Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Ode to Braiding Sweetgrass - Wide Awakes Tile

Ode to Braiding Sweetgrass - Wide Awakes Tile, 2023
Digital Illustration Collage, 36 x 84 in.

The Wide Awakes compilation was curated with Amplifier artworks with hopes that it will encourage further research, downloads, and community engagement. Featured artists include: Das Frank, Alex Albadree, Tracie Ching, Cindy Chischilly, Jess X Snow, Mer Young, Lmnopi, Jessica Thornton, Cassielle Santos Gaerlan, Thomas Wimberly, Celeste Byers, Shepard Fairey, Weshoyot Alvitre, Pete Railand, Noa Denmon, Jazz Danis, Roger Peet, Flostitanarum, and Gregg Deal.

Mothering Criticality

Mothering Criticality, 2023
Digitized Pen and Ink Drawing, 36 x 84 in.

“Mothering Criticality” is a collection of images by Jasmine “Jaz” Smith-Cruz, a commissioned artist by the team of library workers for the Critical Pedagogy Symposium, a working symposium that is focused on building a space to learn, collaborate, and engage with critical race theory in dialogue and community. The Symposium’s working definition of critical pedagogy includes: teaching and learning in the library that interrogates power structures, distributions of labor, histories, queer, racial inequities, environmental and social justices, and other forms of anti-oppression frameworks. Tenets of Critical Race Theory include:

• Race as a social construct; Racism is normal • Experiences and knowledge of BIPOC • Intersectionality; Interdisciplinary • Whiteness as property • Critique of dominant ideologies • Focus on historical contexts • Counter Storytelling and voice • Interest convergence

Hand-drawn line images by J. Smith-Cruz display undercurrents of sepia with saturation from digital manipulation, and deeply cut black and whites that reveal hints of light reflectivity, producing new colors in the darkness. The variation and at times dichotomized images of scale and theme include the female body, with landscape of city buildings, or townships, metric scales, spirals, and a ladder, all Taino and Yoruba symbolisms; these images intend to point to the ancestral Caribbean, denoting a consideration of place, the domestic, and includes a standpoint of the viewer, gazing in. These images are juxtaposed with screenshots of the Critical Pedagogy Symposium website, disrupting the ways that the connection of art and scholarship, theory with practice, and exhibitions as time-bound, may critique the impact of spaces, and the acknowledgement of land, on bodies and communities, providing the viewer as having agency to engage. The focus on Critical Race Theory, a theory grounded in legal studies, is a nod to the NYU Reads text, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The focus on the ancestral and fertile-women-centered landscapes that embrace the bush with the building, evoking community participation is a nod to the NYU Reads text, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. More subtly, the tiled format, ripe with possibilities, as if doors becoming portals to new realities, is a nod to the NYU Reads text, Exit West.

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is the associate dean for the Teaching, Learning, and Engagement sub-division at NYU’s Division of Libraries. She is lead co-convenor of the Critical Pedagogy Symposium, a collaboration of librarians from NYU, and other neighboring institutions in NYC through the Metropolitan Library Council. She is a proud wife of a visual artist, Jasmine “Jaz” Smith-Cruz, whose hand-drawings in Mothering Criticality, comissioned for the Critical Pedagogy Symposium, are featured. Jaz and Shawn are inspired by the imagined world for their daughter, Joey. Together, they think up images that center women in community and big-up the power of “home.” They’ve built their little house in Norwalk, CT (by way of Brooklyn), from Garifuna and Jamaican, and Puerto Rican ancestry mixed in with a lesbian-mothering-woman-centered experience. Shawn is co-editor for Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Libraries & Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Archives with Litwin Books. Shawn is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt School of Information teaching reference and instruction. She co-leads the METRO Reference and Instruction Special Interest Group.