Michele Carlson is formerly trained as a critic with an interest in the complex ways that power operates within diverse social bodies and cultural exchanges with a focus on intersectional racial grief and violence, representation in art and media, and decolonial socio-historical narratives. She has written for journals such as Art in America, Hyphen, Art Practical, KQED, and After Image.

Carlson’s current manuscript titled The Visits is an experimental memoir set against the backdrop of visiting her brother in six different Washington State prisons over the course of seven and a half years. Part memoir, part critical analysis of landscape, place, visual culture, The Visits explores how the site of the personal can be used as a strategy to deconstruct broader paradigms of power and the institutionalization of kinship, and family.The Visits was recently funded by a San Leandro Arts Commission individual arts grant and she has read excerpts at University of California Berkeley, Sonoma State University, Kearny Street Workshop, Alley Cat Books, and Pitzer College, amongst others.

(For a full writing resume or queries please email info [at] michelecarlson [dot] com)


OUT OF PLACE, 2021

A personal essay about academia and “giving away the institution.” Download a copy of the book for free!

Broad in scope, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose presents an overview of the different paths taken by artists and artist collectives as they navigate their way from formative experiences into pedagogy. Focusing on the realms in- and outside the academy (the places and persons involved in post-secondary education) and the multiple forms and functions of pedagogy (practices of learning and instruction), the contributions in this volume engage individual and collective artistic practices as they adapt to meet the factors and historical conditions of the people and communities they serve through solidarity, equity, and creativity.

With this critically, historicist approach in mind, the contributions in Out of Place historicize, study, critique, revise, reframe, and question the academy, its operations and exclusions. The extensive range of contributions, emphasizing community-oriented projects both inside and outside the United States, is grouped into three overarching categories: artists who work in academic institutions but whose social and pedagogical engagement extends beyond the walls of the academy; artists who engage in pedagogical initiatives or forms of institutional critique that were established outside of an art school or university setting; and artist–scholars who are doing transformative and inter/transdisciplinary work within their respective institutions.

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WHERE ARE THE TINY REVOLTS?, 2020

“Background Information” is a creative redaction essay. Where are the tiny revolts? (A Series of Open Questions, vol. 1). Published by CCA Wattis Institute and Sternberg Press, 2020.

Where are the tiny revolts? is the first book in an annual series of readers titled A Series of Open Questions, published by the Wattis and Sternberg Press, and distributed by the MIT Press. Each reader includes newly commissioned texts and an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis’s year-long research seasons. The title of each book comes in the form of a question.

Where are the tiny revolts? takes the work of Dodie Bellamy as its point of departure and explores contemporary forms of feminism and sexuality, the rebirth of the author, and ways in which vulnerability, perversion, vulgarity, and self-exposure can be forms of empowerment.

Where are the tiny revolts? includes essays, poems, stories, photographs, collages, musical scores, and much more. Contributors include Sara Ahmed, Nicole Archer, Marcela Pardo Ariza, Georges Bataille, Dodie Bellamy, Justin G. Binek, Kaucyila Brooke, Tammy-Rae Carland, Michele Carlson, Thomas Clerc, Combahee River Collective, Mary Beth Edelson, Bob Flanagan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Johanna Hedva, Glen Helfand, Juliana Huxtable, Alex Kitnick, Julia Kristeva, Mike Kuchar, Audre Lorde, Anne McGuire, Lisa Robertson, Patrick Staff, Frances Stark, and Rosemarie Trockel.


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Reading of Everything Falls Apart, at the Wattis Institute

February 15, 2018

 

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Reading of The Future Is Not Communal at the Wattis Institute

October 26, 2018

 

KQED. “A Punishing Perspective: M. Lamar's 'Negrogothic',” Feb 12, 2015

KQED. “Anthony Discenza's 'Trouble Sleeping': An Exhibition in Stages,” Feb 16, 2015

KQED. “How Artists Use Their Skills to Pay the Bills,” Sep 30, 2014

Hyphen. “CYBERHATE IS REAL HATE: The real online world,” Issue 28: The R/Evolution Issue - Fall 2014

Art Practical. “Inside the Artist’s Studio, Part 5: Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman,” June 26, 2014

Art in America. “MARK BRADFORD BRINGS MAINSTREAM TO THE FRINGE,” March 15, 2012

Art in America. “HISTORY IN THE MAKING TITUS KAPHAR CUTS UP TO REBUILD,” May 20, 2009