Possibilities of Care within Institutional Constraints: A Case Study in Black Creative Knowledge Production
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Art school curriculums in institutional settings are often irrelevant to the lived experiences, pathways, and histories of Black students. In this context, in Summer 2021 and 2022, Artspace gallery manager Joshua Vettivelu stewarded a series of projects centring Black students, creating space for open exploration through residencies and research supported by peer mentorship. These projects mobilized a durational approach, pairing small groups of students with slightly more experienced peer mentors over an extended period, in an environment underscored with care and self-direction. In 2021, the it’s real because it happened residency and exhibit allowed participants to explore questions of self-portraiture and perception in collaboration. In 2022, The Black Creative Research Residency (BCRR) project paired a working artist, Shaya Ishaq, with three students to explore questions of optical allyship and Black resistance, culminating in the Knowable Archives, Unknowable Vessels exhibit. This exploration of optical allyship raised questions about allyship communicated through (sometimes shallow) visual signifiers, and in particular explored the works of David Drake – an enslaved potter working in the Antebellum South known for engraving his pots with poetry and his signature – and Josiah Wedgwood – a British potter who made abolitionist pendants for The Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slave Trade. This paper highlights the best practices that emerged from these residencies, such as providing both material resources and immaterial – that is to say, intellectual and relational – support through caring mentorship and relationship building. Furthermore, we explore the tension between both possibilities and limitations of radical care and Black creative practices within institutional constraints.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".