zoe cinel - Counterspaces

From Counterspaces official website:

As a term, counterspaces have been conceptualized by Yosso and other critical race theorists as safe spaces of resistance where racially marginalized individuals can find support and engage in ways to transform their current lived reality. Yosso et al (2010) have found that BIPOC students might “seek out and establish socio academic counterspaces that position their cultural knowledge as valuable strengths” (2010, p. 677) as a response to experiencing interpersonal, institutional, and structural forms of oppression, including gendered racism in institutions of higher learning.

The Counterspaces project is a community-art collaborative model envisioned by two faculty members at the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) – Angie Mejia and Yuko Taniguchi and UMR alumna Lucia Sem. The project was an intentional response to the lack of transformative spaces and inadequate resources for students identifying as Black, Indigenous, or other People of Color (BIPOC). Counterspace allowed BIPOC undergraduates in the health sciences to use art to communicate anxieties about their ongoing experiences as students and their future as healthcare providers and scientists.

The exhibition of the works created through these workshops was curated by Zoe Cinel for the Rochester Art Center. The were three rotations of artworks that included artworks created by the many participants to the workshops. The exhibition was open from April 2021 to July 2022.

The space was set up to inspire active community engagement with the participants’ works. First, the area includes spaces for patrons to sit down and contemplate the pieces. Second, two art creation spaces were set up for museum patrons to participate and respond to the exhibit. The first station was stocked with origami paper and instructions on creating various shapes to add to a collective wall display. A second station included various pens, markers, paints, and card stock paper for the community to leave messages and poems responding to the artists’ work.

More info and full project at: www.counterspacesart.com