Episode 8 // Life Like Fragile Clay: Arlene Shechet + Rachael Borthwick Artwork

Reckoning and Repair

An experimental oral history podcast with artists, curators, and organizers speaking on the need for reckoning, and the (im?)possibilities of repair in art worlds and social spaces around the globe.Season 1, "The Art That's Touched Philadelphia", was recorded, written, and produced by students in "Conversations with Contemporary Artists" a course by Alissa Jordan at the Center for Experimental Ethnography. This CEE production runs alongside the 2023 exhibit "Rising Sun-Artists in an Uncertain America", an African American Museum of Philadelphia (AAMP) and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) collaboration. How do artists and organizers confront the troubling histories of Empire in their midsts? Is it even possible for colonially-based art institutions to meaningfully reckon with their own exclusionary histories? What models of reckoning and repair already exist in Philadelphia's art worlds?

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Reckoning and Repair

Episode 8 // Life Like Fragile Clay: Arlene Shechet + Rachael Borthwick

March 14, 2023 • Center for Experimental Ethnography • Season 1 • Episode 8

Life like Fragile Clay breaks down materiality and color as vivid depictions of what it means to be alive in a human body as an object that retains memory.

For episode extras, and to learn more about the artists, hosts, and organizations involved, check out the Reckoning and Repair website: rnrphilly.com

This podcast was created at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, a multimodal research hub that views creative practice as intellectual work that necessarily historicizes the inequalities that pervade our society, and that develops solutions for their present iterations through collaborative and participatory work.

This season was produced in connection to 2023 exhibit, "Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America", an AAMP and PAFA collaboration curated by Dejay Duckett (AAMP), Judith Tannenbaum (PAFA), Mekhala Signal (PAFA), Michael Wilson (AAMP). This exhibit brings together 20 artists to respond to the question: Is the sun rising or setting on the experiment of American democracy? The exhibit runs March 23 through Oct 8 of 2023 at the Historic Landmark Building in Philadelphia.