Art and the Archive

Art and the Archive

Whether you're an art enthusiast or a history buff, this event is perfect for you.

Join us at the BCaT Lab in Skinner 3115 for an in-conversation between artists and archivists Amber Robles-Gordon, keondra bills-freemyn and Maïa Walcott. The session will explore artistic practice as/and archival methods, the role of Black art in filling archival silences, and explore themes of personal vs. collective Black diasporic experience.

Lunch will be served in the lab from 1pm, with the panel from 2-3pm.

This is a hybrid event - to join us on Zoom, please register here.

Drop into the lab between 10-5pm any day between 1st - 4th November to participate in our collaborative mural project!

Introducing our panellists:

keondra bills freemyn

keondra bills freemyn is a writer, memory worker, and archivist in the Black tradition currently serving as Co-Executive Director of Black Lunch Table, a radical archiving project centering Black visual artists. Originally from South Central, LA, keondra is a former US diplomat and has worked with the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, New York Public Library and DC Public Library on oral history, digital transcription, and metadata projects centering marginalized communities. She is founder of the digital archival initiative Black Women Writers Project and former coordinator of Project STAND, an independent archival consortium focused on the ethical documentation of student movements. A dedicated digital humanist, keondra is a former Curationist.org Critics of Color fellow and an African American Digital & Experimental Humanities (AADHUM) Scholar. keondra earned a Bachelors degree in Marketing from Fordham University, a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University, and a Master of Library and Information Science in Archives and Digital Curation from University of Maryland. keondra completed a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies at Harvard University and is a Society of American Archivists Digital Archives Specialist.

Maïa Walcott

Maïa Walcott is a multi-disciplinary artist working with sculpture, painting, illustration and photography. Her work centres Black British Caribbean culture and reflects quotidian Black life, transforming everyday intimacies, her family’s history of migration and cultural rituals into archival record. Her work has appeared in exhibitions including photography in the Jupiter Artland Gallery (Edinburgh, 2021), Celestial Bodies (Edinburgh, 2019) the I’m Tired project (Edinburgh, 2019), sculptures in Black Minds Zine and The Colour of Madness (Pan Macmillan, 2024), illustrations in The Selkie, Project Myopia and The Wellcome Collection, and she has an oil painting currently displayed at the Royal Museums Greenwich (London, 2025 - 26).

Maïa is serving as our artist-in-residence for this week at the BCaT Lab: join her in the lab at any time between 10-5pm between 1st - 5th December to participate in our collaborative mural-making project.

Amber Robles-Gordon

Amber Robles-Gordon is an Afro-Latina interdisciplinary visual artist whose creations are visual representations of her hybridism: a fusion of her gender, ethnicity, cultural, and social experiences. Her assemblages, large sculptures, installations, and public artwork, emphasize the essentialness of spirituality and temporality within life. The underpinnings of her creations are imbued to reveal racial injustice and the paradoxes within the imbalance of masculine and feminine energies within our society. Known for recontextualizing non-traditional materials, her large scale assemblages, sculptures, collages, installations, and public artwork, in order to emphasize the essentialness of spirituality and temporality within life. Robles-Gordon is driven by the need to construct her own distinctive path, innovate, peel back the layers of injustice and challenge social norms, hence her artwork is unconventional and non-formulaic.

Robles-Gordon’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the American University Museum (Washington, DC), Derek Eller Gallery (New York, NY), August Wilson African American Cultural Center (Pittsburgh, PA), University of Quebec, (Quebec, Canada) among other art and collegiate institutions, galleries, art fairs, and in group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. She was a resident at the American Academy in Rome, 2019, visiting artist at the Universidad de Sagrado de Corazón, San Juan, Puerto, 2020, a semi-finalist for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize, 2022, and the Project Development Residency, Cultural DC, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico in 2023-2025. She holds an MFA from Howard University and a BS from Trinity College.

You can find Robles-Gordon's work exhibited on UMD campus until December 5th, at the Driskell Center in the Solace and Sisterhood Exhibition