Land and Equity

Land, Equity, and Teaching (Calderon, Arroyo, Jojola, Noorani) - The means by which land is acquired, apportioned, controlled, owned, and preserved in this country have embedded within them our national legacies of racism. Land and race are historically intertwined in this country. Meet artists and professors whose practices seek to reconfigure these disparities that have existed historically and hear the ways in which they are radically reimagining land control in their communities. Learn how to challenge the historical relationship between land and race through such examples as cooperatives, land trusts, banks, vacant lot possession, and other tactics. And learn how universities can address these relationships and issues in their curricula, courses, and community-based learning.



Leading with community (Barash, Song) - In Boston, an ambitious partnership among the Boston Foundation, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and place-based community organizations intends to disrupt land development patterns. Through the lens of equitable placemaking and placekeeping, Harvard and TBF are supporting the capacity of communities to mitigate market forces, strengthen civic infrastructures, and express cultural identity. In its pilot phase, this community-determined, cooperative model is already generating learning and building power throughout neighborhoods.

Li Chiao-Ping Dance presents an evening-length multimedia concert telling the stories of United States citizens that are often unheard or ignored. These stories are that of immigration and assimilation, fact versus fiction in our political systems, both on macro and micro scales and are told in such a way that the audience can relate. Together the performers and audience members can create a collective ‘we’ in order to understand each other and move forward with enlightenment and kindness rather than judgement and oppression.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 2 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved shortly after submitting the Zoom form.

Critical Gardening and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (McMullen, Winkler) - This presentation introduces critical gardening as an emerging art practice that explores the ideological, political and narrative qualities of gardens at the intersection of nature and technology. Using examples from their own critical gardening art and research practice, the authors discuss challenges and opportunities for artist-led interdisciplinary collaborations in the context of a STEM-focused Midwest R1 land grant university. They also introduce the potential of art & technology collaborations to help publics narrate, debate and act on possible future natures (desirable and potentially undesirable ones) and the politics that shape them.

Shale Play (Kasdorf, Rubin) - In the parlance of the oil and gas industry, “shale play” refers to a region exploited for its natural gas by means of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—transient industrial processes that often occur far from the populations that benefit from them. Amid polarized claims about fracking and pressure to develop these areas around the world, Kasdorf and Rubin have gathered evidence from everyday life in the Marcellus Shale Play in Pennsylvania. Poet and photographer follow in the footsteps of the documentarians of the 1930s, taking a deliberate and thoughtful approach to gather the stories of workers on pipelines and well pads, landowners and leaseholders, waitresses, ministers, farmers, retired miners, teachers, and neighbors. The poet and photographer will discuss the inception of their documentary project, their collaborative process, and offer samples of their work of witness, inviting the audience to look beyond the easy caricatures of the white working class to create an urgent, authentic representation of a sacrifice zone that fuels America.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 1 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved shortly after submitting the Zoom form.

Through photography, video and narrative, we introduce participants to the Rising Tide of Pollution at Ilavalai Beach Project at St. Henry’s College, Ilavalai, Sri Lanka. Overview of the site and project processes under the umbrella of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) include the use of field journals, online research, engineering design processes, and arts, culture and storytelling as methods of inquiry, problem-solving and advocacy. We share lessons learned and creative strategies for prompting dialogue, problem solving, idea generating– processes and skills embedded in project-based learning. Participants engage in a hands-on engineering design process activity addressing an environmental challenge.

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From its broader impacts funding category to its support of Advancing Research Impact on Society (ARIS), the National Science Foundation has increasingly prioritized situating its funded research in terms of its impact in improving large systemic societal problems. How is this funding fostering the participation of interdisciplinary individuals and institutions in the projects it supports? Where are they going next in reaching beyond STEM for expertise in its funded projects?

Please register via this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_r_C-bgwBSB-S5yFeoTFP0Q

If you have added the session to your schedule, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.


Mobilizing Anti-Racist Arts Leaders On Campus and Beyond (Christmas, Logan, Vader) - How can arts leadership training grounded in an analysis of racial oppression build knowledge, skills, and abilities to challenge racism in dance education, on and off-campus? During this three-part lightning talk, co-founders of the Anti-Racist Working Group within Ohio State University’s Department of Dance discuss how the organization brings embodied practices and lived experience into conversation with anti-racist thought and action to imagine new models for institutional change-making. Presenters will share perspectives on creating a multi-year workshop series, facilitating affinity groups for co-learning, and designing an Anti-Racism Leadership in the Arts certificate program.

