Memory/Care/Work: Chassidy A. Winestock in Conversation with Melissa Messina and Holly Smith

In this program, presented in conjunction with the exhibition A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, visiting curator Chassidy A. Winestock will join Holly Smith (college archivist, Women's Research and Resource Center, Spelman College) and Melissa Messina (executor, Mildred Thompson Estate) for a dialogue about the labor and care of working with art, archives, and collections.

The artworks included in A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture foreground their material construction and, with this, the physical actions undertaken by the artists who brought them together. These works underscore the effort and care in their creation by revealing the actions through which they were made. As featured artist Mildred Thompson describes, they make the invisible visible.

Similarly, the stewardship of collections and archives requires labor and an ethic of care that is often unseen. In this conversation, Winestock will speak with Smith and Messina about their work with artists, art-based collections, and archives—and the ways that this work intersects with deep care for people, place, and community, fostering connections that can span generations.

Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Endowment Fund for the Arts, which is supporting this exhibition.

Speakers

Melissa Messina, independent curator; executor of the Mildred Thompson Estate

Holly Smith, college archivist, Women's Research and Resource Center, Spelman College

Chassidy A. Winestock, visiting curator, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; doctoral candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

 We plan to post the recording on our website in one week.