ART AND JUSTICE
Art and Social Justice was one of the ACSJL’s most prolific collaborations. With a massive exhibition space in the ACSJL building, we invited regional artists to mount three large scale exhibitions. Each exhibition stayed up for two years so that they could inspire dialogue within classes and in the community.
In addition, two art faculty were faculty fellows and their fellowships led to four new courses, a downtown studio and new lines of research and publications.
The Theater Department became more racially just by working with us and in so doing increased the number of theater majors and minors of color, from one between 2009–2014 to thirteen between 2015–2019.
We are very proud of the fact that we made visible the work of 39 social justice artists on our Praxis Center; whose work you can see below. Moreover, over the 10 years we had three student staffers to serve as the arts editor. These students, often art majors, were introduced to the world of social just art through this position.
We impacted local arts organizations by co-sponsoring many of their events and hosting their visiting artists at the ACSJL; and we participated in the city of Kalamazoo’s well known monthly Art Hop. As you will see below, our attention to this area has increased the education and capacity of faculty, students and community in this area.
BANNER IMAGE: IRIS DAWN PARKER
Stranger Land, 2014
“The opportunity to work on Stranger Land through a Visiting Fellowship at the ACSJL in 2014 was a unique and meaningful experience for me. I got a chance to collaborate with a group of students from Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University in collecting local stories through interviews, casual conversations, overheard dialogues, shared writings, and oral history archives, among others. I also got to work with other members of the community, including researchers at KVCC’s Kalamazoo Valley Museum. Stranger Land ultimately functioned as a textual landscape of voices from the many Kalamazoo communities. It served as a mapping of sorts, a place where painful stories coexist with stories of love, activism, poetry, and the imaginary, and that is precisely what the ACSJL is to me. “
— Nayda Collazo-Llorens
Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project, 2016
Crystals, moss, black salt, wood, fabric, and sound
Afrofuturist Ingrid LaFleur created twenty-eight sculptures and a sound meditation influenced by the Hindu philosophy of turiya, which means pure consciousness. Inspired by jazz musician Alice Coltrane and her composition Galaxy in Turiya, LaFleur believes the map for the future can be found within this transcendent state. Her work centers on the premise no new futures can be created until trauma is cleansed from the body. Transcendence of the human experience is the only safe place where futures can be imagined freely without limitation. Using over twenty varieties of crystals, each resonating their own healing power, LaFleur responds to Coltrane by employing spirit technology in hopes audiences attain a higher consciousness.
The Land is Always, 2018
The new installation by Dylan Miner calls to remembrance an often forgotten past and lets it serve as motivation to work toward a more just future. For students at Kalamazoo College, it is also a humble reminder that this land belongs to peoples pushed out, and that the work to respect and uphold their history remains.
Theater and Social Justice
2011–2012 was deemed the year of social justice theater at K College. Continued collaboration of ACSJL with theater led to a jump in BIPOC students majoring and minoring in Theater from 1 between 2009–2014 to 13 between 2015–2019.
“Working with Arcus and learning from the folks at Arcus made me become a better playwright. The knowledge I gained from being in the Center, allowed me the look critically at plays and playwrights and how the depiction of POC or lack thereof is harmful. Thus making me want to write shows using some of the knowledge I got from The Arcus Center”
— Trevor Loduem-Jackson, K’21
“For me, at the core of theater, is storytelling. The people telling those stories matter and are just as essential to the story as the key themes and underlying messages in the story. Having BIPOC-centered plays in the theater department at K College made me feel seen, heard, and appreciated for the uniqueness my identity brought to the stories being told. These plays gave me a very strong sense of belonging.”
— Nakeya Boyles, K’16
Power: From the Mouths of the Occupied
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, MFA, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, was a visiting activist in Fall 2014. During that time, she developed a devised theater piece entitled Power: From the Mouths of the Occupied, a play based on real experiences of Kalamazoo and Western University students with police and state violence. The play has now been mounted in cities throughout the United States.
Two New Art History Courses
Faculty fellow (2016) Dr. Christine Hahn, Associate Professor of Art History, was an ongoing presence at the ACSJL, serving on the Faculty Advisory Board and providing strong administrative gifts. She also created two new courses, ARTX195: Art, Power, and Society and ARTX211: Architecture, Urbanism, and Identity. These courses led to an essay accepted for a special issue of the London Review of Education. Her research also contributed to her work with the College Arts Association.