Undoing Classical Whiteness: Incorporating Anti-Racism and Social Justice into Classical Music Courses at UW-Madison (Rodriguez, Valmadrid) - To implement anti-racism into the coursework at the Mead Witter School of Music and UW-Madison as a whole, the presenters created a musicology course that enforces foundational social justice concepts and applied them to classical music examples and events. The purpose of this course is to emphasize that music is not exempt from the power structures that propagate white supremacy. This lightning talk summarizes the MWSOM’s need for this course in comparison to the current curriculum, outlines the overall framework of the course, and describes current responses and actions from the MWSOM.

Resiliency Against Bureaucracy: How to Obtain Accountable Action from Trickle-Down Academics (Nambo-Escobar) - From Black and Brown originated dances being reduced to elective coursework to professors teaching in racist manners and from racist perspectives, the University of Washington’s Dance department has upheld institutional systems of racism. There has been an influx of Black and Brown dancers in the department ever since Street Styles and West African dance classes were added to the curriculum over two years ago, but these courses are taught by untenured lecturers and little effort has been made to retain these dancers for the Dance major. The presenter will share her experience as a Brown student navigating bureaucratic systems with the hope of enacting sustainable change. In particular, she will discuss her role on a student-formed organization, the Arts Diversity Council, and the Council’s work to create an antiracist and equitable Dance department.

Please note: Register in advance for this meeting:
https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qdeiurzsrGNQObH2_a3uywUktBcNoEy0V. If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be approved to enter the session. 

This session will start promptly at 3:00PM EDT. The room will open at 2:55PM. Please register as soon as possible and plan to arrive to the session on time so that the workshop facilitators can use their allotted 90 minutes. 

What new cartographies will help us navigate hybrid physical-virtual spaces and guide the way we create, share, engage, make equitable, and deliver arts inquiry in higher education? Due to the pandemic, we have lost the shared physical space that has been a central feature of the arts in higher education, and are suddenly working in distributed and diverse spaces, mediated by digital interfaces that impose new limitations and unfamiliar opportunities for our learning communities. Venturing into this territory, guided by an unfinished map, we are confronting new issues of equity and access to the shared “space” of arts inquiry, as we define the contours and boundaries of the hybrid learning environment in real-time. In this workshop, we will use a series of collaborative art-making activities as a case study to begin charting pitfalls and promising routes to help guide us in creating equitable learning environments for art inquiry in hybrid domains.

Please register using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0ZN8L3EiRY6QvHm7nMnIrg

If you have added this session to you schedule, you will be approved to enter the session. We recommend registering at least 5 minutes before the start of the session.

Promoting Women's Health (Wu, Xu) - "For Tashi" is the outcome of a media arts collaboration between research universities to promote women's health awareness. Combing computer program generated visuals, soundscape, voice, and the sound of ancient Chinese instrument Konghou, this project depicts the physical and emotional journey that a woman goes through when losing her baby prematurely, aiming to share this deeply personal, largely unspoken, and often overlooked experience with the public, in the hope to transfer the previously private excursion to a communal experience.

Black Power Station (Crisman) - This presentation will examine lessons learned from the Black Power Station project—a collaboration with the Xhosa community to design a sustainable public performance space and arts programming in an abandoned power station in Makhanda, South Africa. Indigenous artists have informally occupied this ruined landscape of giant brick industrial buildings as an arts space for black youth from the townships. Our creative research seeks to help the community overcome the history of apartheid and its legacies—land colonization, radical economic and social inequality, high unemployment and poverty, violence, political alienation, and environmental degradation. Xhosa hip-hop musician and activist Xolile Madinda and University of Virginia faculty and students in Architecture, Ethnomusicology, and Global Development Studies are co-producing music, poetry, art, and architecture through physical exchanges and virtual connections, while stimulating arts education and arts-based community development at the Black Power Station. The collaborative design process is highly iterative and emergent, treats all participants as socially and culturally situated, and troubles conventional ideas of expertise and divisions of labor. We are generating a sustainable creative process shaped by significant social and cultural difference—while designing arts programming and indigenous cultural space to promote equity, reduce resource use and foster community thriving.

