New Leadership
A Message from IDA’s Director on Racial Violence and Social Justice
Dear IDA family I wanted to write to you more personally today, not just as director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, but also as a Black woman, a mother, an artist, and as someone deeply committed to justice for the long haul. This quarter has been a rough one for our community.…
Read MoreUPDATE: Spring Class & COVID-19
To our IDA community During this time of change, we want to send you our love and solidarity. Today, as always, we take our cues from the most vulnerable of our communities. We send our support to BIPOC students, FLI students, Queer students, all those who might feel uprooted during this time. We send our…
Read MoreArtist in the Spotlight: Introducing Student Fellow Angel Smith
Angel is a multimedia artist and an IDA fellow. She seeks to create Art that honors her ancestors (the past) as well as what kind of ancestor she would like to be (the future). And while all these are important in her practice, her Art is also deeply rooted in the Now, for her own…
Read MoreThe New Director of Stanford’s Institute For Diversity in the Arts on How Art Breeds Social Change
A-lan Holt’s job is to help young people understand the immense power of art. In her new role as the Director of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), she helps train …
Read MoreLunch and Conversation with Kimberly Drew
On Tuesday, October 22nd, Kimberly Drew, writer, social activist, and curator of “black art and experiences” graced us with her presence to reflect on her experiences working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her decision to leave that space to focus on writing her first book. Ever so accessible and attentive, she shared a…
Read MoreIDA Online Courses. Long Live Our Mother Week 7: Joy Harjo: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
MAY 15, 2019
Long Live Our 4Billion Year Old Mother:
black feminist praxis, indigenous resistance, and cultures of queer possibility
AFRICAAM 39 / NATIVEAM 39 / CSRE 39 / FEMGEN 39
Week 7: Joy Harjo: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
Joy Harjo’s eight books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry; a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Forthcoming in the fall of 2019 is a book of poetry from Norton, An American Sunrise. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Course Description:
How can art facilitate a culture that values women, mothers, transfolks, caregivers, girls? How can black, indigenous, and people of color frameworks help us reckon with oppressive systems that threaten safety and survival for marginalized people and the lands that sustain us? How can these questions reveal the brilliant and inventive forms of survival that precede and transcend harmful systems toward a world of possibility? Each week, this course will call on artists, scholars, and organizers of color who clarify the urgency and interconnection of issues from patriarchal violence to environmental degradation; hyper-criminalization to legacies of settler colonialism. These same thinkers will also speak to the imaginative, everyday knowledge and creative healing practices that our forebears have used for millennia to give vision and rise to true transformation.
Fall Quarter with IDA
At IDA, we’ve had a beautiful beginning to our year. This quarter we’ve welcomed a new team of 11 student fellows, who have shared with us their artistic crafts and visions for the program. We opened the year with our annual Open House, where we shared music and joy with musician Calina Lawrence, whose music…
Read MoreCBPA’s Healing in the Afro-Present
On Sunday, March 4th, the Committee on Black Performing Arts (CBPA) hosted our debut event as a renewed collective: “Healing in the Afro-Present*: A Divinity Salon.” Our day together started with a land acknowledgment ceremony by Amara Tabor Smith. We then moved into rose water making and guided meditation with A-lan Holt. Jade A. Fair…
Read MoreAn Evening with Fatimah Asghar
On February 27th, 2019, students and community members gathered at the Stanford Humanities Center to welcome poet Fatimah Asghar. Asghar read from her new collection, “If They Come for Us” which Roxane Gay described as “An outstanding collection of poetry . . . wonderful play with form . . . These poems cover so much—identity,…
Read MoreConcert and talkback with tïna-hanäé and Sabine Holler
We were blessed to host the artists of tïna-hanäé and Sabine Holler during the first week of winter quarter 2018. A four-piece Shinto-futurist band from Queens, NY, the Asian American femme artists of tïna-hanäé combine strings, electronics, and taiko drum to explore the intersections of ecological and social realms in their work. Sabine Holler is a…
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