Two New Studio Art Courses
Sarah Lindley, Professor of Studio Art, was an early ACSJL faculty fellow, a Faculty Advisory Board member, and currently is Senior Chair of the ACSJL. She was a steady presence and advisor of the work of the ACSJL during its first ten years. She created S.P.A.C.E., an interdisciplinary senior seminar focused on socially engaged and collaborative art projects in partnership with numerous community partners, including a billboard project with Kalamazoo County Department of Health Equity, and antiracism training with the YWCA. She created a second course, World Pottery, which employs feminist and anticolonial theories to the history of ceramics.
Professor Sarah Lindley created an off-campus community studio in downtown Kalamazoo during her ACSJL Faculty Fellowship.
It has developed into an immersive arts education and civic engagement program that places advanced art students and community partner projects in a communal studio in the Park Trades Center in downtown Kalamazoo. The program, now in its eleventh year, has continued to grow. It yielded approximately $95,000 in external grants that provided a salary for the Post Baccalaureate Fellow and studio rent. Space itself has been used to host exhibitions and events for numerous civic-engagement classes (from the English Department, Spanish Department, Public Health Concentration, and other areas), community partner activities, and art students of all levels.
“Intersection between visual art, poetry and performance art/film and activism was very important, and foregrounded the importance of art/social justice networks/nexus.”
— WOBS 2014 Participant
Embodiment and the Medical Gaze
An exhibition by Sonia Baez-Hernandez, ACSJL Visiting Artist. It was mounted in the Kalamazoo College community studio. Baez-Hernandez fully used her fellowship. She worked with local cancer survivors of color to co-produce and participate in this exhibition.
“I was honored to be a Visiting Fellow during Spring 2013. This was an amazing opportunity for me to be part of an academic environment in which I was able to conduct research as well as interact with students, faculty, and the community. I was provided a studio, access to the library, to books. Because of this, I created 20 small format installations, 10 drawings, and wrote a poem; all were connected to my experience with breast cancer. I also worked with and connected with BIPOC women in the area who also had breast cancer. We had an exhibition at K’s downtown studio which was very well attended.”
— Sonia Baez-Hernandez, Artist, Educator, Cancer Survivor
Reclaiming Black Male Identity Through the Art of Tattooing
An exhibition by Nicole Harrison. She interviewed and photographed men from her own West Side, Chicago community, where Black men use their tattoos to tell the stories of their lives.
“The 2012 invitation to the ACSJL provided me a platform to further discuss my MA thesis with others. It also put a spotlight on topics of black masculinity, agency, and body politics in a way that is uplifting and empowering. As such, this opportunity helped to expand my collegiate work as a scholar-activist committed to discussing aspects of urban and youth culture that are often demonized and/or overlooked. The reception I received from both ACSJL, the college, and the city of Kalamazoo, encouraged me to continue this work. “
— Nicole Harrison, Photographer, and Educator
Interpreters Guild Project, WOBS 2014
“It was a benefit to my own artistic and teaching career to be able to engage this and draw lessons to return to my own institution and professional encounters. Across the production of a new artwork, Varieties of Dispossession and the Interpreters’ Guild; giving lectures on my work, and a seminar for faculty, on disobedient curiosity in the academy; plus studio visits and informal mentorship with Arcus Center interns, I saw the Center serve a vital role for students and faculty alike.”
— Ashley Hunt, MFA, California School of Arts, ACSJL Global Advisory Board Member.
What People are Saying
“I enjoyed working with Ashley Hunt and Shagha Arianna on the Interpreter's Guild project.”
“Connected with Chicago- and Ann Arbor-based poets.”
“Meeting others who are also interested in using the arts in social justice activities”
“Art can be used as a type of therapy/rehabilitation as well as a way of crossing borders within oneself and between others in a classroom setting early on”
“Engagements with Social Justice Centers in Ohio and Johannesburg SA. As well as synergies with other visual artists around the globe, South Carolina, Cuba, Chicago, etc.”
Praxis Center Artists
