Spring 2021 Speakers, Panel Discussions & Workshops

Race & Social Justice in the Arts Speakers' Series

Amy Elkins: Visualizing Mass Incarceration
April 23, 2021 from 12:00-1:00 PM. Click Here to Register for link.

Amy Elkins is a visual artist currently based in California. She works primarily in photography and has spent the past fifteen years researching, creating and exhibiting work that explores the multifaceted nature of masculine identity as well as the psychological and sociological impacts of incarceration. Her approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual and documentary. Elkins discuss this and other projects surrounding capital punishment, solitary confinement and mass incarceration.

A selection of 216 images from her ongoing photographic project titled Parting Words (2009 to Present) is currently on view in School of Art's SRO Photo Gallery. Parting Words is a visual archive created out of mug shots and testimony readily available through public record of the 556 inmates executed in Texas since 1976, the year the ban on capital punishment was overturned. Using an algorithm, Elkins converts each mug shot into looping excerpts from last utterances ranging from confessions to hymns, sorrows to fears. Parting Words is a work in progress, growing in size with the growing numbers of those executed in Texas, a state responsible for over 37% of all executions in the United States, which is more than the totals of Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri, Georgia and Alabama combined.

Claudia Zapata: ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
April 30, 2021 from 12:00-1:00 PM. Click Here to Register for link.

In the 1960s, Chicano activist artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking rooted in cultural expression and social justice movements that remains vital today. The exhibition ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now presents, for the first time, historical civil rights-era prints by Chicano artists alongside works by graphic artists working from the 1980s to today. It considers how artists innovatively use graphic arts to build community, engage the public around ongoing social justice concerns and wrestle with shifting notions of the term "Chicano." Mexican Americans defiantly adopted the term Chicano in the 1960s and 1970s as a sign of a new political and cultural identity. Graphic artists played a pivotal role in projecting this revolutionary new consciousness, which affirmed the value of Mexican American culture and history and questioned injustice nationally and globally. The exhibition was organized by E. Carmen Ramos, acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Claudia E. Zapata, a Ph.D. candidate in the Art History program in Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, serves as curatorial assistant for Latinx art.

Revisit Previous Presentations

Danielle East  "Why East Lubbock Matters: Art and Activism in a Segregated City" [October 9, 2020]

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. "Random Thoughts" [October 23, 2020]

Patrick Earl Hammie "Counterpoint" [November 13, 2020]

Making Connections: Race, Pain, and Wellness. Althea Murphy-Price in conversation with Shin Ye Kim and Danielle East [March 12, 2021]

Althea Murphy-Price and Danielle Demetria East Making Connections Workshop: Art, Medium, Hair [March 28, 2021]

Dr. Stephanie O'Rourke "Painting France's Forest Histories" [March 12, 2021]

Zora J. Murff: Looking as a Radical Act [March 26, 2021]

Lisa Jarrett: Socially Engaged Practice at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art)—An Art Museum Inside a Public School [April 02, 2021]

Debjani Mukherjee - PURPOSE AND PRACTICE IN ARTS: A Journey through India with Community Filmmaking [April 09, 2021]

UPROOTED: An Artist and Educator Panel [November 4, 2020]

UPROOTED served as the unifying theme for this panel discussion which begins with a consideration of borders and the importance of transforming local communities through creative production. The panel took an interdisciplinary approach to art to develop an understanding of the value of place and provide a resource for teachers. Uprooted was organized and presented by Rina Little, Ph.D., associate professor of Art Education, and Andrés Peralta, Ph.D., associate professor of Art Education, at Texas Tech School of Art. Guest speakers included Portia Cobb is a filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee; interdisciplinary artist Raoul Deal, coordinator of the Community Art BA Program at the Peck School of the Arts, UW-Milwaukee; Sean Justice, photographer, art educator, and an assistant professor at Texas State University; and Dawn Stienecker, assistant professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

Landmark Arts Exhibitions and Speaker Programs in the Texas Tech University School of Art are made possible in part with a generous grant from the Helen Jones Foundation of Lubbock.