What does The Clearing feel like & how will unruly folk feel within it?

It feels like, "in the order they occur,  a video of the African American Garden at IAAM taken by me in the rain, Black Women finding their own Black Eden by splashing their feet in the water at the 1963 March on Washington, hands seen in Corrine Bailey Rae’s Peach Velvet Sky rooted in Harriet Jacobs’ book entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Zora Neale Hurston’s Ethnographic Film footage of children dancing in a circle, Mary McLeod Bethune Archival Footage, & The Great Dismal Swamp Maroon Community."

— Text & accompanying film by Kay Brown, Looking Back to Chart The Way Forward

Why now?

• With every revolution the people must plant seeds of imagination to create what comes after the fall of empire, the end of genocides, the end of war, the end of prisons, & so on. Engaging with the Assemblage Conservatory Quilted Syllabi enables you to harness your imagination to understand theory, starting with your body & extending to other sources, resulting in the creation of pathways that transform lessons into embodied praxis in your daily life.
• You are ready to commit to interdependent study as a ritual for survival & a laboratory for creating a just thriving world rooted in Black Feminism & abolitionism.
• As access to information is increasingly surveilled & censored you understand the importance of active participation in the dissemination of varied source material to inspire conversations giving folks the language to identify harm & how it must be changed.
• You are seeking an open, safe, clearing filled with other unruly & wayward folk to learn how to remain present in a ever desensitizing world. 
• You want to learn not only the theories of notable theorists but also the theories that exist in your own body & lineage. As James Baldwin writes in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation” from his book The Fire Next Time “…trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.”
•  

What are Quilted Syllabi?

I’m gathering all that I came from, all that made me who I am & who I am becoming, available to you through my citational vernacular art practice.

• Citation as gratitude
• Citation as love
• Citation as keeping our loved ones alive
• Citation as the creation of sites of memory to keep us alive & dreaming
• Citation because “naming is an act of rebellion” [Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement) by Christen A. Smith, Erica L. Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Whitney N. L. Pirtle, & The Cite Black Women Collective]

What was once a private part of art & research my practice springing forth from the Assemblage: Baby’s Breath publication is now being open up to fellow unruly folks. Quilted Syllabi were originally presented in the publication's adaptive methodology. What follows is the budding excerpt of the quilted syllabi that has since been tended to in winter & now fully blooms for you in spring.

“Not all of what I gather ends up making it into the final piece as an Assemblage hyperlink or source. However, all of the materials I gather inform my writing of that piece or serve as a benchmark to think alongside the material in a future piece. I stitch all of these sources together into what I am calling quilted syllabi. These quilts are inspired by the communities who practiced quilting as a way of life—who are artist even when society deemed them to just be crafty folk gathering scraps to make a whole. They also serve as a growing garden to visually tend & document the overflowing pieces I write.

Quilted syllabi are a textured & interdisciplinary way to engage with source materials so that the information may be metabolized over time—however long it takes. Quilted syllabi can also be described as an ever growing love letter to honor the sites of memory, people/places/materials, that gather us. By enrolling in The Clearing, you gain access to a conservatory of critical thinking through vernacular citational practice & study. All sources include additional information & attribution for you to individually explore.

Much like this methodology, as Assemblage grows so does the vertical length of the quilted site. In this once private practice that I now invite you to become a part of, it has been interesting to see which sources find themselves in more than one quilt & where my mind wanders off to. Let’s wander & wonder together through our individual & communal exploration of these innovative syllabi within The Clearing.” — Kay Brown, The Methodology of Assemblage: Baby’s Breath 

Who is the steward of Assemblage Conservatory?

Kay Brown (she/her) is a poet & theorist who graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a B.A. in Critical Social Thought (as described in the program overview sourced from Mount Holyoke below).

In other words, I have been trained to think critically & learn how to make theory accessible to folks from a variety of different backgrounds. I desire to serve as a bridge between the privileged (& harmful) spaces of academia, that introduced me to life-changing theory, to the folks in my community that I truly want to offer my big heart in service to.

