Expanding Local Histories
California • Kameelah Janan Rasheed
From the 2021-2022 We, Women nationwide exhibit.
About the project
Expanding Local Histories seeks to build an archive of East Palo Alto’s radical education history from the late 1960s through the early 1980s to situate this local history within a larger national movement of Black institution-building and self-determination. Alongside this archival effort is an interest in considering how this specific moment in educational history can provide frameworks, questions, and strategies for reimagining our contemporary schooling landscape.
Kameelah is returning to her hometown to explore how this effort and other archival efforts in the city allow us to understand how community change caused by gentrification and other factors impact the preservation of local histories. She is working with local residents to create a digital archive of East Palo Alto’s history, which includes the creation of a school system.
In this process, she has learned about the lineage of archival efforts in East Palo Alto, the wide dispersal of archival materials across institutional and personal collections, as well as the ethics of narrating a city’s history.
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
Access the We, Women Education Resource Guide here, where you can dive more deeply into the 19 We, Women projects and think more deeply about collaboration and community!
About the Artist
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, California, based in Brooklyn, New York. Engaging primarily with text, Kameelah works on the page, on walls, and in public spaces to create associative arrangements of letters and words that invite embodied and iterative reading processes. Rasheed is invested in Black storytelling technologies that ask us to consider ways of [un]learning that are interdisciplinary, interspecies, and interstellar. She is the author of two artist’s books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.