Afterthought | Remembering a Pandemic
September 28 - October 27, 2023
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
How will we remember the pandemic and the lives it cut short?
Join us at the University of Michigan for a special program spotlighting COVID commemoration as a form of political resistance. Our program offers interactions with commemorative art, invites students and visitors to think about art as a form of political and social action, and includes multiple opportunities to interact with artists on campus. Additionally, we propose art as a pathway for resisting the dominance of text in academic expression. Our program begins on September 28, 2023 and includes five events — scroll down for details!
Co-sponsored by Arts Initiative, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Museum Studies Program, and the departments of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, Film Television & Media, and Latina/o Studies
Five Events
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I. Exhibition
“Half Built House,” a COVID memorial by Laura Taylor
Sep 28 - Oct 27, 2023
Reception: Sep 28, 1-3pm
GalleryDAAS (HH G648 ) -
II. Screening
A work-in-progress screening of Afterthought plus filmmaker Q&A
Sep 29, 6pm
UMMA
Helmut Stern Auditorium -
III. Workshop
A graduate student workshop on film & academic expression
Sep 30, 11am
Rackham Graduate School
East Conference Room -
IV. Career Talk
Featuring Afterthought Editor Mark Juergens & Producer Lydia Robertson
Sep 30, 1pm
Rackham Graduate School
East Conference Room -
V. Panel Talk
A discussion of art and COVID commemoration featuring artists & activists.
Sep 30, 3pm
Rackham Graduate School
East Conference Room
See "Half-Built House," a COVID Memorial by Laura Taylor, at GalleryDAAS 09.28-10.27
I. Exhibition
Half-Built House
A COVID Memorial by Laura Taylor
In “Half-Built House,” Brazilian-American artist Laura Taylor grieves the loss of her childhood friend Tina to COVID. When COVID took Tina’s life, Taylor started ordering identical versions of their childhood games and toys on eBay. As she assembled these objects, Taylor recalled a memory of climbing with Tina through the skeletal frameworks of unfinished houses in the 1970s. Late at night, the girls would pick their way through floorless rooms and speculate about their future inhabitants. In this spirit of imaginative experimentation, Taylor began taking apart her eBay acquisitions. Gathering, breaking, sawing, splicing, painting, gluing, layering, and reassembling these toys became, for her, a way to probe the complicated nature of a lost friendship and to explore the multidimensional nature of grief. Ultimately, Taylor built the framework of an unfinished house to evoke those she once explored with Tina. Taylor describes the house as a “container for grief.”
September 28 - October 27
Opening Reception: September 28, 1-3pm
GalleryDAAS
Haven Hall, ground floor, room G648
II. Work-in-Progress Film Screening and Q&A
Afterthought
A documentary film-in-progress by Charlotte Juergens
Over the past three years, COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than one million Americans. Nearly one-fifth of us knew someone among them. All of us have been impacted. In a culture that avoids talk of death and puts grief on a timeline, what does our mourning look like? How will we manage the voids the pandemic has created? Currently in production, Afterthought is a documentary feature about COVID memorials and the people who build them. It centers on two projects: a community memorial in Detroit involving thousands of participants, and one artist’s personal memorial in New York commemorating the loss of a friend. In documenting these stories, “Afterthought” memorializes individuals lost and communities changed by the pandemic and asks universal questions about shared trauma, memory, and healing. Join the filmmakers for a free screening of clips from the film-in-progress, followed by conversation.
September 29, 6pm
Rackham Graduate School East Conference Room
915 E Washington St
III. Graduate Student Workshop
Film & Academic Expression
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Workshop
This workshop invites graduate students to consider film as a modality for presenting research. It explores art as a pathway for resisting the centrality of text in academic expression. “Afterthought" director and University of Michigan Ph.D. student Charlotte Juergens will share clips from three academic film projects, discuss the possibilities and challenges of film as a research methodology, and work with attendees to troubleshoot next steps for integrating film into their academic practices. This event will include a continental breakfast.
September 30, 11am
Rackham Graduate School East Conference Room
915 E Washington St
IV. Filmmaker Career Talk
Careers in Film
Featuring Mark Juergens & Lydia Robertson
Join Afterthought editor Mark Juergens and technical producer Lydia Robertson for a career talk and coffee hour. Juergens and Robertson each have decades-long careers in film, news, and television, and they invite students to ask questions about their educational and professional pathways.
September 30, 1pm
Rackham Graduate School East Conference Room
915 E Washington St
V. Panel Talk
Art & COVID Commemoration
Featuring memory workers featured in “Afterthought”
Collaborators from the memorials featured in the documentary Afterthought will participate in a panel discussion. Participants include: Laura Taylor (creator of “Half-Built House”), Laura Mott (Chief Curator for the Cranbrook Art Museum and curator for the Detroit Healing Memorial), and Rachel Frierson (Director of Programming for the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy and organizer for the Detroit Healing Memorial). Panelists will discuss the role of art in individual and community healing after mass-trauma events like COVID-19.
September 30, 3pm
Rackham Graduate School East Conference Room
915 E Washington St
Detroit's Healing Memorial, as featured in "Afterthought"
Detroit Healing Memorial
Art & Resistance
This program is part of the University of Michigan’s themed semester on Art & Resistance.
