​​
​the illustrated story /
​of how I cut my teeth
​
​story by Asha Iman Veal
drawings by Jadzia Floyd
​
last update 2019
​(traditional cv available via LinkedIn)

It is my strongest belief—and experience—​​that the power of an arts education is fierce across settings. 

Through professional practice and formal education, I have spent the past eighteen years broadening my understanding of art as a field of public discourse, capable to propose new frameworks and redraft contexts.

​My own independent projects demonstrate the possibilities of redirected routes of dialogues across global space. This is especially directed in personal and collective tools of eloquent disruption to the spatial imaginaries and historical inheritances of race.

​​​I began the earliest path in my career as a writer and editor, seeking literary and narrative practices that explore contemporary examples of multiculturalism.

​Today ​I am on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Arts Administration & Policy, working primarily with third and fourth year undergraduate students, and graduate students. 

​Engaging a multidisciplinary community of peers within the arts, and advocating arts education as a valuable leadership background outside of the field, is also what I passionately do.  

but first, I started as an intern...

For a semester during undergraduate school I assisted at an oral history project led by professor and performance artist Judith Sloan. Judith taught a class in collaboration, training college students from our university and theater teens from the International High School of Queens.

She trusted us each to learn our own strengths in how to contribute to the full group. Judith had an easy, natural style of respecting people of any age and from any place. Testing ​my role there, I dialogued with the teens about the short pieces of memoir that they wrote to share on stage.   

At a very different experience, ​I worked in editorial at TimeOut New York. Sometimes I reviewed DVD promos that none of the staff writers wanted. Twice I got a longer byline in the magazine. ​In my most valuable role of free labor, I did a whole lot of interview transcriptions for the writers.

I can still remember the Tuesday when a distinctly appreciative staff writer came to the intern desk and presented a large bottle of gin, as a token of gratitude for my eight hours of typing while pressing pause on a mini tape. “But I’m under 21!!!” I panicked at first, before pretending to be cool and passing the booze off at my dorm.

​A brief list of additional, learning gigs from my early career:

​Staten Island Advance newspaper—​
Wrote obituaries (yup), Teen Page stories, and one Health Page feature ​about athlete Agnes Oquendo

MTV Networks—​
Supported the Original Programming & Series Development department; assisted during casting week for Undressed, archived housemate submissions for Real World, and reviewed script submissions by aspiring television writers

​Sacramento Business Journal—​
Fact-checked business referral lists while I was still in high school; our boss was a very cool lady who promoted me from intern to Junior Research Assistant  

Sacramento Bee—​
Wrote several reviews and guest columns for the Teen Page; this included interviewing Kurt Cobain’s cousin who'd written a book about suicide, and a column about the SATs

California Youth Crisis Line—​
Answered phone calls as a crisis counselor for young people, and provided referrals for free mental health and social services

 

learning about people and places became important to me, then connecting that to creative expression and the arts... 

My unyielding passion is to talk to people and hear their stories. It's a productive curiosity, to try and make sense of the experiences that define individuals. ​I feel emboldened by a multiplicity of difference, as opposed to feeling vulnerable when positioned as that tiny bit of difference.

The next step I learned, is to try and create something that invites others into that space of shared encounter too. ​I learned this while still a university student, being taught by all types of writers and artists—​and introduced to project-oriented travel.

I once took a documentary-production seminar on the topic of family and legacies of war, split between New York and Vietnam, led by veterans Wayne Karlin (a writer) and Judd Ne'eman (a director of films).

​In Havana, I sat inside of a cinema house where Marco Williams screened The Two Towns of Jasper to share what he's learned about America's segregation of race.

That same year I became obsessed with reading and experimenting in travel writing. I revised my private journal notes from Havana and Trinidad de Cuba into a forty-page narrative that the university excerpted to publish online.

Back in New York I took a seminar called Artist Ethnographer Expeditions led by cultural historian and musician Yale Strom. Over the semester I workshopped and completed a colorful (or perhaps unintentionally comical) zine of interviews with young women across cultural groups and backgrounds—​aka all my friends.

From the cultural historian and playwright Michael Dinwiddie, I'd taken a course on Migration and American Culture where I learned that personal stories of identity and experience could be shared with a public audience through many forms.

    

 

creative projects hold space for broader thought, and can imagine new frameworks of equity and mobility...

I knew I wanted to build a career in arts and advocacy—​and I learned how to develop global projects that are also networked, from playwright Eve Ensler while a staff member on her core team for the V-Day global activist movement to end violence against women and girls.

V-Day brought me to Mexico for a march of 7,000 feminist activists in Juarez and to stage a massive benefit theater production with Mexican and American actresses. ​Esther Chávez Cano spoke on behalf of the 400+ (now outdated number) missing women and girls to media, the U.S. Consular Officer, and several U.S. congresswomen, requesting support from both sides of the border. 