Please register for this session using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_laOA4ILQQDSb2HEEWv8aSQ 

If you have added this session to you schedule, you will be approved to enter the session. We recommend registering at least 5 minutes before the start of the session.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Interdisciplinary Arts Residency Program (IARP) brings innovative, world-class artists to campus for a semester-long residency. Artists teach a course, present at least one free public event, and participate in community outreach activities and sponsored by at least two units. Since 1999, we have hosted more than 40 residencies with over 60 campus and community partners.

These interdisciplinary artists-in-residence have used performance to express their work in the environmental, land equity, and/or sustainability realm before, during, or after their residency. They will all speak briefly about their residency, their work, collaborations, and impacts on their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The IARP artists are Laura Anderson Barbata (Spring 2015) with residency guest artist Bently Spang; Carrie Hanson (Fall 2019) with residency guest artist Faheem Majeed; and Ben Barson and Gizelxanath Rodriguez (Spring 2020).

This session is supported by the Anonymous Fund at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Please note: You can register for this session using the following link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mxK2j2C1Qgyoty4Q4Wfiww

If you have added this session to you schedule, you will be approved to enter the session. We recommend registering at least 5 minutes before the start of the session.

Drum Power is a drum and dance experience for young people where they can development new skills and explore West African and Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions. Drum Power focuses on three pillars of social-emotional learning: discipline, community and leadership. This musical performance and panel discussion will feature youth performers and presenters focusing on Drum Power as an exploration/expression of personal sovereignty”— the governing of one’s self as personal agency -- the same sovereignty that is the focus of indigenous efforts around land and equity and the politics of place. Students will share what that experience has been for them and instructors will share how that artistic creative space is supported and maintained.

Please note: You can register for this session using the following link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NZkYxdP-QzOmgIc-W_jC_A

If you have added this session to you schedule, you will be approved to enter the session. We recommend registering at least 5 minutes before the start of the session.

Dancing through Civil Justice Issues (Davis) - This lightning talk will discuss my personal experiences as an African American dance major at The University of Alabama. I will recount the discussions surrounding recruiting more dancers of color to our Dance Department. I will also discuss my thoughts on how we can add more works that address civil justice issues and how we can work to cultivate a positive environment for people of color in the dance department for years to come. This discussion will also address my faults in staying silent.

Why Representation Is Not Enough (Cuyubamba Kong) will explain why the idea of diversity in recruitment is not the solution we need. Without deeply examining the institutional structure on all levels - from a classroom to a school to the university as large - we cannot guarantee safe spaces for BIPOC students, faculty, or administration. This talk will explain Why Representation Is Not Enough, and what changes are necessary for a better, safer learning environment like those promised by our institutions.

Educational Institutions as Leaders for Change in Theatre Arts (Martinez) - An issue university theatre programs will claim to have is a lack of BIPOC students auditioning, but what is far more important is retaining the students they get. There can be feelings of otherness that keep BIPOC students from staying for two reasons: we are either tokenized, or go completely unnoticed because we don’t fit into a certain “box.” These institutions must see their students not just for their "diversity," but for what they bring as artists. We are the future producers, directors, and actors that will be making the decisions for the future of the theatre community. Our program faculty must be the ones to lead the change by pledging to take specific, anti-racist actions that will grow into long-lasting, sustainable change that will move our community forward.

Please use this link to register for the Zoom session: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VYehS5G_Tv6AWb2C_QvKJg
If you have added the session to your Zoom schedule, you will be approved to enter the room.

This series of short talks will offer a nuanced picture of the interconnected issues surrounding psychedelic ritual/therapy, art/music, and land/equity, in the context of both research universities and indigenous cultural practices. The series of talks will begin by highlighting the relationship between the Huichol (Wixáritari) peyote ritual, their art and music traditions, and the fight for land and equity to sustain their culture. The second portion of the session will feature talks focusing on dimensions of art/music and land/equity within the context of psychedelic clinical trials. Each speaker will offer different and vital perspectives gained from a variety of fields of expertise--in ethnobotany, pharmacology, music theory, history of science, human development and family studies, Latin American studies, environmental studies, and rhetorical science and technology studies. The lightning talks will then culminate in a formal presentation/performance given by a Huichol artist.

Please register using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6W10o0guTKS9K0Fw40LPBg

If you have added the session to your Schedule, you will be admitted to the room. 

