Fall Athenaeum Exhibition Presents Visiting Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Next week, the Lamar Dodd School of Art is excited to welcome our first Visiting Artist of the 2022-2023 academic year, Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Students, faculty, and the public are invited to our downtown gallery the Athenaeum on September 1st at 6 PM to hear Rasheed discuss her practice against the backdrop of her solo exhibition SMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTH OPERATOR. Join us directly after the talk for an exhibition opening with refreshments and continued conversation. 

In tandem with Rasheed’s three-day visit, lecture, and exhibition opening, the UGA Art Library has published a list of books currently inspiring the artist in their most recent installment of “The Artist is Reading” series. Check out the list here and request any of the books on loan through the Art Library, located on the second floor of our main building.

About the Exhibition

SMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTH OPERATOR

September 1 – December 1

Brooklyn-based learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, explores the poetics and politics of machine learning. Having grown up in East Palo Alto, CA, a region that later came to be known as “Silicon Valley”, Rasheed had early access to emerging technologies including adolescent experience with computer coding. This, alongside her syncretic upbringing, a Muslim with formerly Protestant parents who sent her to a Catholic high school, Rasheed was exposed to parallel worlds of religion and computation, both modes of sense-making that relied on prophecy, formula, and close reading. 

Some twenty years later, Rasheed has slowly returned to questions of computation, the role of the reader, and ritual in Smooooooooooooooth Operator which considers the menace of smoothness. We know what a smooth thing is; we’ve run our hand over a surface without noticeable projections or interruptions. Smoothing as a practice shows up in music via quantization and again in image processing via filters. Both are procedures of standardization and forced patterning by disregarding dirty data (or noise) in the service of fulfilling the audience’s expectations. Smooth viewing is easy viewing because the brain doesn’t have to second guess what it is looking at–it’s easily assimilable. Smooth images, smooth text make smooth, speed readers.

Artist Bio

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/they) was born in East Palo Alto, CA. Rasheed lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has an MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University (2008) and a BA in Public Policy from Pomona College (2006). She was an Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa (2006–7). Rasheed’s work has been exhibited nationally at the Brooklyn Museum; the New Museum; MASS MoCA; the Queens Museum; the Bronx Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; the Brooklyn Public Library; and the Brooklyn Historical Society, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally at NOME; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Kunsthalle Wien; Bétonsalon Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Artspace Peterborough; the 57th Venice Biennial; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, among others. Her public installations have appeared at Ballroom Marfa; the Brooklyn Museum; For Freedoms x Times Square Art, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; The California Air Resources Board; and several others. Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019), No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019), and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing, including longform essays and interviews, has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts and a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee. For the 2021-2022 school year, she is an adjunct at the School of Visual Arts – MFA Fine Arts (2016–present) and The Cooper Union (2022-present). In 2021, she was a Core Critic at Yale School of Art – MFA Painting and Printmaking as well as a Program Mentor for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s low-residency MFA Program (2021–present). Additionally, for the 2021–22 school year, she is the inaugural Douglass Discovery Arts Fellow at Rutgers University’s Douglass Residential College and Mason Gross School of Arts.

About the Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series