Out of the Frame

This program begins near the Benefit Street entrance in the exhibit Witnessing.
What is the role of art in imagining human relationships to non-human nature? How does race figure into human connections to land and the environment? How can we think with art to build alternative ecologies that are racially and environmentally just despite our physical existence outside of its frame? Join Joann “Jo” Ayuso and Virginia Thomas for an experiential and embodied inquiry into the relationships between art, race, and the environment. Beginning with our bodies as starting points, we will work with four works of art as a means of thinking critically about the connections between racial and environmental justice and as a way into envisioning ourselves as part of the environments these works of art evoke.
Free
Joann “Jo” Ayuso (she/ her) is a community collaborator who practices hands-on healing, poetry, love for food, and the outdoors with an emphasis on social justice, honoring ancestors and undoing negative perceptions of the outdoors and wellness. She has been working as a self-care educator for 21 years holding an MS in Exercise Science and Physiology. Working in the health care, fitness, education and within prison systems has shaped her communication as well as her desire to work in community with Black and Brown farmers and youth. Jo is the founder of Movement and Education Outdoors, a youth outdoor experience program, supporting community-based organizations in understanding inclusion and equity and uniting with educators and leaders of color on how to increase access to health and wellness in the education system for low-income, Black and brown students in Rhode Island.
Virginia Thomas (she/her) is a scholar of U.S. visual culture, race, gender, and sexuality. Her current project, Dark Trees: Family Photography, Lynching Aesthetics, and Queer Resistance interrogates the obscured relationships between white family photography and lynching photography as well as queer of color interventions into those genres. In Dark Trees, Virginia takes up visual grammars of resistance to family and lynching photography as a means of reimagining environmental justice. She holds a PhD in American Studies and an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University.