This series of short talks will offer a nuanced picture of the interconnected issues surrounding psychedelic ritual/therapy, art/music, and land/equity, in the context of both research universities and indigenous cultural practices. The series of talks will begin by highlighting the relationship between the Huichol (Wixáritari) peyote ritual, their art and music traditions, and the fight for land and equity to sustain their culture. The second portion of the session will feature talks focusing on dimensions of art/music and land/equity within the context of psychedelic clinical trials. Each speaker will offer different and vital perspectives gained from a variety of fields of expertise--in ethnobotany, pharmacology, music theory, history of science, human development and family studies, Latin American studies, environmental studies, and rhetorical science and technology studies. The lightning talks will then culminate in a formal presentation/performance given by a Huichol artist.

Please note: You can register for this session using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcsd-CuqzwvGdSYwmZTxxGPHrxYvSdFa7fG.

If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be approved to enter the Zoom room.

This experiential workshop will use individual movement and collective activities to model environmental justice principles at work. The activities are derived from creative process approaches used in making the performance work Overflow, which investigates the nature and impacts of Hurricane Sandy on the land mass and people of New York City. Activities utilize Artichoke Dance Company’s unique approach to contemporary dance partnering, requiring a balance of grounding and sensitivity. These experiences, both in doing and viewing, serve as content for examining interconnected systems, effective collaboration in action, and environmental justice principles.

The Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities would like to highlight our partners', the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine's and Leonardo's, D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) series. The event is free and will be held online. You can register HERE.

How might a cellist, a dancer, and a visual artist approach a collaboration and what does math have to do with it? Join the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS) for a D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) Experiment online. Launched in 2011, DASER is a discussion forum exploring multidisciplinary projects and fostering networking across disciplines. CPNAS moved DASER online where they are experimenting with different formats. In October, the discussion explores The Poetics of Mathematics and the Process of Collaboration.

Please register for this session using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DGP7sTHZRiqUmyUr8petig

If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be approved for entry to the Zoom room. 

Teaching with Galleries, Museums & Collections in a time of Covid: Case Studies from the Field (Halliday) - Many arts curricula are structured around object-based inquiry and engagement with museums, galleries, and collections. In a time of Covid, with restrictions on in-person visitation and museums impacted by furloughs, what are some of the strategies we can use to maintain these pedagogical and professional relationships, support our museum partners, and adapt our approaches?

Creating an arts-integrated general education curriculum (Millea, Bukoski) - The positive impacts of arts integrated curriculum at the K-12 level is well documented. This presentation describes a proposed curriculum modification and research design that would create an arts-integrated general education curriculum track for students at a public, mid-sized, research university primarily serving students from rural eastern North Carolina. We will describe the curriculum, research design, and institutional support and seek feedback from session participants.

Exploring Youth Resilience (Seale, Michaud) - The Madison Youth Arts Center is a new, multi-million dollar facility currently under construction in Madison, Wisconsin with an anticipated completion date of summer 2021. This center will help a wide-spread need for arts organizations in Madison to have equitable, accessible spaces to hold arts programming, increase programming capabilities, and thus reach more of Madison’s youth. Join a UW Master of Public Health graduate student and UW faculty member with the Center for Patient Partnerships at the UW Law School for a collaborative discussion exploring how the arts can be a powerful driver of well-being. When merging public health and the arts, what are the ways in which the Madison Youth Arts Center becomes more than a performance space, but also, a center for youth support to build resiliency through artistic expression? Be ready to roll up your sleeves and apply your ideas and creativity!

Editorial Board meeting for a2ru's journal Ground Works, a compendium of exemplary interdisciplinary arts-inclusive collaborative research projects, and a hub for reflection on the processes that drive such work. This meeting is invitation only.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

“Quilting Reparation” (Thompson, Pearsall) focuses on blankets and quilts as collaborators and coproducers in the resistance to ongoing extractivism, the construction of pipelines, and the work to memorialize and commemorate sites of cultural and personal trauma. It features the visual art of contemporary Lakota artists who contributed a quilt and quilt pieces to Takuwe, an ongoing exhibition by Craig Howe (Oglala Sioux Tribe) about the 1890 massacre of 300 Lakotas at Wounded Knee. Their work shows how quilts and blankets become agitators for land reparation, carriers of memory, and monumental collaborators.

