The Black School x Kameelah Janan Rasheed at the New Museum

For the New Museum’s annual summer art and social justice residency and exhibition, the Black School (Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters) and Kameelah Janan Rasheed will explore the pasts and futures of critical black pedagogies. Looking to examples of pit schools and other covert learning structures in the United States, as well as the Freedom Schools of 1964, the Oakland Community School, and early twentieth-century black literary societies, the artists will realize two interconnected projects in an installation on the Fifth Floor. The Black School will reimagine a traditional classroom space for art-making workshops rooted in creative activist tactics. Meanwhile, drawing from the local histories of her hometown of East Palo Alto, CA, Kameelah Janan Rasheed will build a kinesthetic learning environment containing an installation with text, objects, and video, as well as a resource library equipped with a Xerox machine, to consider black traditions of independent schools, publishing, and radical imagination. Working with the Teen Apprentice Program, the artists will facilitate a newly developed curriculum through public and private workshops, programs, and classes for youth and adults throughout the residency.