Image: Hannah Brancato, The Monument Quilt.

“What if we joined our sorrows…what if that is joy?”

It’s a question posed by the poet Ross Gay, and it particularly resonates for multidisciplinary artist Hannah Brancato, closing keynote speaker for the MassArt Graduate Programs Summer Lecture Series on Thursday, July 25. “That quote is important to me,” she says, “because of the idea that sorrow and joy exist together; the idea that with intense grief and trauma that comes from sexual violence and any other kind of violence, it’s only possible to access healing through connecting to other people. There’s only so far we can go on our own.”

“That’s what I’m going to be talking about when I speak at MassArt,” she says – “the complexity of organizing with survivors around our trauma and all the work that is coming out of that.”

The “work” Brancato is referring to is the art of what she calls collective storytelling, One of her projects is The Monument Quilt, a crowd-sourced project of 3,000 individual stories from the U.S., Mexico, and beyond that are sewn into large quilt blocks. It’s an initiative of FORCE, an art and activist collective she co-founded that is dedicated to ending sexual violence and creating public art to disrupt rape culture.

There’s also Move Slowly, an interview series and visual art project featuring both conversations between creative activists working to end sexual violence and portraits of the interviewees, based on their words and cyanotype prints of their hair.

A theme that informs Brancato’s art projects is how people’s trauma is responded to. People who are white or have more money or privilege may be reacted to differently by the police, for instance, and “how our  trauma is responded to in the aftermath really impacts how we deal with it in the long term,” she says.

Her work entitled The Inheritance of White Silence speaks directly to this issue. “It’s a project where I began to work with a set of white linen napkins that I inherited from my grandmother,” she says. “I was thinking about white supremacy culture and the way I was racialized – or more accurately, not racialized – as a white person in the United States. How had I taken on the culture without being conscious of it?

“I started to use white embroidery on the white linen to express ways in which I had noticed I had taken on characteristics of that culture – ‘Grandad’s Bootstrap Story,’ ‘Fear of what I don’t know,’ ‘The desire to be perfect.’ I then took a set second of napkins and put the ways I want to pass down legacy – what I want to do differently as I look into the future: ‘Release of control,’ ‘An understanding of interdependence,’ ‘Curiosity to always learn more.’

“I am constantly negotiating the complex relationship between my whiteness, class, and ability privileges, as they are interconnected with my experiences as a woman and as a survivor of trauma,” she explains on her website.

Brancato and her work have received widespread media coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other publications and on broadcast channels that include MSNBC, CNN, and NPR’s All Things Considered. A gifted, provocative speaker, she is not to be missed.

Hannah Brancato’s keynote will be held at MassArt’s Design and Media Center Lecture Hall on Thursday, July 25, 4:30 pm. All MFA lectures are free and open to the broader MassArt community and the public. For more information about the MFA summer lecture series, visit the MassArt Events Calendar.