class struggle

In this podcast, we sit with Laura Benítez Valero under a glass ceiling that never quite cracks, to talk about its unshakeable foundations, the question of class, and the scaffold of the meritocracy. Anger and shame are the emotions provoked by the emergence of this perverse and oppressive system, which reproduces inequalities generation after generation, until they become ingrained. From the same perspective, Laura Benítez Valero proudly recounts the legacy of a community-based education in the struggle of women who support families and children. She also talks about music and dance as catalysts and points of escape; and about research projects that take place outside of academia, in the form of erratic, intuitive and affective methodologies in which enjoyment plays a central role. 

Ebony G. Patterson is an expansive artist working across painting, tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. In this podcast, she reflects on the paradoxes that animate her practice and how she uses them to entice -and unsettle- the viewer. Drawing on pop culture, art history, and pageantry, Patterson confronts social and racial inequality and the persistent brutality embedded in postcolonial and working-class spaces. Her work blurs the boundaries between high art and bling, between adornment and the grotesque, and memorializes those rendered “un-visible.” She also revisits her early days at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica, her moving back and forth to the United States, and her ongoing negotiation with labels of Blackness and “Jamaican-ness,” as she follows her own guiding voices and embraces discomfort, grief, and the Trojan-horse possibilities of her work.