Portals, Potions, and Archives with Jehan Roberson

As part of the solo exhibition Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, AGYU and Hemi Encounters (Performing Archives Stream) were excited to co-present Portals, Potions, and Archives, a presentation by celebrated queer artist, writer, poet, and scholar Jehan Roberson. For this talk, Jehan presented her work within archives as a practice to counter historical erasure by rethinking how information is accumulated, sourced, referenced, and stored within a decolonial framework. This approach of recuperation and reparation informs Jehan’s writing and artwork, which are acts of resistance, knowledge sharing, and retribution. 

Jehan Roberson uses collaboration as an approach within her interdisciplinary art practice. Projects such as ancestral futurities, a psalm for the mismeasured and unfit, and TALIXMXN are all collaborative projects that are co-conceived and produced with artists, choreographers, writers, and family members. She is a magnanimous writer whose work has been published in Public Books, Apogee, VICE, Zora, Women & Performance, and Recess Art, among others. She is currently based in Ithaca, New York, where she is a PhD student in English Language and Literatures at Cornell University.