Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Scoring the Stacks (Experiment II)

Using a set of scores or performance instructions that riff on the traditions of musical notation, conceptual art, constrained writing techniques, and recreational mathematics, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Scoring the Stacks (Experiment II) encourages participants to explore Haverford’s newly renovated library, the arboretum, and other forms of institutional spaces and collections in unconventional ways. Seeking opportunities to map generative relationships between wide-ranging ideas, words, objects, and experiences, this participatory intervention suggests the precarity of fixed knowledge and considers the process of learning to be a leaky endeavor.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a Brooklyn-based artist and learner from East Palo Alto. Her sprawling inquiry has led her to develop work that explores experimental poetry, reference texts, intimate intertextuality, techniques of non-institutional archiving, anecdotes of religious syncretism, histories of human as well as non-human communication methods, enclosure systems, and ecological studies. Rasheed makes her inquiries visible through an ecosystem of iterative and provisional projects including sprawling, Xerox-based “architecturally-scaled collages” (frieze magazine, winter 2018); interactive publications; large-scale text banner installations; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; poems/poetic gestures; and other forms yet to be determined. Rasheed has exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, ICA Philadelphia, Pinchuk Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Kitchen, among others. She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, forthcoming 2019).

Scoring the Stacks was conceived by Kameelah Janan Rasheed in its first iteration at the Brooklyn Public Library, curated by Cora Fisher. This is the 2nd experiment in the artist’s ongoing series. Support for the exhibition and programs is provided by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and Haverford College Libraries.