Wendy’s Subway: In a Letter Never Sent Workshop with Legacy Russell, 7/11
June Jordan in Dorm Room at Northfield School for Girls, Radcliffe Institute, 1951–1952. [Image Description: In this monochrome photograph with a slight tint of yellow sits a woman at a desk covered in notebooks and books. She sits right of the desk, and looks sideways at the camera, she wears a check shirtand wears a plaid.]
Saturday, July 11, 1-3pm
About the workshop
This is an online workshop and will take place on Zoom.
Saturday, July 11, 1-3:00pm EST
Capacity: 15 participants
Cost: $25-75 (Sliding scale, discounted from $40-90)
Register here.
“I don’t want you to love me. I don't even want you to like me. I don’t need these abstractions of you.”
— Gary Fisher, “Love in Prepositions”
In honor of the act of paper letter-writing as both radical intervention and performative material, this workshop will take the construct of the “love letter” as a fugitive point of exploration and departure. Engaging letter-writing as a collective practice of reflection and refusal through sharing space and experience, participants will draft individual letters with the intention of sending them. Drawing inspiration from writers such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, Caspar Heinemann, Etheridge Knight, June Jordan, Richard Siken, Ocean Vuong, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Saidiya Hartman, among others, participants will use this time to collectively discuss and reflect on the act of exchanging letters to memorialize, celebrate, process, feelings of anxiety, desire, longing, love, rage, loss, and heartbreak. As this class will take place online, BYO envelope, stationary, and stamps. Sending of letters will take place away from the screen and will require care, courage, and a postal box.
About the Instructor
Legacy Russell is a writer and curator. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent exhibitions include Projects 110: Michael Armitage, organized with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA (2019); Dozie Kanu: Function(2019), Chloë Bass: Wayfinding (2019), Radical Reading Room (2019) at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018-19 (2019) at MoMA PS1. Russell’s ongoing academic work and research focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. She is Visual Arts Editor of Apogee Journal, a Contributing Editor for BOMB Magazine online, and a Senior Editor at Berfrois. Russell is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art and a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow. Her first book, Glitch Feminism, is forthcoming from Verso Books in Fall 2020. Instagram: @ellerustle | Twitter: @legacyrussell
You can find out more about Wendy’s Subway programs here.