Historically, the United States has neglected the public memory of pandemics. Almost no memorials commemorate those who died of diseases like Smallpox, Yellow Fever, Cholera, or the 1918 Influenza. Afterthought resists this pattern of neglect, erasure, and forgetting, pushing back against societal pressures to “move on” from COVID without making space for public grief and healing. Over 1,000,000 people in the U.S. have lost their lives to COVID, leaving 40% of Americans in mourning. As art and as a memorial, Afterthought holds space for the heartbreak of this pandemic.
As a work of multimodal scholarship, Afterthought also resists the centrality of text in academic expression. Director Charlotte Juergens is a Ph.D. student in the American Culture department. With her dissertation, Charlotte will contribute to new directions in American Studies by presenting her work through a combination of film and writing; Afterthought represents the film portion of her dissertation. As a scholarly project, Afterthought invites conversation around timely themes and questions. What does it mean for individuals and communities to take memory work into their own hands? How can the arts help communities process the impact of COVID? How do COVID memorials fit into America’s history of publicly remembering — and forgetting — pandemics?
Participants
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Rachel Frierson
Detroit Riverfront Conservancy
DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMMINGRachel Frierson is the director of programming for the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy. In this role, Rachel oversees and implements the diverse program offerings that activate the Detroit Riverfront and Dequindre Cut to create a world-class gathering space for three million visitors annually. Rachel holds bachelors’ degrees in history and political theory from Michigan State University, and a master’s degree in public service management from DePaul University. Prior to joining the Conservancy in 2013, Rachel worked with two different Chicago-based community development organizations, the Chicago Loop Alliance and Division Street Business Development Association, and prior to that she worked at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
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Laura Mott
Cranbrook Art Museum
CHIEF CURATORAn accomplished curator and lecturer, Mott joined Cranbrook in 2013 and has curated and co-curated more than 20 projects for the museum, including Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality, an exhibition and publication for which she was named a Warhol Curatorial Fellow, Nick Cave: Here Hear, Maya Stovall: Liquor Store Theater, Allie McGhee: Banana Moon Horn, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, and upcoming exhibitions with artists Tyrrell Winston and Sonya Clark. Prior to joining Cranbrook Art Museum, Mott had an active career as a curator and lecturer in both the United States and Europe. She worked in various curatorial positions in Sweden, Stockholm, San Francisco, and New York City.
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Laura Taylor
Creator of “Half-Built House”
ARTISTLaura Taylor is of Brazilian/American heritage and was raised in Canada with frequent intervals spent in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She is now based in New York. Laura studied at The Ontario College of Art, Le Université du Quebec à Trois-Rivières, and The New York Studio School in New York City. She has been awarded residencies at Kulterrmodell in Passau, Germany; Treffpunkst in Ried-im-Innkreis, Austria; Governor’s Island in New York City; and the Vermont Studio Center. Exhibitions include: AIR Gallery, The Painting Center, Brenda Taylor Gallery, RKL Gallery, the Salzburg International Art Fair, Bushel Collective, Wired Gallery and more. Her groundbreaking COVID memorial “Half-Built House” opened in March 2023 at Bushel Collective in Delhi, NY.
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Charlotte Juergens
Independent Filmmaker
DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, DPCharlotte Juergens is an award-winning filmmaker, archival producer, and interdisciplinary scholar. She recently directed the documentary feature Sunken Roads, which premiered theatrically in 2021. As an archival producer, Charlotte has collaborated on numerous film, museum, theatrical, and network news projects, including one Oscar-nominated short. Charlotte is a third-year Ph.D. student in American Culture at the University of Michigan, where she studies the public memory of pandemics (past and present). She holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Yale. Charlotte currently serves as co-curator for the traveling exhibit Commemorating COVID.
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Mark Juergens
Independent Filmmaker
EDITORMark Juergens has been a filmmaker in New York since 1982. His work as an editor has led him into documentary and feature films, music videos, episodic television and all sorts of experimental video weirdness. Recently, he spent seven years as the Senior Series Editor for How Democracy Works Now and edited six of the feature-length films in that series. His projects have aired on HBO, Comedy Central, MTV, Bravo, A&E, Discovery, History Channel, MSNBC, Logo, Lifetime, and PBS. Films that he edited have screened at Sundance, the New York Film Festival, South by Southwest, DOC NYC, and Berlinale. Many of these films have won awards and had theatrical distribution.
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Lydia Robertson
NBC News & Independent Filmmaker
EDITOR & TECHNICAL PRODUCEROver the course of Lydia's 30-year career in film and television, Lydia has worn many hats of all shapes and sizes. Her efforts as a producer, fundraiser, director, news and documentary film editor, sound editor, audio and video engineer, rock photographer, and colorist have resulted in many international and domestic awards, including numerous Emmys and one Oscar. Lydia's most recent projects include the award-winning feature documentaries Sunken Roads and Yasuni Man, the award-winning dramatic feature Sold, the comedy feature 79 Parts, and NBC Network News shows such as Nightly News, Dateline, and the Today Show.