Retracing the Rubicon Curatorial Tour and Performative Reading: Lineaments of Truth

Language is a form of reconciling with truth and perceiving a reality that is not tangible yet. Join us for a performative poetry sit-in led by artist Hannah Spector. Spector will perform a written piece responding to Retracing the Rubicon and the artist's personal experience with grief. Jennifer Chang and Saffiya Haider will present additional readings. Members of the public are then invited to recite their own poetry and literary works, as well as works related to grief collected from other authors. Lineaments of Truth offers a contemplative moment to sit with the questions being presented in the exhibition such as “How do we move forward with grief rather than moving on from it?”

Retracing the Rubicon curators Zahra Martinez, Fionayuko Forbes, and Farah Narejo will lead a tour of the exhibition in the VAC galleries at 5:30 p.m. Spector’s performative reading will begin promptly at 6 p.m. in the VAC’s outdoor courtyard.

Hannah Spector is an interdisciplinary visual artist and poet. Spector thinks of language as a solid object—a concrete and spatial expression that can overturn limiting perceptions of the everyday. Spector graduated from UT Austin with an MFA in Printmaking & Transmedia. Spector has shown their work at Transformer Gallery (DC), The CAM Perennial (TX), Stoveworks (TN), The Katzen (DC), and Women and Their Work (ATX). Spector’s short films have won prizes at The DUMBO Film Festival and Berlin Shorts Festival. They have completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), Stoveworks (TN), The Museum of Human Achievement (ATX), and MASS Gallery (ATX). They are an Assistant Professor of Practice at UT Austin and serve as Secretary for the artist collective, MASS Gallery.

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award and was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and The Volta, and she has published scholarly articles on poetics, modernism, race, and the environmental imagination in Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, The Oxford Encyclopedia for Asian American Literature and Culture, and New Literary History. An essay on an Asian American ecopoetics is forthcoming in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her poems have been featured on NPR, the PBS NewsHour, and The Slowdown and have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, The New Yorker, The New York Times, A Public Space, and Yale Review. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman and serves as the poetry editor of the New England Review.

Safiyya Haider is a Pakistani poet-activist from Austin, Texas. Their work is published in A Gathering of the Tribes, Rising Phoenix Review, SPARK Magazine, Red Salmon Arts Zine, Silk Club, and A La Moda. They were awarded the 2023 and 2024 Fania Kruger Fellowships for social justice writing, and the Amiri Baraka Scholarship at Naropa's 2024 Summer Writing Program. They are part of Saffron, a Central Texas based creative house that centers the South Asian diaspora. They are a senior at the Univesity of Texas at Austin and study genetics and poetry.