Later that year in New York I worked on “Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock,” a political performance event at Harlem's Apollo Theater. I wore a fierce expression in the group photo. Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, more seasoned, clearly felt relaxed enough to smile.

That night at the Apollo concluded my role on a longer campaign and the Vote Tour that traveled to Ohio and Florida. The full campaign had launched downtown at the Culture Project Theater in spring, and on stage with two other young women I read Eve's "Vagina Vote" campaign pledge. Hibaaq Osman came to town that week for the launch, from Washington DC. ​

My last major event “Hard Out Here For A Girl" took place at the Brooklyn Museum, co-organized by performance poet Suheir Hammad, as part of Until the Violence Stops, a multi-site festival. In one of the top exciting moments of my early career, I earned the the title of Festival Associate Producer in New York. This for me was (still is) huge!

Something I've learned over the years of being in arts and nonprofits, is that often staff and independent contractors will give their skills and time above and beyond for a project, but often won't be credited with a title or pay that reflects their actual workload and level of contribution. At 26, I got a nod of respect and value for leadership and contributions from V-Day. Very cool.

Additional engagements held during my twenties:

​Molloy Gallery—​
Editor and gallery assistant; I collaborated with colleague Mona Medicine Crow to publish a catalogue for an exhibition she'd been the curator for

Illinois Action for Children—​
Wrote grants for the advocacy department of a large nonprofit and social services organization; managed a portfolio of more than $2 million in grant funds over three years

Quite random and perhaps ill-fated, I—​
Coordinated film festival submissions and the photo-print fundraising initiative for a nonprofit that worked with art and kids

​Wrote tiny freelance pieces that appeared online and in trade papers to promote exhibitions

Completed a creative writing MFA that was not a good program fit for me; but I met classmate Yuki Aizawa, and she contributed a story to my first book project years later

 

eventually I felt ready to develop my own collaborations and projects—​and Chicago is an amazing, perfect place to do this...

I founded The Places We've Been books independent publishing project in 2012 in Chicago. Thanks to the help of lots of family and friends, I was able to work on the project for four years. From a tiny home office while often in pajamas, I developed the inaugural title The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35 (2013), an anthology of original nonfiction travel narratives and interviews that brought together forty-eight distinct perspectives from across the globe. 

The dynamic contributors included a Marvel Comics editor who'd been my neighbor in our college dorm, and a show producer for The Amazing Race who'd been a friend during high school journalism class. There was an MTV Base VJ who is now a recording artist and works in advocacy, and a World Air Guitar Champion who's won annual performance festival competitions. ​There was a documentary filmmaker who wrote for the BBC; she'd published compelling stories online about the rise of right-wing politics near her family's home.

The Field Reports book rounded out at four hundred pages and released in paperback, hardcover, and digitally. For public events, I directed a panel featuring nine of the contributors at a co-sponsorship through the Illinois Humanities Council. The group travelled in from London, New York, California, Nebraska, along with several folks from here in Chicago and moderator Mariam Sobh. A second, four-person presentation took place the following year during the FRINGE Festival in Edinburgh, supported by a DCASE grant and moderated by a very serious me.

It felt good to work so that The Field Reports book, along with a second title Brooklyn (the black) (2015), landed acquisition on special collections library shelves at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Bibliothèque Kandinsky Centre Pompidou, The British Library St. Pancras, National Library of Scotland, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, and more.

​Through the end of The Places We've Been, I functioned as a developmental editor on other peoples' stories: a PhD Glaciologist who'd written his true tale of captaining a tiny boat across the full Atlantic; a young Texan blending fiction and reality in short stories about her father's life between America and Vietnam; a policy specialist, who decided to write poems about being a woman of color searching for love.

 

it turns out that if you love to learn, you’ll really love being part of the learning process for others... 
​it’s amazing to be a support to another person setting out on their path…

 

In Chicago I'd started hanging out at the massive art museums down the street from my home—​all the time. The first time I saw exhibitions of work by Kara Walker and Doris Salcedo I thought back to all that I’d learned from working with different types of artists and on projects. Walker and Salcedo's work added a new dimension to my understanding of how so many types of artists bring critical discourse to public space, and reframe and expand contexts. I also began to think more about narratives that are not only based in text, performance, photo, or film.
​
This is when everything began to click.

For two-and-a-half years at every moment possible I studied contemporary art independently—even finding discounted air tickets to go see mural districts, museums, art centers, nonprofit galleries, artists collectives, and arts campuses in more cities and abroad. Then I applied and was accepted to a PhD program in the UK to take this expansion further—​but was also accepted for a dynamic and very exciting graduate program at SAIC.

