Join us for a day-long retreat and reflection with artists Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel Atrib and Gina Athena Ulysse. The morning walk, starting at the UC Santa Cruz Quarry, will be a chance to reflect on individual and collective futures together as we move between the nodes of Gina Athena Ulysse’s exhibition Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins and Disentanglements. After a light lunch, Nicolás and Gina will then be in conversation together at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences galleries (100 Panetta Avenue). This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

10am-1pm Where Are We Going?
A 6-mile pilgrimage traversing the four locations of Redwoods Rasanblaj from the UCSC Quarry to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences via Variance and the Museum of Art and History. Please bring water and sturdy shoes and meet at the UCSC Quarry at 10am. Participants are also welcome to join at the Museum of Art and History at approximately 11:30am.

1pm-2pm Lunch
A light lunch will be provided for people who plan to join for both the walk and the conversation. RSVP below.

2pm-3:30pm It Was Never Meant To Be Secular
A conversation at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences galleries between Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel and Gina Athena Ulysse.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel Atrib treads an elusive path that manifests itself through creative experiences that he helps unfold within the quotidian. He has exhibited or performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07/21, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Sculpture Center, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance BAAD!, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, City as Living Laboratory, Princeton University, The Bee Friendly Trust, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Nicolás has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field.

Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, CEC ArtsLink, The Performance Project, Soaring Gardens, Jentel, Henry Street Settlement/Abrons Arts Center, Center for Book Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Artists Alliance Inc., Yaddo, and MacDowell. Nicolás has curated exhibitions or programs for El Museo del Barrio; Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; Bronx River Art Center (BRAC); Franklin Furnace; Elizabeth Foundation Project Space; Artists Alliance Inc; Art in Odd Places; Korea Art Forum; Social Practice CUNY; BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance; and The Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York; as well as for the Filmoteca de Andalucía in Córdoba, Spain.

Publications include Pleased to Meet You, Life as Material for Art and Vice Versa (editor), One Person at a Time (editor), Induced Labor, and For Art’s Sake, among others. Nicolás holds an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, where he studied with Coco Fusco, and an M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. He was a Senior Lecturer and Social Practice Artist in Residence in the Art and Art History Department at The University of Texas at Austin; and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Nicolás was recently a Teaching Scholar in Residence at Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY). Born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, he was baptized as a Bronxite in 2011. He is the Founding Director of The Interior Beauty Salon www.interiorbeautysalon.com

Image credit: Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel / Photo: Donna Hoffman / Courtesy of the artist

Gina Athena Ulysse (b 1966) Haiti/United States is an artist-scholar, Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Rasanblaj Praxis Project Lab (RPPL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Concerned with the visceral in the structural, her questions engage geopolitics, historical representations, aesthetics and the spiritual in the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions. In the last two decades, her rasanblaj approach (the gathering of ideas, things, people, and spirits) to her multidisciplinary art and writing practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She has performed at The British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Cabaret Voltaire, Gorki Theatre, House of World Cultures, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon, among other venues. She has held residencies at the University of Buffalo, Oregon State, University of Zurich, as well as the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy. In 2020, she was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney. In 2024, she was invited to participate in the Biennale de Dakar. She is a 2025 MacDowell fellow. Her major publications include the forthcoming A Year and A Day. Leonore Mau and Haiti (Oct 2025, editor with Dora Imhoff and U5), a polyphonic inquiry into the photographs Leonore Mau (1916-2013) took in Haiti during the 1970s; Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (2015); Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) – long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and recipient of the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award – and A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics (2023). She was the invited editor of e-misferica’s Caribbean Rasanblaj (2015), the Hemispheric Institute’s Journal for Performance and Politics. Her visual art has appeared on the covers of Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, Frontiers, and Meridians Journals.