Fellow
Anna Martine Whitehead
2022-2024
Anna Martine Whitehead is a 2022–2024 Vera List Center Fellow whose fellowship project, FORCE! an opera in three acts, is part of the Vera List Center’s Focus Theme cycle Correction*.
FORCE! an opera in three acts is a Black femme story of interior lives and shared dreams. This project explores relationships blooming in the shadow of prisons, imagining a strange sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls. Through sound, movement, and exploration of dreams with one another, we (those who are most impacted by these interlocking forces of oppression on which the prison industrial complex runs) put into practice the free world of our visions. In development since early 2020, FORCE! is a world-building project that manifests as a dance instruction manual, a live performance, and a co-thinking project to re-imagine theater and dance performance, centering care, consent, queer divergence, and Black femme rest. For the fellowship, Whitehead and collaborators develop FORCE! as a live show as well as body of work that proposes decolonial and abolition feminist art-making, particularly body-based (dance, theater, performance) practices.
Anna Martine Whitehead is a Virginia-raised Chicago-based performer, artist, and writer interested in Black queer temporalities. They have been presented by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They are a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant recipient, 2020 Graham Foundation Fellow, and an awardee of a 2020 MAP Fund grant. And in 2022 they will be institutionally supported by the Rauschenberg Foundation and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, Frieze, Art Practical and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017); and is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). They teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and organize with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts / Education Project.
Related
Performance
Anna Martine Whitehead: FORCE! an opera in three acts
Nov 22–Nov 23, 2024
Artist Book, Libretto
FORCE! an opera in three acts
Anna Martine Whitehead
Lecture
Anna Martine Whitehead: Still in the Waiting Room
Oct 23, 2024
Performance
VLC Forum 2022: FORCE! an opera in three acts with Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty
Oct 22, 2022
Presentation
VLC Forum 2022: A Time for Correction*, Introducing the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows
Oct 22, 2022
Forum
Vera List Center Forum 2022: Correction*
Oct 20–Oct 22, 2022
Catalogue, VLC Forum
Vera List Center Forum 2022: Correction*
Network
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- ⁕ Élise Atangana
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- ⁕ Andrea Geyer
- ⁕ Michelle Marxuach
- ⁕ Pooja Sood
- ⁕ Ute Meta Bauer
- ⁕ Hetti Perkins
- ⁕ Joanna Warsza
- ⁕ Long March Project
- ⁕ Antawan Byrd
- ⁕ Miguel Lopez
- ⁕ cheyanne turions
- ⁕ Claudia Fernandez
- ⁕ Hrag Vartanian
- ⁕ Nontobeko Ntombela
- ⁕ Theaster Gates
- ⁕ Sarah Demeuse
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