platforms with Marina Peng & Shannon Levin (PSA:) and Cleo Barnett
06-05-2021
Public Platforms with Marina Peng & Shannon Levin (PSA:) and Cleo Barnett
How do public spaces reflect public consciousness? Join Shannon Levin and Marina Peng of PSA:, a public art project that features text installations by St. Louis-based artists, writers, and poets, and Cleo Barnett of Amplifier, a non-profit design lab that builds media experiments to amplify social movements. These creatives share with us how and why they use their platforms to reclaim public space in order to uplift the voices of others, and how public art has the ability to shift our perspectives and make room for real change. Cleo Barnett is a curator, creative director, post disciplinary artist and emergent strategist working in the arts & civic engagement. Barnett is currently the Executive Director of Amplifier, a non-profit design lab that builds media experiments to amplify social movements. Since 2009, Barnett has directed and produced more than 300 public space interventions across five continents. Collaborating with artists, government agencies, non-profit and community based organizations, foundations, educators and global brands, her work shifts culture through public art and mass media experiments that amplify the voices of environmental & social justice movements. Shannon Levin is co-founder of PSA: and an illustrator, designer, and educator living, working, and playing in St. Louis, MO. She earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she currently teaches an undergraduate illustration course. Driven by color and expression, her work extends to clients in the arts, music, and community-focused spaces.Marina Peng is co-founder of PSA: and a visual artist based in St. Louis, MO. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. In her practice, she examines her position as a second-generation American in the Midwest. Her work visualizes experiences of isolation, sacrifice, and hyper self-analysis.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Leveling the Field with Glenn Kaino, Tommie Smith, and Dr. Harry Edwards
22-04-2021
Leveling the Field with Glenn Kaino, Tommie Smith, and Dr. Harry Edwards
In a gesture witnessed around the world, Tommie Smith’s raised fist at the 1968 Olympics, with fellow US sprinter John Carlos, connected with and inspired future athletes to take part in social and political activism. Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem, WNBA players wearing Black Lives Matter adorned jerseys in games—such recent acts are part of Smith’s legacy. In this two-part episode, hear from Smith and artist Glenn Kaino about their long collaboration on a body of work paying homage to this moment and the timelessness of taking a stand. Dr. Harry Edwards, a St. Louis/East St. Louis native, also joins the episode to share how his segregated upbringing laid the foundation for him to contribute to the Olympic Project for Human Rights and the rise of sports sociology. All three participants explore the potential for athletics to serve as a metaphor for creating an arena for social change, and the imagination, ambition, and courage required to do so.Glenn Kaino is an artist whose works, often functioning as poetic contradictions, aim to reconcile conflicting ideologies, opposing systems, and strict dichotomies in material and experiential ways. In addition to his studio practice, he also operates outside the traditional purview of contemporary art, instigating collaborations with other modes of culture—ranging from tech to music to political organizing. He has collaborated on a consciousness-raising body of work with Tommie Smith since 2013.Tommie Smith is an activist and athlete who, in Mexico City in the summer of 1968, broke the world and Olympic records with a time of 19.83 seconds and became the 200-meter Olympic champion. As the Star-Spangled Banner played, Smith and John Carlos stood on the victory podium and raised a fist in a historic stand for Black power, liberation, and solidarity. Dr. Smith made a commitment to dedicate his life, even at great personal risk, to champion the causes of oppressed people. Dr. Harry Edwards is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born in Homer G. Phillips Hospital and raised in East St. Louis before he moved to California. There, he organized the Olympic Project for Human Rights, the movement that encouraged Tommie Smith and John Carlos to raise a fist at the 1968 Olympics. He is the author of the seminal book The Revolt of the Black Athlete.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Perseverance and Participation with Wendy Red Star and De Nichols
08-04-2021
Perseverance and Participation with Wendy Red Star and De Nichols
If taking a collaborative stance in protesting ensures sustainability and longevity, how do we lay the groundwork for participation? In this episode of Radio Resistance, Wendy Red Star and De Nichols talk about how and why they use their creative work to connect with communities of ancestors and young people across time and place. They share thoughts on defining success by the ability to make, hold, and take space, as well as how important maintaining curiosity and setting strong boundaries are to the sense of adventure that gives them both purpose.Wendy Red Star was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, and her work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Portland, OR.De Nichols is a social impact designer, arts organizer, and community engagement specialist. Through her leadership with Design as Protest, De mobilizes designers and changemakers nationwide to develop creative approaches to the social, civic, and racial justice issues that matter most within communities. De is a 2020 Monument Lab Fellow and 2020 Loeb Fellow of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She is also the author of an upcoming book, Art of Protest, with Bonnier UK and Candlewick publishers. -As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.
Organizing Rebellion with Dread Scott and Walter Johnson
25-03-2021
Organizing Rebellion with Dread Scott and Walter Johnson
Is rebellion a norm, or is it exceptional? In this episode, artist Dread Scott and scholar Walter Johnson discuss the community-engaged performance Slave Rebellion Reenactment and the inspiring true story of the largest uprising of enslaved people in US history, in 1811. Scott and Walker discuss the power of culture to unify and catalyze people, as well as the proposition that the most radical views of freedom in early American history were held in the minds of enslaved people.Dread Scott is an artist who makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. In 1989, Scott became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the new law by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Photographs and flags from his community-engaged performance Slave Rebellion Reenactment are included as part of the exhibition Stories of Resistance. Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. He is a founding member of the Commonwealth Project, which brings together academics, artists, and activists in an effort to imagine, foster, and support revolutionary social change, beginning in St. Louis.-As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.