Public Art and Post-Pandemic Place (Tarantino) explores how research universities can support community-engaged projects that dialogue with the emerging "new normal" of how civic space is negotiated, described, used, and shared. Projects emerging from member institutions, including Penn State University and Ohio State University, will be presented and discussed. Highlighted projects will explore how research universities can invest in projects that strengthen social fabric and connection to place; support immigrant and refugee communities; and rethink issues of accessibility. Particular emphasis will be placed on how the current global health crisis has illuminated a need for projects that explore access to shared space and how public art can address create a platform for diverse, equity, and inclusion.

On Specters of Home (Avnisan) - Who should be held accountable for the dark legacies of colonialism? And whose responsibility is it to work towards undoing colonialism’s persistent forms of violence today? On Specters of Home is a hybrid lyric essay / multimedia artist’s talk that meditates on these complex questions by exploring how new media technologies including 3d scanning, augmented reality and virtual reality can be used as tools for artistic research through which to better understand histories of settler-colonialism, dispossession and exile in Israel-Palestine.

Please register using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rfTLNvu4Thi1WnDlmYfu4Q

If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be admitted to the Zoom room. 

Adrienne Keene will cover cultural appropriation and stereotyping, as well as pull in more of the personal story behind Native Appropriations, and the journey of thinking about the blog as a space to challenge racism, and understanding the blog as a space for "consenting to learn in public." She will cover the 4 "C"s of the blog: Critical Lens, Contemporary Issues, Community, and Counter-narratives, and the ways each of these play out in the space of Native Appropriations. She will also discuss and provide practical advice about handling the deluge of hate mail that can accompany being a woman of color on the internet, and the power of the space to create real change, as well as how a blog can work alongside an academic career path.

Please note: You can register for this session using the following link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VQuGZ9HATF6ykcNVy8IeVg. If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be granted access to the Zoom Room.

Requiem for the Innocent (Behn, Rubinstein, Willis) - El Paso and Beyond is an interdisciplinary art project, both a traveling museum/gallery exhibition and a book from GFT Publishing, combining documentary photography, text, music, and dance by artists from four separate locations (John Willis, Robin Behn, Matan Rubinstein, and Shannon Hummel, respectively). The photographs are of the spontaneous memorials that sprang up in the wake of the mass shooting targeting Latinx people at the Walmart in El Paso in August 2019. The aim of Requiem is to use the combined art forms to honor and evoke the deep, sustained, and complex sense of grief arising from such tragedy, sustaining the attention to this shooting and all mass shootings. The text contributes lyric meditation on the feeling tone of the whole while also integrating research about mass shootings and possible courses of action. A visual/aural performance of the artwork will be followed by discussion of collaboration across time, space, and disciplines; questions about the right to speak about others’ tragedies; access to gallery/museum space and book funding/distribution; the silencing of public health professionals on the subject of gun violence; possible next steps with other disciplines and venues; and the struggle to reach as wide an audience as possible.

The Time that Remains (Foxley, Osorio) - The Time that Remains is an interactive documentary project which explores digital interactive technology and a mixture of audiovisual formats (photo collage, video, photo and sound) to create and experience of proximity and time within a place: El Aguilucho street, in Santiago de Chile. An interdisciplinary academic project, developed at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, it proposes the User a deep and efficient multidimensional documentary experience, sensory and narrative, which aims to evoke aspects of life and nature The project invites the user to interact with a street, listening to neighbours or entering places over the course of a day (morning, afternoon, night), in which three activities converge: commerce, health-aging and residence.

Please note: You can register for this session using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_I8GeVYbkRpu3AVg4tW_W2g

If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be admitted to the Zoom room.

Please note: You can register for this session using this link: 
https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcvd-2trD0qHdFruyNwdvcRhro43-CifSpY


If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be admitted to the Zoom room.

This session explores CARI (the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative) at the University of Alabama.  An in-depth discussion among researchers, directors, and staff on the most recent cohort of CARI projects, moderated by a2ru executive director, Maryrose Flanigan. We will compare and analyze some of the successes, pitfalls, and general lessons learned by CARI staff and researchers; as well as discuss how its guidelines were developed as a partner school within a larger network and what can be learned for others in the a2ru network who are looking to launch or refine programs that celebrate, incentivize, and capitalize on arts-integrated centers and programs.

