Artist's Talk, Walks, and Printmaking Workshop
March 21 – March 23, 2022

Organized and presented by the TTU School of Art in collaboration with the Charles Adams Studio Project, the Making Today Series seeks to create a dynamic space rooted in the School of Art's commitment to artistic praxis and to collaboration among faculty, students, community members. Together, we strive to challenge traditional ways of knowing, to render different histories tangible, and to meet and exchange multiple and contested stories. The Spring 2022 Season of Making Today invites interdisciplinary artist Scherezade García for a public, print-based art intervention in the city of Lubbock.

Scherezade García is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist whose work often explores allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization and politics. More information on García's work can be found at https://www.scherezade.net.

Artist's Talk, Scherezade García
Monday, March 21st
School of Art Building, Room B01 [courtyard level] 3010 18th Street, Lubbock, Texas 79409
(Paid parking located on the 4th Floor of the Flint Avenue Garage across the street. Limited paid parking is also available in the parking lot at the south entrance to the Art Building.)

Creative Walks as Artistic Investigation

Join us for a series of community walks in which we investigate Lubbock through the eyes of local artists and writers. Each walk is designed to facilitate encounters that can be used as research for the printmaking intervention. Attend as many walks as you wish!

Investigation #1: Walk with artist Aaliyah Limon
Tuesday, March 22nd
Meeting location: Tim Cole Statue, SW Corner of 19th Street and University Avenue.

A symbolic journey of Lubbock's past, present and potential, we will begin at the Tim Cole statue to discuss the previous seeds of racism planted throughout this town's time, as well as the history of mistreatment towards black and brown communities. We will explore how this history shapes our views and standpoints in life as well as artistically. Ending at CASP Studio 4, This small expedition will symbolize how far we have come, and how far we still have to go until Lubbock is a fully integrated multicultural hub.

Investigation #2: Walk with writer Katie Cortese
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2-4PM
Meeting location: Lubbock Sunrise Mural, north of the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, 1106 5th Street.

Lubbock Texas, the "Hub City," has a public face and a private one. This walk will begin on the campus of the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts and progress to the Buddy Holly Center—two areas of town that guidebooks and travel sites never fail to include. Along the way, though, we will move through and past Lubbock's downtown region where boarded-up buildings share space with high-priced restaurants, community health centers face new nightclubs across Broadway's worn bricks, and tattoo parlors occupy units between Texas Tech office buildings and long-lived lunch joints serving pizza by the slice. Join us to experience and respond to the many layers and faces of Lubbock's downtown and Depot District.

Investigation #3: Walk with artist J. Eric Simpson
Wednesday, March 23rd, 10AM-12PM
Meeting location: FiberMax Center for Discovery, E. Broadway and Canyon Lake Dr.

The Llano Estacado, a 37,500 square mile mesa roughly the size of Indiana, can be a hostile place to be. It is an expansive mesa with an iconic flat landscape that extends in every direction without disruption. Its infrequent rains provide few sources of fresh surface water and its relentless winds are inescapable. Why then, have people chosen to live here - to call the Llano home? Eric Simpson will explore this question on his guided tour outside of the Fibermax Center for Discovery, in Lubbock TX. He will discuss the hunter gather societies of the Comanche, land profiteering and the dust bowl, the Ogallala aquifer, and modern-day monocropping agriculture, which has come to define the region of the Southern Plains.

Printmaking Workshop with Scherezade Garcia
Wednesday, March 23rd, 4-7 PM CASP, Helen DeVitt Jones Print Studio

World-renowned visiting artist Scherezade García lead a printmaking workshop participants through the linocut technique to create a double-sided postcard that will preserve a memory from their previous walk(s). García then lead participants through the creation of a larger printed work that will engage the idea of self- portraiture in relation to the landscape of Lubbock. This exercise is designed to help participants think about belonging to a place through the production of symbols and narrative.

Making Today Series is supported with funding from the Ryla T. & John F. Lott Endowment for
Excellence in the Visual Arts and an Arts in Action Microgrant from the J.T. & Margaret Talkington
College of Visual & Performing Arts.

Contributing Artists

In an attempt to dissolve social lines and racial boundaries within her community, Multiethnic Interdisciplinary Artist Aaliyah Limon uses her artistic and social influence to provoke thoughts of change. With a passion for growth, love and mental health she strives to help this world heal from within using a special form of Eclecticism. Borrowing pieces from all aspects of herself and this world around her, she wishes to build something better for all.

Katie Cortese is the author of Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories (ELJ Publications, 2015) and Make Way for Her and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky, 2018). She teaches in the creative writing program at TTU where she also serves as the Faculty Director for Texas Tech University Press.

J. Eric Simpson is an artist, researcher, and fourth generation farmer in the Southern High Plains of Texas. He received his BFA at Texas Tech University (2013) and his MFA from the University at Buffalo (2017). He is an alumnus of the Land Arts of the American West program (2014) and the CASP residency program (2019). Simpson is a co-founder of the artist run space, CO-OPt: Research+Projects in Lubbock, TX, (2018-Present).