Tag: Pratt Institute

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Words of the Other Story

School of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty & Staff Exhibition at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn

Announcement for exhibit at Pratt Institute titled Words of the Other Story

School of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty and Staff Exhibition

Curated by Uzma Z Rizvi

October 22nd, 2026 through December 12, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 22nd, 5-7pm

The Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery 
Chemistry Building, Brooklyn Campus

Exhibiting Artists:

Fulla Abdul-Jabbar
Lara Allen
Ersin Altin
Ashley Bales
Francis Bradley
Sincere Brooks
Josiah Brownell
Gabriel Cohen
Brian Cook
Paul Dambowic
Rafael De Balanzó Joue
Cecilia Dougherty (interactive fiction, Shanidar, Safe Return)
Cynthia Elmas
Dominica Giglio
Nada Gordon
Jeffrey Hogrefe
Nurhaizatul Jamil
May Joseph
Adeena Karasick
Cindie Kehlet
Velina Manolova
Ágnes Mócsy
Ciclón Olivares
Nancy Seidler
Timothy Simonds
Jeremy Tausch
Morgan Võ & Laura Henriksen

There is no single story of how we exist in the world today. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1988), Ursula K. Le Guin proposed that the first human tool may have been a container and that narratives, like bags, hold many stories and their many elements together, creating their own worlds and universes of possibilities. It is not about one way of being, nor one way of moving towards a hero’s victory. This exhibition takes that idea as its method: a way of finding other stories together.

The work of twenty-eight School of Liberal Arts and Sciences (SLAS) faculty and staff are curated with the same ethos. You will find poetry as data, photography as oral history, disciplines carried together rather than divided, much like our school. There are moments of being held, whether it be the wind in a parachute, a female mannequin adorned with found objects as a hero of the future, or poems descending into holes. And we are gathered: histories carried across generations and borders, ideas translated between languages, media and machines, and inner ways of being, from memory and fear to attention and resilience. 

This exhibition celebrates the story-work and world-building that happen through our curiosity about time, place and futurity, and about the relations formed in human and more-than-human encounters. In this space of simultaneous time, where you may meet our many pasts, presents and futures, we invite you to meander, gather, reflect, and exist in ways that hold your own experiences, knowing that there is never just one story, but many interconnected ones.

– Uzma Z. Rizvi, Curator

The Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery
200 Willoughby, Chemistry 101
Brooklyn, NY 11205

Gallery Hours:
Monday–Saturday, 10 AM–5 PM

www.pratt.edu/exhibitions
@prattexhibits

This exhibition is free and open to the public.

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Who Owns Prehistory?

We do! All of us! Because it is about us!

So, no more exclamation points, please.

Cecilia Dougherty on a field trip on February 9, 2023, to the Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History with her students enrolled in HMS-340S-01, Who Owns Prehistory?  

This is one my courses at Pratt Institute. A course I designed. My baby. In the course, we non-scientists (we, artists, that is) look at the discourses of science surrounding the never-ending question to figure out what is “human,” who qualifies as “human,” and how many species of bona fide “humans” are there? The discourses are fun and interesting and always spark my imagination like crazy. And going to the American Museum of Natural History with my students was like turning on all the lights. They saw things I hadn’t seen, even after many trips. They pointed out objects, displays, topics that I had always missed or glossed over. Paleolithic music, for example – music, hearing, the development of the ear. Very important topic.

Cecilia Dougherty looking at an exhibit in the Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History, New York
Cecilia Dougherty at the American Museum of Natural History. Photo by Gina Marchetti.