While academia did introduce me to many theorists & critical thinkers who have profoundly shaped my life, I desire to share this way of being I have come to know as assemblage with a community I rarely saw reflected in the classroom. I have been trained to cite & craft academic methodologies despite desiring to create a more wild freedom map. Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote that “being a Black Feminist engaged in the university like I was during my PhD program, is like looking at artifacts of an apocalypse while breathing sulfur. It’s feeling your heart turn to coal and knowing that eventually it will become a diamond that you will never see.”

I have felt the start of witnessing my heart turn to coal through academia & the only way to save it was to re-wild it. That is what my new public practice, methodology, & quilted syllabi have done for me & what I now want to share with others. Upon graduating in 2023 I found devotion in the Black Feminist theory of Assemblage I unknowingly wrote as an escape map to myself in my senior thesis. Whatever semblance of joy I felt was overshadowed by experiencing extreme burnout, mental health struggles, & being absent in moments of my life after powering through systems I felt I had no choice but to go along with.

However, it soon became all too clear that I needed a more nourishing & aligned life than the one I had been charting. The spaces, people, & future plans I originally believed I could fit stopped supporting me. Or more so, I realized they never supported me at all.

Yet these places, the academy/museums/& more, seemed like the only place to put the skills I love into practice. The skills being the facilitation of exploring art, reading theory, writing, & research. In crafting this clearing my excitement was re-invigorated by affirming that the warm glow I felt in the seminar/leading a close looking tour at the museum/working on my thesis/,did not come from those institutions. It never had anything to do with those institutions. I made the mistake of placing my power with them when it always glowed from within me. I did not need the allusion of security institutions desperately sell in order to continue to see my gifted skills flourish. Now, I seek to empower others to place their power with themselves first & always.

Instead, I gathered the abundantly nourishing gifts inside me to honor who I was, who I am, & what I needed in the future to craft an assemblage that is a present-aligned life. The terms unruly & wild have been placed upon us in an attempt to stunt our curiosity & diminish our power. I desire to activate charged clearings, invoking Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs preaching from Beloved, to enable Black folk’s hearts to weep, laugh, dance, & love instead of being extractively mined. This is the intention of The Clearing by Assemblage Conservatory. I hope to see you from within it 🩵.

The Assemblage Framework

The Assemblage Framework, informed by musical notation, is designed to balance intimate periods of reflection with the materials in The Clearing Library with live community Clearing Ceremonies to assist in the process of challenging definitive theory & metabolizing it in our daily lives.

Each whole note on the right hand side (3,6,& 8) are representative of when we come together to sing our citational love out loud. Together we will gather, embody stillness, & honor citations as sites of memories that inform how we move in the world. Here, you may bring your reflections, questions, responses to the materials made available to you in your library to community. 

Prior to reaching the nourishing whole notes, 1,2,4,5,7,& 8 are represented by  the musical notation of the whole rest. When reading music, whole rests represent 4 beats of silence. The work of reclaiming your unruly & wild imagination through vernacular citational practice takes time. This work will not be finished after interacting with one resource or quilt. Oftentimes, the ways in which the work becomes metabolized is when it is complimented with our genuine wild experience of living.

I have read things years ago that are just now rising to the surface of my mind. This is the assemblage way of being, honoring time as circular, that is encouraged through rests. The whole rests represent the time period for self-paced individual exploration of the numerous resources in The Clearing library. 

Lastly, musical notation provides the language for the Assemblage Framework because nothing can be heard without beats of silence. Furthermore, I believe that devotion to citation as sites of memory & the work of reclaiming our unruly & wild imagination through the vernacular is a simple act of play. What we gather in turns gather us. It feels like playing outside all day as a child collecting rocks, dandelions, & dirt to make a pie no one could eat. It feels like riding a bike down a new path & being excited to see what is around the corner. It feels like learning as discovery anchored in moving slowly, with ease centering rest so that when we do sing our citational song out loud we have enough breath to carry us home.