Surfacing Site: A Panel on "suite for a minor meeting"

Join Tufts University Art Galleries and Magical Thinking, of Systems and Belief featured artist Jonathan González, alongside Angela Tate, Phillip Howze, and Yolande Daniels, with moderation from TUAG curator Laurel V. McLaughlin for a panel conversation engaging a new commission by artist, choreographer, and writer Jonathan González, entitled suite for a minor meeting, composed of a print series, choral composition, and performance at the African Meeting House on February 28, 2025. The panel conversation will center the layered embodied research González conducted for the commission, ranging from Asher Benjamin’s architectural renderings, William Grant Still Jr.’s Harlem Renaissance compositions, site-based abolitionist legacies from Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Sarah Grimké, and conceptions of long emancipation and a Black commons from Rinaldo Walcott, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, and J.T. Roane.

Jonathan González is an artist and educator working at the intersections of experimental performance, prose, pedagogy, and time-based media based in Philadelphia and New York. Their practice(s) seek to operate upon the formulas which cohere the individual, the built environment, and systems of economic circulation through investigating the transnational currents of Black life as creative apertures for illuminating the structuring logics of the human and emancipatory choreographies. Their practice has been supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Trinidad Performance Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Center for Afrofuturist Studies, MoMA PS1, Jerome Hill Foundation, The Momentary/Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Abrons Arts Center, Loghaven and Art Matters Foundation. Their writing can be found through deem journal, contemporaryand, EAR|WAVE|EVENT, cultured magazine, contact quarterly, the creative independent, ASAP/J, MR Journal, and Angela’s Pulse.

Angela T. Tate is Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket and a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, where her dissertation looks at Etta Moten Barnett’s Cold War radio program through the lens of the role of the arts in international affairs, cultural diplomacy, and the African Diaspora. This research has been supported by the Schlesinger Library, the Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center, and the Social Science Research Council. She has taught classes related to monuments through United States history, African American history, and slavery through cultural studies. She was born in Sacramento, spent her formative years in rural Kansas and the DMV, and became an adopted Chicagoan–a variety of geographic areas that have shaped her research, political, and curatorial perspectives. She currently splits her time between Washington, D.C. and Boston.

Phillip Howze is a playwright whose work has been developed or produced at American AF Festival, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, BRIC-Arts Media, The Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb, PRELUDE 2015, The Public Theater, San Francisco Playhouse, SPACE at Ryder Farm, and Yale Cabaret. A graduate of Yale School of Drama, he is a Fellow of the Sundance Institute Theater Lab, a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, a 2050 Fellow at New York Theater Workshop, and a Resident Writer at Lincoln Center Theater. His NY playwriting debut Frontieres Sans Frontieres premiered in a sold-out, extended engagement at The Bushwick Starr and was named one of the “10 Best Theatrical Productions of the Year” by New York Magazine.

J. Yolande Daniels is the founder of studioSUMO West in Los Angeles and a co-founding design principal of studioSUMO in New York. The work of the studio ranges from institutional and cultural projects in education and the arts to housing at multiple scales in the US and abroad. Her independent design research explores the spatial effects of race and gender in the built environment, focusing on revealing the narratives of resistance and autonomy. In particular, her work takes as a focus documenting and representing spaces that have been rendered adjunct to, yet supplement and maintain, dominant spatial and political systems of power. Taking the form of writing and design research, this work has been published and exhibited widely, including the recent anthology, In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism, and, also recently in the project Black City: the Los Angeles Edition, currently featured in the exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art. Along with her fellow Reconstructions exhibitors, she is a co-founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective.