Art Reflection and Writing Workshop with Brittney Frantece

What are the many conversations a work of art can incite? What do we experience when we sink into the red hues of Brittney Leeanne Williams’s Our Horizon (2019), and what do we feel when witnessing the regurgitation in Wangechi Mutu’s All the Way Up, All the Way Out (2012)? In this online workshop, we will practice unpacking and articulating our varied experiences as we virtually interact with some of the artworks featured in Plural Possibilities & the Female Body. We will engage in art writing that stages conversations between the artists, the art pieces, the world, and you–the viewers. 

This workshop is intended for anyone interested in processing how they read works of art and in developing skills for translating their ideas about art for the public sphere. By talking through what we see and feel personally drawn to, we’ll discover how we engage with a work’s visual narrative, both individually and collectively. To further the conversation, we will contemplate strategies for translating the conversations that we have with ourselves and others into writing, while educating ourselves about the complexity of gender and the processes of gendering bodies. 

This workshop will consist of small and large group discussions and free-writing. Participants will leave with a working draft of a pitch to send to arts writing publications and venues.

Brittney Frantece is a writer, artist, writing teacher, and PhD student in the English Department at UW. Her area of study is at the intersection of Black speculative literary and visual arts and Black feminist and queer studies. With her work, she explores the new ways of thinking and knowledge productions that Black cultural works offer. In her teaching, she encourages students to venture out of what they consider to be “rules” when they are creating their projects, written or otherwise.

Plural Possibilities & the Female Body and related programming is presented as part of the Henry’s participation in the Feminist Art Coalition, a nation-wide initiative that seeks to generate cultural awareness about feminist thought, experience, and action.