Gabrielle Civil

Last updated

Gabrielle Civil
Born Detroit, Michigan, US
Alma materUniversity of Michigan
Occupation Performance artist, teacher   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website https://www.gabriellecivilartist.com/   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Gabrielle Civil is an American performance artist, poet, and educator. [1]

Contents

Background and education

Civil is originally from Detroit, Michigan. [2] From 1991 to 1995 she attended the University of Michigan, from where she graduated with high honors in both Creative writing and Comparative Literature. [3] Later Civil attended New York University for both her master's and her doctorate. She received her M.A. in comparative literature in 2000. [3] Her dissertation, From Body to Nation: Reading Black Women's Poetry in the United States, Haiti & Canada, focused on the poetry of black women in the United States, Canada and Haiti. [4] Civil's concentrations included Black Feminist Theory; African-American Literature; Experimental World Poetry. [3]

Career

Civil started her teaching career teaching summers at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in New York. She taught "strategies for embodied knowledge" through Language & Thinking 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006. [3] Following her summers at Bard College, Civil taught "Women and Voice: Black Women and Performance" at Macalester College from 2005 to the winter of 2006. [3] She then returned to Bard College, and taught for the Bard College Prison Initiative, "Language & Thinking, Eastern Maximum Security Correctional Facility," the summer of 2011. [3] She taught at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, from 2000 to 2013 as a tenured professor in English, Women's studies, and Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity. [3] From 2013 to 2016, she was a tenured associate professor of performance at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. [5] She currently teaches as guest faculty in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. [6]

As a curator, Civil worked on the following performance projects:

Works

Civil identifies as a black, feminist artist whose aim is "to open up space". [7] She works solo and collaboratively and has premiered more than 40 performances in North America and abroad. [8]

In Performance Art: Futurism to the Present, RoseLee Goldberg analyzes performance art and its significance to the developments made in modern art. She acknowledges that no definition can be encompassing of performance art if it were to be specific. "Performance has been considered as a way of bringing to life the many formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based." [9] There is a significance within current society to performance art and the cultural impact it has and how culture impacts the arts. "This latest account describes the huge increase in the number of twenty-first century artists around the globe turning to performance as a medium for articulating 'difference'—of their own cultures and ethnicities—and for entering the larger discourse of international culture in our highly mediated times." [9] [ relevant? ]

Selected works of performance art

Civil's works include: [3]

Themes and criticism

Civil's writings and performances investigate ephemerality and documentation, race, remembering, community-building, and inclusion. Her work is in constant conversation with artists working both today and in the past: she has stated that she is "haunted by the black women artists, dancers, performers, thinkers, whose body of work has been destroyed and lost to time." [11] Civil frequently incorporates collaborative techniques, such as call-and-response, in her writing and performance: for example, the collaborative piece "Call & Response," convened at Antioch College in 2014 with Duriel E. Harris, Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, Rosamond S. King, Wura-Natashi Ogunji, Miré Regulus, and Awilda Rodríguez Lora, resulted in numerous art projects and "experiments in joy." [12] In her installation "Kinds of Performing Objects I've Been," Civil also collaborated with audiences for the work, interacting with gallery patrons, telling stories, and performing gift exchanges. [11]

Writing

From her artist's notes to performance outlines, she reveals the spaces an artist inhabits prior to presenting a finished piece before an audience. For anyone who has ever thought a performance artist just enters stage right and wings it, this memoir will prove you sorely mistaken. From initial inklings of ideas to concrete performance scripts, Civil's archives demonstrate the sheer time and dedication this art form begs of those who choose to wield it.

—  Neyat Yohannes [14]

References

  1. ↑ "Gabrielle Civil: Fugue (Da, Montréal)". Archived from the original on January 16, 2015. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  2. ↑ "SPACES / Artists / Directory". www.spacesgallery.org. Retrieved May 6, 2017.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Civil, Gabrielle. "CV" (PDF). Retrieved May 6, 2017.
  4. ↑ Civil, Gabrielle (January 1, 2000). From body to nation: Black women's poetry in the United States, Haiti, and Canada (Thesis). OCLC   53237946.
  5. ↑ "Faculty Appointments | The Antiochian". magazine.antiochcollege.org. Archived from the original on August 12, 2017. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  6. ↑ "Naropa University, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics | Poets & Writers". www.pw.org. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  7. ↑ Yohannes, Neyat (February 23, 2017). "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Feminist: Gabrielle Civil". Chicago Review of Books. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  8. ↑ "Experiments in Joy: Recharging Our Culture". St. Kate's. March 10, 2017. Archived from the original on August 12, 2017. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  9. 1 2 Goldberg, RoseLee (January 1, 1996). Performance art: from Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN   0500202141. OCLC   441023828.
  10. ↑ "Gabrielle Civil performs Aide Memoire" . Antioch College, January 1, 2014. Web. April 23, 2017.
  11. 1 2 "Experiments in Joy – Gabrielle Civil" . Retrieved March 9, 2021.
  12. ↑ "What to Read When You Want to Conduct Experiments in Joy". The Rumpus.net. August 23, 2019. Retrieved March 9, 2021.
  13. ↑ "Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle Civil". The Accomplices. Retrieved February 4, 2019.
  14. ↑ Yohannes, Neyat. "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Feminist: Gabrielle Civil". Chicago: Review of Books, 2017. ISBN   9781937865795

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.