Joy Mariama Smith's Postgrad Year

A native Philadelphian currently based in Den Haag, Netherlands, Joy Mariama Smith graduated from the Dutch Arts Institute 's Master's Programme in Arts Praxis in 2017. They* were able to do this the support of 90 generous people who contributed almost $7,000 to assist Joy's studies after an unforeseen financial change left them living on a shoestring and working part-time jobs while doing challenging, innovative graduate study in the arts an ocean away from Philly on another continent.

THANK YOU! I'm now re-upping this campaign to help Joy in their post-graduate year as they launch the next phase of their professional life. As of this writing (January 2018) Joy has applied for a Search Year Visa to legally find work in the Netherlands. They already have plans and part-time engagements for the new year. Joy's ongoing needs include funds to assist with travel/commuting to their jobs, covering costs for visa documents, and general subsistence.

In case you don't know by now, Joy's work in the world addresses the conundrum of projected identities in various contexts. A sub-theme, or ongoing question in Joy's work is: What is the interplay between the body and its physical environment? Rooted in socially engaged art practice, they are a performance/installation/movement artist, activist, facilitator, curator and architectural designer.

Read Joy's thesis, Resisting Spatial Appropriation, here .  (Full disclosure: I provided some editing assistance to Joy on this document. Reading it and working on it was pivotal for me, their perspective has changed how I move through the world as well as how I approach my own artistic practice).

While seeking a full-time pedagogic position with an institution, Joy has secured two time-limited paid jobs for 2018. The first is at the prestigious SNDO (School for New Dance Development) that is in Amsterdam, NL. In January and February, Joy will be teaching and advising students in one of the seminal blocks within SNDO curriculum, "Thinking through gender: gender and postcolonial critique." Also in 2018 Joy will be working with a group of artists and designers under Pascale Gatzen, an accomplished fashion designer, educator and artist at ArtEZ University of the Arts , to contribute to a radically new curriculum for the Master Fashion Design at ArtEZ that aims to activate the dynamic and powerful potential of fashion to contribute to social, cultural, ecological and economic transformation.

Looking ahead to the summer, Joy is working with Jen Polins of The School of Contemporary Dance and Thought on co-curating a three-pronged program entitled Freedom to Move, which will be a symposium/caucus and retreat in June 2018.

Joy also intends to use the summer months to continue to connect to peers and practices around the globe through artist residencies. They are applying to the following as possibilities for their ongoing research: betOnest ,  a new artist residency in Germany located in a former cement factory in the village of Stolpe/Oder that offers time and space to artists in all disciplines; The Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) , the first residency in the United States exclusively for artists identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer; The QUEENS COLLECTIVE ,  a community art space and artists collective in Marrakech, Morocco; and Stroom Den Haag , a Dutch arts center with a wide range of activities.

Joy is also applying to have their work shown in galleries and museums in the USA and Europe. I am rooting for the success of their applications to the 2018 Municipal Art Acquisitions at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam's Freedom of Movement exhibition and Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia's 2018 Guest Artist and Exhibitions Open Call.

In the meantime, Joy has not abandoned their architecture practice. They have AutoCAD installed in their computer and can work on projects in your home or other structure on a freelance basis. If you'd like to be in touch with Joy for this, or any collaborative artistic work, you can engage with them through their tubmlr, here . 

Which leads me to another big goal of Joy's that could use funding or practical support: building a dedicated, legit website to share their work with the world. If you have the means to help with that, please be in touch.

No gesture of support is too big or too small. Don't you want to be a part of this remarkable career? Let's lift up JOY MARIAMA SMITH.

*they/them/their* :third person singular gender-neutral pronoun