Start: March 1, 2023 6 p.m.
End: March 1, 2023 7 p.m.
Location: Art and Journalism Building, Room 225
Nastassja Swift
Crafting History: Reconstructing Narratives through Fiber
Nastassja Swift is a sculptural fiber artist whose soft sculptures speak to spirituality, history, and place in relation to the body. Inspired by West African masks and Yoruba ritual practices, her work explores identity, reinterpreting who can be worshipped, challenging archived history, and questioning language around racialized bodies. Her felted portraits exist repetitively as vessels of stories and ancestral presence as a way of narrating Black stories, experiences, and memories. Her talk will discuss recent projects, including Remembering Her Homecoming (2019), which premiered at the Afrikana Independent Film Festival, blue/Black/baby smiles, singin’ to an old river—we hear you coming, commissioned by SPACES (Cleveland, 2021), and Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice (2021) a performance and installation about the personal and communal impact of mass incarceration.