SPEAK TO ME OF RIVERS PUBLIC EVENT
Wed. February 27 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Fine Arts Center, Lobby. UMass Amherst
Refreshments will be served
Please join us for a public discussion with Speak To Me of Rivers curator Kiara Hill in conversation with Stephanie Shonekan, Professor and Chair of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies, kara lynch, artist and Associate Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire, and Alexis Callender, Assistant Professor of Art, Smith College.
Kiara Hill is a fourth-year doctoral student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Stephanie Shonekan is Professor and Chair of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. In 2003, she earned a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology and Folklore with a minor in African American Studies from Indiana University. From 2003-2011, she taught at Columbia College Chicago, and from 2011-2018, she was a faculty member at the University of Missouri in the Black Studies Department and the School of Music. From 2015-2018, she was chair of the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri. Her dual heritage combining West Africa with the West Indies allows her to straddle the black world comfortably. She has published articles on Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, as well as American and Nigerian hip-hop. Her books The Life of Camilla Williams, African American Classical Singer and Opera Diva (2011) and Soul, Country, and the USA: Race and Identity in American Music Culture (2015) explore the intersection where identity, history, culture and music meet. This October (2017), her co-edited book Black Lives Matter & Music will be published by the Indiana University Press in the fall of 2018. In 2019, her co-edited book Black Resistance in the Americas will be published by Routledge Press.
Alexis Callender’s studio practice incorporates varied media in painting, drawing and installation to explore the intersections between myth, identity and material culture. Through the visual forms of historical narrative, the built environment and repurposed archival imagery, she considers issues of migration, environmental instability and hybridized landscapes. Callender has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and she has completed studio-based residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass, and DRAWinternational in France. Her work is held in the Art in Embassies Collections and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine. Callender teaches painting and drawing studio courses at Smith, where she is currently researching representations of gender and tourism in colonial painting and textiles, and the construction of the World’s Fair and other modes of spectacle futurisms.
kara lynch, associate professor of video and cultural studies, is a video, sound, and performance artist. She has received several awards for her video work, including the Planet Out/ifilm Short Movie Award in 2000 and the New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council for the Arts Individual artist awards in video and new media. Recent works include: ‘Invisible: episode 03 meet me in Okemah, Ok’ 2003/4 a speculative fiction audio/video installation; ‘Xing Over’ 2003 6hr performance 2.36min 3 channel audio piece; ‘Black Russians’ 2001 117min documentary video; “The Outing Trilogy” experimental video piece including: ‘Mi Companera’ 2002 12min and ‘Me-ba… I’m Coming’ 1998 9min. kara currently serves on the board for The Mountain School, Clockshop, and the Denniston Hill Foundation. She is a member of La Linea Interdiciplinario, a collective of women writers and artists in dialog across the US/Mexico borderlandia. She completed her M.F.A. in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego.
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For more information please visit umass.edu/umca