Bulletin 03: Kindred Launch Gathering celebrates the newest issue of Monument Lab’s print publication, Bulletin. Edited by Monument Lab Senior Curator Yolanda Wisher, Bulletin 03: Kindred gathers a constellation of writers, artists, poets, and thinkers whose work expands what it means to be—and become—kin. The evening brings their contributions into conversation through readings, making, food, and fellowship.
What makes us kin and what might kinship ask of us?
Through essays, poems, interviews, songs, and images, Bulletin 03 looks beyond conventional ideas of family to consider the relationships we forge across place, time, memory, and difference. Contributors trace queer community in Guatemala, consider vandalism as an unexpected form of kinship, enter the intimate terrain of archives and the legacy of Octavia E. Butler, commune with the dead and ancestral memory, reflect on Maya Angelou and the making of a new monument in her honor, and explore relationships of reciprocity and stewardship with the land.
Published in the wake of the United States’ 250th anniversary, Bulletin 03: Kindred asks what belonging might make possible when we understand commemoration not only as a way of remembering the past, but as a practice of relationship. Together, these works offer an expansive vision of kinship—among families and chosen families, neighbors and strangers, the living and the dead, people and place—and imagine how those bonds might reshape the stories we inherit and the futures we make.
The Launch Gathering brings the issue off the page and into shared space. Through readings, collective making, conversation, food, and drink, guests are invited to encounter Bulletin 03: Kindred together: to listen, kick it, make, and consider the ties that bind us—and the ones we have yet to create.
Contributors: Mercedes Dorame, Paul M. Farber, Raquel Gutiérrez, Anne Ishii, Aubree Penney, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Chuck Sams, Sasha Stiles, Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz, Lava Thomas, Marvin K. White, Carmen Winant, and Yolanda Wisher