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<em>Crafting Sustainable Futures: Collaborative Visions</em> Exhibition Catalog: Chapter 8 - Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Crafting Sustainable Futures: Collaborative Visions Exhibition Catalog
Chapter 8 - Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Introduction
  3. Section 1 - *This Is Not A Drill* 2022 Selected Works
    1. Chapter 2 - Tega Brain
    2. Chapter 3 - Pato Hebert
    3. Chapter 4 - Karen Holmburg
    4. Chapter 5 - Irene Mercadal
    5. Chapter 6 - Richard Move
  4. Section 2 - *Crafting Sustainable Futures Visions*
    1. Chapter 7 - Andrew Hager
    2. Chapter 8 - Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz
    3. Chapter 9 - Noor Jones-Bey
    4. Chapter 10 - Trish Sachdev
    5. Chapter 11 - Farha Najah Hussain
    6. Chapter 12 - Connecting Through Color Workshop
    7. Chapter 13 - Louis Lu
    8. Chapter 14 - Juan Ferrer
    9. Chapter 15 - Sylvia Juliana Riveros
    10. Chapter 16 - Imaan Deen
    11. Chapter 17 - Darinka Arones
    12. Chapter 18 - Seungyeon Chang
    13. Chapter 19 - Eli Kan
    14. Chapter 20 - Grace Ezzati
    15. Chapter 21 - Kyejin Lee
    16. Chapter 22 - Bingyi Zhang
  5. Section 3 - 2040 Now Showcase
    1. Chapter 23 - Emma Bautista
    2. Chapter 24 - 2040 Now Student Films
  6. Chapter 25 - Exhibition Credits

<span data-text-digest="c56ce0c98c77f7cc7d604e8170bd707b32a38933" data-node-uuid="a18c0413210801ddb3e9421f11c037cbfe4f1c17">Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz</span>

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Ode to Braiding Sweetgrass - Wide Awakes Tile

Grid of 39 colorful illustrations of people, decorative objects, and text
Image of Ode to Braiding Sweetgrass - Wide Awakes Tile, courtsey of the artist.

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

Illustrated black-white and collage featuring line drawings of human figures, cityscapes, abstract shapes, and text
Image of Mothering Criticality, courtsey of the artist.

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.

Photograph of three people against a greenish-white background, including a child with medium-colored skin wearing a white dress with a red belt, held by a person with medium-colored skin wearing a long-sleeved gray shirt, standing next to a person with light-colored skin wearing a long-sleeved black shirt with flowers
Photograph of Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, J. Smith-Cruz, and child, courtsey of the artist.

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.

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