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Anna Wexler

awexler's picture
Neighborhood: Mission
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I am an interdisciplinary, project centered artist who works with ritually inflected performance, installation and text. My research based pieces often engage visionary legacies of resistance to colonialism and racial capitalism. I am inspired by collaborative works that fuse radical aesthetics and insurgent social practices across contexts and communities.

I have worked as an educator, activist and counselor in Haitian and other immigrant communities in the Boston area. My ethnographically based doctoral dissertation, supported by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, was based on an artistic apprenticeship with a Haitian Vodou priest and ritual flag maker. My writings and performances have been commissioned for exhibits, events and publications exploring the influence of African Atlantic ritual practices on contemporary art practice. The opportunity to participate in learning and creating ritual healing forms in Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería, shaped by legacies of resistance to slavery and colonialism, is a continuous source of inspiration within my interdisciplinary practice.

My ongoing projects include a collaboration with the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland, CA based on an accessible archive I created and contributed to their Community Archival Resource Project. The archive documents the radical activism of the Soledad Mothers, the mothers of three militant Black prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers because of their alleged involvement in the 1970 murder of a guard in the California prison of that name.

I am currently developing a performance based on the search for habitable exoplanets or worlds orbiting other stars, and its interface with the critical question of the limits of Earth's habitability for our species and countless others. In a participatory process, I will dialogue with audience members to create assemblages conceived as messages to envisioned interplanetary companions. This project extends other collaborative exoplanet focused works I created and produced at the Boston Center for the Arts and Mobius to the San Francisco Bay Area.