Janet Sarbanes with Hailey Loman

Janet Sarbanes
with Hailey Loman

Wednesday, December 14
7pm

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Book launch for Letters on the Autonomy Project, by Janet Sarbanes.

Reading and conversation with Hailey Loman, Director of LA Contemporary Archive (LACA).

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In the face of rising authoritarianism and on the heels of urgent struggle, autonomy calls to us. How can we excavate the theory and history of autonomous politics to arrive at new possibilities for radical democracy and the radical imaginary? How can we rethink the ways in which artistic autonomy is theorized and practiced beyond the shrunken horizon of liberal individualism? How might we understand political and artistic autonomies as linked, rather than diametrically opposed? And what role does radical pedagogy have to play in all of this? Addressed inclusively to artists, activists and academics ("Dear A"), this series of open letters seeks to grasp the potential of our moment to transform our understandings of both art and politics.

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Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collections Army of One and The Protester Has Been Released. She has published art criticism and other critical writing in museum catalogues, anthologies, and journals including East of Borneo, Afterall, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her essay on Shaker aesthetics and utopian communalism received the Eugenio Battisti prize from the Society for Utopian Studies. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program and the MA of Aesthetics and Politics in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.