Research
We publish footage from our courses and events on our YouTube channel, a sampling of which is below.
Long Live Our 4Billion Year Old Mother, 2019
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?
ART + COMMUNITY: Division, Resilience & Reconciliation
Freedom is meaningful only if it lifts us all, especially those of us who have been done the most harm. In times of violence and polarization, art brings people together, and can articulate new ways of finding community and freedom.
In this course, we will explore how we make and sustain community, especially in the face of threats from within and without. We will do this especially through examining how artists and culture workers of color develop and advance practices that build mutuality, criticality, renewal, trust, and joy amidst ongoing racial injustice and cultural inequity.
Living Free: Embodying healing and creativity in the era of Racial Justice Movements, 2017
Justice based work urges us to interrupt systems of violence with systems of healing that recover traditions, invent new modalities, and connect to survival practices developed by many generations of people in community.
In this course we will bring together leading artists, thinkers, organizers, and healers to envision work and embody practices that resist the subjugation and erasure of their bodies, land, and natural resources. In this course we ask: what does it mean to embody health? How can we shift frameworks of pathology into frameworks of wholeness through intentional design? And finally, how can we all live free?
Introduction to IDA
This quarter-long series introduces students to leading artists, creatives, and scholars affiliated with the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Through a series of talks, guests reveal how their work illuminates crucial questions of identity, diversity, and aesthetics.
Who We Be
Over the past half-century, the U.S. has seen profound demographic and cultural change. But racial progress still seems distant. We remain a nation divided. Resegregation is the norm. The culture wars flare as hot as ever. This course examines visual culture—particularly images, works, and ideas in the contemporary arts, justice movements, and popular culture from the Watts uprising to #BlackLivesMatter, from multiculturalism through hip-hop to the successes and frustrations of “post-identity” art. How do Americans see race now? Do we see each other any more clearly than before?