Please note: You can register for this session using this link:  https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIldeqrqjwqG9yYUDFc8eTW_-aUe-eL3h8B

If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be admitted to the Zoom room.

Over the past four years, faculty from the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Art Practice, and Business at UC Berkeley have worked together to create a course entitled Collaborative Innovation. The course explores both collaboration and innovation at the intersection of these three areas of study: dance theater, socially engaged art, and empathy-focused business. The workshop will share some of the basic frameworks and course organizing principles used in the class to create a genuinely integrated interdisciplinary experiences for students; experiences that interweave personal development and growth with problem framing and solving skills with priority placed on learning diverse-teaming skills leadership.

Please note: You can register for this session using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1MQqwxqdQ9-kJIkMpOcESA

If you have added the session to your schedule, you will be admitted to the Zoom room.

The Urban Living Lab (Brisotto, Carney) - Designers at the Florida Institute for the Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) at the University of Florida are conducting research that aims to assist the resilient development of rural Florida facing growth due to climate immigration from coastal areas. This research is at its initial stage of developing the interdisciplinary methodology that facilitates inclusion, equity, and long-term solutions using a co-design approach as framework. Designers work to co-create; not merely translate or to dictate outcomes collected from the community. In this light, design offers a place to creatively think about the future of one’s town, providing interdisciplinary academic expertise and knowledge to the community so that it can be understood and processed through art and design. This presentation seeks to visually narrate the application of Urban Living Lab in rural contexts, collecting case studies from around the world providing insights on the method, its characteristics, strategies, and outcomes.

Richmond, Virginia is Burning: Who holds the legacy? Who tells the story? (Chessin)
Following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, Richmond, Virginia was one of the many cities that erupted in protest and violence. Richmond's legacy as the capital of the Confederacy holds a unique position in the U.S. history of racism, oppression. With the end of the Civil War clearly in sight, the retreating Confederate Army ignited the city's arsenal. The fires raged out of control as the city quickly became engulfed in flames. Less than thirty years after the end of the war, the Jim Crow era seized the imagination of the wealthy power brokers of the city, now rebuilt. To honor "the lost cause", enormous statues were erected to honor several Confederate generals, most notably Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia whose surrender to General Grant of the Union Army marked the beginning of the end of this chapter in Virginia history. It is commonly believed that the monuments served as a way to create a lasting statement of white supremacy to serve the city of RIchmond in perpetuity. Everything changed by early June when the Lee statue became the canvas for graffiti announcing that Black Lives Matter. Over the summer the 20' high base and the surrounding lawn was transformed into a monument to Black bodies killed by law enforcement. With this presentation I will present the transformation of this monument and then share individual stories told to me—a middle-aged white woman—by young Black males during a Father's Day celebration. As I tell the stories they shared with me, I am raising the questions that must address not only the past history, but our current crisis: who tells the story?

Lowtech (Durán) - Lowtech UC design group refuses to assume that every problem needs to be solved with high technology. Sensible, sensitive, and pertinent responses to local realities can instill value in the productive and educational processes of our communities. The technology transfer mechanism, outreach and implementation of high-end scientific knowledge developed in Chile and the rest of the world presents an evident challenge; its costs and complexity are not consistent with the economic and technical scenarios of a large percentage of society. This high technology innovation dynamic makes it difficult to integrate into socially vulnerable or productive environments. In this way, a renewed perspective for the development of products and systems that take advantage of the state of the art in science, but simplify the processes and materials used, has had interesting results. To achieve these objectives, we have developed and implemented a design methodology based on the didactic extrapolation of evolutionary biological phenomena referring to the emergence of new species from symbiotic relationships.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

“Art has the power to demand truth and justice that isn’t bound by the markers of class, race, region, gender identity, or tradition. Art, in all its varied forms, is a form of resistance” (Khalilah L. Brown-Dean). Reflecting on Brown-Dean's idea of art as a form of resistance, Art for Politic's roundtable participants will discuss questions such as: What role does art play in the anti-racism movement? How can art’s power help us demand justice for Black people in America? How can we use art to resist epistemic, structural, and physical violence? What can our work do to highlight the true narrative of what BIPOC experience every day?

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

It is an outmoded paradigm to leave training in career skills and professional identity outside of Arts and Design curricula. This is particularly important in the Arts because of the specificities and alternative formats professional practice can take. And while elements of these concepts may be offered in parts of existing curricula or in entrepreneurship options, it is time for the Arts and Design in higher education as a whole to reckon with how these skills are comprehensively being taught to our emerging creatives as part of – not on top of or optionally on the side – our arts and design curricula.