In a nutshell of two years in the program, I was able to more intentionally reflect on and expand my knowledge of arts administration and policy, exhibition studies, contemporary and modern art history, visual critical studies, and art education. I interviewed artist Tania Bruguera about organizing and politically engaged art; scholar Diane Ragsdale about her work of teaching a course on art and aesthetics at a business school; and Louise Greaves, partner of filmmaker William Greaves who'd directed the sole U.S. documentation of Senegal's 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts. I co-sponsored a cross-institutional invitation to curator Bisi Silva, for her visit to the SAIC Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection led by librarian Doro Boehme, and to speak on campus and in Chicago about Bisi's curatorial practice. 
​
I organized and led a multilingual, digital edition called emerge where my graduate colleagues across departments could hold conversations and interviews. For my own piece, I visited the local studio of sculptor Richard Hunt for a conversation between the venerable artist and his younger colleague artist artist Faheem Majeed.

Working with Faheem again, I got to participate in the ROCK project as part of a Management Studio's public collaboration with the inaugural year of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, orchestrating three artist interventions in Millennium Park, centered around a sculptural stage created by Amsterdam-based architect Kunlé Adeyemi.

I completed a rigorous curatorial training program, working with more than seventy emerging and established artists. 

 

Perhaps most significantly, I fell in love with curatorial theory to the same depth that I first fell in love with narrative nonfiction. So for my thesis project, I made a site-visit trip to Japan and proposed an original version of The Tokyo Show: Black & Brown Are Beautiful—​demonstrating curatorial practice and the discourses of contemporary art as instigators for cross-cultural dialogues across global space.

Yet, that earliest background in narrative nonfiction so strongly underlies my perspectives and ways of organization and presentation, as well as my research and independent curatorial work. In my own practice as well as research, I've become inquires such as: How does curatorial practice create moments of possibility, through unexpected constellations of knowledge? How can curatorial practice be used as a strategy in advocating and modeling artistic pedagogies of leadership?

 

It turns out, that if you love to learn you’ll love to be part of the learning process for others even more. For me it began with an opportunity from my graduate advisor artist Adelheid Mers to teach as a Lecturer for a three-week intensive at SAIC called Flexible Art Worlds; the course lays a foundation to assess modes and agents of cultural work, focusing on networks and organization models, and themes of community and equity. 

Since that first course, I now teach year-round as upper-level undergraduate faculty, and graduate faculty, in the Arts Admin & Policy department; I'm now affiliated in Visual Critical Studies and Professional Practices too. In addition to Flexible Art Worlds I've led courses called Curating in the Expanded Field, Artists Self-Promotion, Researching Art & Change, and more. 

For Fall 2019, I had an opportunity to propose and develop a new junior-level professional practices course. This will be the first year that I teach On Being a Woman of Color in the Arts—​a course premised on the necessity for young women of color to be able to self-direct and achieve their goals regardless of environment. ​ 

​Working with art students is perhaps my very favorite thing I’ve ever done in professional life. 

 

 

In addition to being on faculty at the school, I've continued to work in Chicago for arts organizations, arts centers, and arts projects where I was able to observe and learn complex organizational/operating structures, such as Hyde Park Art Center, on the Exhibitions and Residency team and also on the ALAANA Caucus; and that I've felt aligned with their values and mission, such as Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. I've been on staff for broadly reaching programs in artist residency and exhibitions departments, also at Hyde Park. I've been a studio assistant for the Talking Whiteboards project, and featured as a participant in traveling workshops and exhibitions. I've been a guest curator at Chicago Artists Coalition, and juried exhibitions and residency program applications, for the likes of the Arts + Public Life wing of UChicago Arts that's in partnership with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture; Ox-Bow; ARC Gallery; and ACRE. 

Outside of the field, through an initial two-year collaborative leadership training in the BMW Foundation's Transatlantic Core Group (Germany and U.S.) and then matriculation into the Foundation's Responsible Leaders Network, I've taken part in intensive retreats and workshops on civic responsibility—considering the personal, organizational, societal, and local and global. Through the body of the network, I've practiced how to demonstrate and speak up for the critical, creative, and collaborative skills of an arts education—​within a group of peers from private business, large nonprofit organizations, and government and diplomatic service. Through an invitation to an Inclusive Economies Workgroup co-led by B Lab, I was similarly able to advocate greater access to self-directed and sustainable economic opportunities for artists, and communities of color.

Today, friends or colleagues occasionally ask me, "Which part do you value more: teaching or curating? Or arts advocacy?" For me, these roles are cross-informed and interconnected.   

As an arts professor, I especially focus on curatorial theory as well as how art and cultural production serve as forms of advocacy and public discourse. Similarly, my own curatorial practice seeks to advocate and model artistic pedagogies—such as re-imagining, re-organizing, and conceptual actualization—as an under-tapped source of transformative, collective, and public, instigation, questioning, and leadership.
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(last updated 2019)