A Sense of Place Symposium

January 12-13, 2021 

In September 2019, Daniela Mayer and a group of eleven other graduate students in the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College traveled to Dakar, Senegal to study with curator Koyo Kouoh and her team at RAW Material Company, a non-profit art center offering research and residency programs for artists and curators alongside seasonal exhibitions, publications, and lectures. Guided by Kouoh, the focus in Dakar was examining curatorial practice’s ability to make a place visible, or in her words: “How have actors, active in our local contexts and from across the creative disciplines, responded to and shaped their – our – environment? How do they collaborate? How do they tell stories and recall history? How do they create sites of possibility?”

In partnership with Kouoh, Mayer and the others organized a symposium of artist panels, film screenings, workshops, and walking tours scheduled for March 2020 in New York. This symposium, like so many others, was postponed due to the global pandemic. A year later, Mayer and a select group from the original cohort reimagined these events for an online format in January 2021. A Sense of Place symposium considers gentrification and displacement, infrastructures of surveillance, and sustainability as they relate to how artists see themselves shaping, and being shaped by, their immediate environments.

 Most events are available for viewing online.