Please note: You can register for this free session here.

In this session, a2ru Ground Works invites the interdisciplinary CERN-IARI team at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, to present their early-stage research, followed by feedback from a Ground Works panel and a discussion with session attendees. As the team—comprised of a visual artist, curator, mathematician, and physicist—is in the conceptual phase of their work together, their presentation is about potential and process rather than a finished project. Here, we borrow and adapt a process from the Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics communities, wherein individuals submit letters of interest detailing their research topics and questions for community-wide consideration. We will consider: How is the CERN-IARI team’s work valuable, with “value” assessed differently by our invited panel members, depending on their varied roles and situations? How does the team’s work advance the (still ill-defined) field of arts-integrated research? We look forward to exploring these questions together. This event is free and open to the public.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

When institutions rapidly transformed studio, performance, and other arts courses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, how did arts faculty innovate? How can we contribute to future learning environments that currently overlook pedagogical or arts perspectives? This interdisciplinary charette explores how the Arts can shape online learning and teaching tools, a crucial transformative step towards more engaging, even delightful, learning and teaching experiences. Facilitated by members of UNLV College of Fine Arts (which comprises Architecture, Art/Graphic Design, Film, Music, Dance, Theater, and Entertainment Engineering Design), research scholars, and with experiences welcomed from workshop participants.

*The College of Fine Arts Faculty who have agreed to contribute, and without whom this would not be a transdisciplinary design charrette: Dean Nancy Uscher, Adam Paul, Ashley Doughty, Francisco Menendez, Genevieve Tremblay, Jeffrey Burden, Joshua Vermillion, Julian Kilker, Kimberly James, Michael Fong, Olga Townsend, Sean Slattery, Timothy Jones, Yvonne Houy.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

Social Practice Composition in the Choral Arts: Composer Reena Esmail’s Take What You Need in Skid Row, Los Angeles (Murray) - Every year since 2016, Street Symphony and the Urban Voices Project – two musical service organizations and ensembles based in Skid Row, Los Angeles – have given annual performances of composer Reena Esmail’s “Take What You Need.” A unique piece of contemporary choral-instrumental art music, “Take What You Need” requires the collaboration between two musical groups representing differing musical and socio-economic backgrounds: an ensemble and choir of professional musicians, and a second choir of singers and audience members who are currently experiencing or have previously experienced living in a condition of homelessness. Drawing on an analysis of Esmail’s score for the work, her pre-compositional notes, as well as fieldwork with the Urban Voices Project, I contend that Esmail’s work exemplifies an emerging “social turn” in contemporary choral art music composition, illuminated by a theoretical linkage between scholarship on facilitation and hospitality drawn from Community Music (Higgins 2012) and dialogue and performance in the social practice arts (Jacskon 2011; Kester 2013). I argue that Esmail employs her socio-musical compositional techniques towards an overarching goal of encouraging personal and social healing through community-based musical performance.

“In C”: Using Terry Riley’s masterpiece for operationalizing a social justice approach to music pedagogy with refugee children (Samson) - The compositional structure that Terry Riley uses in “In C” is ideal for reconstruction and experimentation when teaching music composition to children. In this session I will describe my work using “In C” as a point of entry for composition lessons with refugee students. I will also introduce a new framework for a social justice approach to music pedagogy that motivates these composition lessons.

The Songwork Catalogue (Ercin, Mendel, Spatz) - Members of the research project “Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council 2016-2018) will share and discuss the Songwork Catalogue, a webpage containing 308 short video clips selected from more than 500 hours of video created during the Judaica project lab. We will discuss a number of possible ways of accessing and using this rhizomatic archive and consider the ethical and political implications of audiovisual embodied research, especially how it reveals the inextricability of technique, identity, and place.

The Bolz Center Advisory Board will host a virtual celebration to honor the life of our former director, colleague, and dear friend Sherry Wagner-Henry, who passed away on May 30.  The event will be hosted via livestream on Friday October 30, 12pm-1pm Central time / 1pm - 2pm Eastern time. It will be available via this link: https://youtu.be/ag6KMN75zIk  Anyone is welcome to participate, and no RSVP will be required.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.