Announcing Moving Chains: Toward Abolition A Convening on Abolition Today at Charles Gaines’ Monumental Public Artwork
Apr 27, 2023 3:01 pm

Creative Time and Governors Island Arts announce a day of dynamic new discussions and special events in response to artist Charles Gaines’ monumental public artwork Moving Chains. Hosted on Governors Island on Saturday, May 20th, 2023, Moving Chains: Toward Abolition will bring together an interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars, and educators working on strategies for abolition within art, law, education, and political action. The event continues a critical dialogue examining the American origin story, initiated by Charles Gaines last summer with the launch of his multi-year, multi-site public art project anchored by Moving Chains, which will be activated during the event and reopens for regular public hours this summer on Governors Island.
Moving Chains is the second chapter of Charles Gaines’ The American Manifest, which launched in Times Square in July 2022 with performances of Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision and Roots. The 110-foot kinetic sculpture activated by colossal chains rotating overhead anchors a public art project that addresses the reality of systemic racism in the United States of America through embodied and visual experience, and provides critical historical context on our extraordinary political division today. The American Manifest is the first major public art commission by Charles Gaines, a lauded conceptual artist recognized for his nearly 50-year career examining the nature of perception, social systems, and abstraction.
The day-long convening will take place in Castle Williams, a site located within the Governors Island National Monument near Moving Chains. A historic fort that formerly served as a jail for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, the location underscores the rehashing of American history currently galvanizing the political landscape today.
Moving Chains: Toward Abolition is organized by Diya Vij, Curator at Creative Time, with Che Gossett, scholar of abolition and contemporary Black art, co-organizing the session panels; and artist and educator Tiffany Lenoi Jones, co-organizing the drop-in workshops.
FULL SCHEDULE & EVENT REGISTRATION
MOVING CHAINS: TOWARD ABOLITION PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS
Black Gotham Experience Walking Tour
10am — 10:45am | Leaves from Governors Island ferry landing
Join founder of Black Gotham Experience, Kamau Ware, for an in-person guided tour of River Years.. The pathway chosen by Ware explores the colonial patterns that have informed a centuries-long relationship with what are known today as the East River, the Hudson River, and New York Harbor.
Abolition and the Law
Panelists: American Artist, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Albert Fox Cahn, moderated by Che Gossett
12pm | Castle Williams, Governors Island
The panel “Abolition and the Law” brings together artists American Artist and Keemalah Janan Rasheed in conversation with lawyer Albert Fox Cahn, Founder and Executive Director of Surveillance Oversight Technology Project (S.T.O.P.), moderated by Che Gossett. Together, the panelists will discuss the intersection of art, law, surveillance, and abolition. How do redaction, bracketing, and constraint exist within the context of surveillance and the legal system? How might art become a vehicle for exposing, negotiating, and moving past the structure of the law and towards new possibilities for abolition?
Drop-In Workshops
12 — 3pm | Colonels Row, Governors Island
Drop into multigenerational artmaking workshops and gatherings to collectively imagine freedom while learning about the possibility, necessity, and stakes of teaching abolition today. This program is organized by Tiffany Lenoi Jones with Akiea “Ki” Gross and Noor Jones-Bey, grantees of the Abolitionist Teaching Network.
Architectures of Freedom
Panelists: Torkwase Dyson, Saidiya Hartman, and Rinaldo Walcott
2:30pm | Castle Williams, Governors Island
Scholars Saidiya Hartman and Rinaldo Walcott will think alongside and in concert with artist Torkwase Dyson about how freedom might be actualized and spatialized, the places freedom inhabits and takes. What are the architectures and infrastructures of freedom? How might freedom be shared, rather than monetized, privatized and racialized as property? What is the role of art in making freedom(s) possible in the midst of slavery’s global social and aesthetic afterlives?
In Conversation: Charles Gaines and Christina Sharpe
4:00pm | Castle Williams, Governors Island
Join artist Charles Gaines and scholar Christina Sharpe in an intimate conversation on Gaines’ monumental work Moving Chains through the lens of Sharpe’s groundbreaking framework of “wake work,” introduced in her seminal book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016) and continued throughout her work, most recently in Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), a meditation in words and images on the contours of Black life that emerge in the wake. The two will discuss aesthetic strategies to address race and power in order to reorient our ways of seeing and being and doing in the afterlives of slavery and the United States project.
FULL PARTICIPANTS
Kamau Ware, Black Gotham Experience | Tali Keren and Alex Strada, 28th Amendment Project | American Artist | Kameelah Janan Rasheed | Albert Fox Cahn, Esq., Surveillance Technology Oversight Project | Sarah Abdelaziz, Abolitionist Teaching Network | Russell Craig, Right of Return | Torkwase Dyson | Saidiya Hartman | Rinaldo Walcott | Charles Gaines | Christina Sharpe