Raquel Gutiérrez
SESSION: Keynote, Friday, June 10, 9:00am, Room 111
ON WRITING RADICAL CONVENING: RENDERING THE CREATIVE COMMONS
Raquel Gutierrez shares insights into the art of description and a practice centered on being a social index—a living human with the ability to provide a set of clear cross references for particular art happenings. And to do so for and alongside other practitioners, and particularly practitioners excelling in the practice of the self through the writing of a self in service to a collective and its communal expressions.
SESSION: Workshop, Friday, June 10, 2:30pm, Room 109
LIVING BESIDES OURSELVES: Representing Place & Power On The Page
In her poem "The Mosquito Is A Problem And Nothing Else," Jackie Wang writes that "the problem of occupying space is the power that organizes space."
What does it mean to write about our relationship to home and community when the places they are located are struggling to exist? This class will consider the ways in which place connects us to each other, make political commitments and understand their infrastructural antecedents in contemporary literary and cultural productions. We will think about place, displacement, settler colonialism, global economy and history in the narratives we read (and write) together. How do ideas about and histories of infrastructure make the narratives we are interested in possible without detection? We'll read about The Heidelberg Project, Detroit, New Orleans, bridges burning and building together and hone our craft in research, scene making and description.
ABOUT:
Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic/writer, poet and educator. Born and raised in Los Angeles Gutiérrez credits the queer and feminist DIY post-punk 'zine culture of the 1990s plus Los Angeles County and Getty paid arts internships with introducing her/them to the various vibrant art & music scenes and communities throughout Southern California. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her/Their writing has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in Art In America, NPR Music, Places Journal, and The Georgia Review. Gutiérrez teaches in the Oregon State University-Cascades Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program. Her/Their first book of prose Brown Neon (Coffee House Press, June 2022) is an essay collection that considers the Latinx artist during the Trump era. Gutiérrez calls Tucson home.