The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies and the MA in Critical Studies are proud to present Willamette’s very own art historian, Abigail Susik, as she presents her lecture on Surrealism and Wage Labor Refusal!

In her wide-ranging research devoted to modern and contemporary art history and visual Abigail Susik focuses on the intersection of international surrealism with antiauthoritarian protest cultures. She is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021), editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-1967 (Eberhardt Press, 2023), and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State University Press, 2022). Susik is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and an Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University. She is a 2023-2024 Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies and the MFA in Print Media are happy to present painter and printmaker, Deborah Freedman!

Deborah Freedman is a painter and printmaker. Selected venues include The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Artists Space, A.I.R, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Hong Kong, Albright Knox Gallery, and Rutgers University. Gallery exhibits include The Painting Center, IPCNY, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Susan Eley Fine Art NYC and Hudson, NY, SITE Brooklyn, The West Strand Gallery, Kingston NY, WAAM, The Lockwood Gallery and The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. It is included in corporate and private collections including The New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rutgers University, NASA, The Library of Congress, Montefiore Hospital, Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and the US Dept. of State. In September 2023 she will have a solo exhibit at Susan Eley Fine Art, NYC.

Freedman studied at N. Y. U. with Knox Martin, Audrey Flack, James Wines and Robert Blackburn. She was a MacDowell Colony Fellow and Guest Artist at the Printmaking Workshop. In 2012 she was commissioned as Artist in Residence to create a suite of monoprints for the FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. Her monoprints are included in SINGULAR and SERIAL: Contemporary Monotype and Monoprint by Catherine Kernan, E. Ashley Rooney, Laura G. Einstein and Janice C. Oresman.

www.deborahfreedman.com | IG-debpaint

The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies and the MA in Critical Studies are happy to present the panel, ‘Ban This!’: Critical Race Theory, Whiteness, and the Return of American Fascism, with Dr. Carmen P. Thompson and Dr. Christopher Ian Foster!

This panel conversation historicizes and contextualizes recent right-wing bans in the United States (bans on Critical Race Theory, Ethnic and Black Studies, “anti-wokeness” campaigns, and many others), within White supremacist and fascist political frameworks. It seeks to both understand and challenge these movements by drawing on important contributions from Black authors and Black history. Dr. Carmen P. Thompson’s book, The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia, for example, shows how our nation’s White supremacist history undergirds institutionalized racism and anti-Blackness in a variety of forms, including the current manifestation nationally and in Oregon, of banning books by Black authors like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, bell hooks, and Sonya Sanchez and more. Thompson’s work situates curriculum censorship, disinformation campaigns, and the inundation of school board meetings by conservative parents attempting to muzzle the teaching of truthful and accurate histories within the larger context of White Supremacy. Author of Conscripts of Migration, Dr. Christopher Ian Foster’s new project leans on anti-colonial and Black Radical traditions to understand the recent turn towards fascist politics in the U.S., evidenced by bans, censorship, illiberal politics, and unabashed racism.

Carmen P. Thompson is a historian and author of The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth Century Virginia. She earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her Master of Arts in African American Studies from Columbia University in New York. Dr. Thompson is a highly sought expert on Race and Whiteness in America. Her scholarship was quoted in the December 2022 Oregon State Supreme Court decision, Watkins v. Ackley, in support of the Court’s conclusion of the disparate racial impact of non-unanimous jury decisions. She wrote the introduction to the forthcoming (2023) book, Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage, a photo book that chronicles the yearlong protests in Portland, Oregon after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020. And she co-edited and authored articles in the peer-reviewed journal, Oregon Historical Quarterly, 2019 special issue on White supremacy in Oregon. She has held visiting scholar appointments at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University in New York and in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University and has taught a wide range of courses on the Black experience and Whiteness at Portland State University and Portland Community College.

Christopher Ian Foster is the author of Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas (2019). He served as an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Jackson State University and James Madison University after receiving a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published widely in postcolonial and Black diaspora studies and has taught courses on globalization in the International Studies Program at Colorado State University, he recently taught in the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Oregon. He lives in Portland, OR with his partner and is working on a second book. He is currently a faculty member in the Black Studies and International & Global Studies departments at Portland State University.

Since the beginning of Fall 2022, Heather Watkins has participated in a year-long residency at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, working with faculty and students in two Freshman Inquiry learning communities. Through workshops, guest lectures, studio visits, and other creative pedagogies, Watkins collaborated with students to create new avenues for understanding and experiencing Watkins’ two public artworks, located on the PSU campus: Score (2014), Lincoln Performance Hall; and Soundings: Opening, Fathoming, Grounding, Searching, Returning (2020), Vanport Building. In this artist talk, Watkins will deliver an overview of this initiative in community-engaged learning that has allowed her to reanimate previous artworks with special attention to artistic process and modes of interpretation. She will also talk about her role in the inaugural curricular exhibition Beautiful Questions, which is currently on view in the Broadway Gallery in Lincoln Hall. Finally, Watkins will discuss the development of a publication (which she received a RACC Arts3C grant to produce) that will encapsulate and archive this exciting and multifaceted project.

Lecture will be held in Lincoln Hall, RM 225. This program is free and open to the public. ASL interpreting will be provided.*

Heather Watkins’ drawings, prints, textiles, sculptures, and installations explore the nature and nuance of line—as form, gesture, and sensation. Her work develops through iterative, experimental processes which embrace flux states and unforeseen results. Watkins holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a dual BA in English & World Literature and Classical Studies, from Pitzer College. Her work has been exhibited in many venues, most recently in a concurrent exhibition at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College: Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Portland Art Museum, the Miller Meigs Collection, and the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer. She has been awarded grants and residencies from many organizations, including a Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Arts 3C Grant to support a forthcoming publication that documents this project. Heather Watkins is represented by PDX Contemporary Art.

Funding is provided by the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.

*Accessibility initiatives have been made possible by a grant from the Richard & Helen Phillips Charitable Fund to the JSMA Community Access Fund.

Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am - 5 pm with extended hours until 7 pm on Thursday.

The JSMA at PSU is pleased to present “Atlantica: Speculative Fiction and Black Opulence,” a talk with Weaving Data featured artist April Bey. The talk will explore Atlantica, a world imagined by Bey as a critical endeavor into Afrofuturist texts and speculative fiction. Bey’s new body of work continues to broaden her unique vision for an ecosystem of mutual aid and acts of reparation. The artist’s expansive world-building—as an intentional decolonial practice—champions Black subjects as the sole representations of opulence, self-care and pleasure, telegraphed through the harmonization of diverse mediums and materials, including sequins, eco fur, and wax fabric.

Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism and constructs of race within supremacist systems.

RSVP Here: http://bit.ly/3GzLvgG

This program is free and open to the public. ASL interpreting will be provided.*

Exhibition, education, and outreach programs have been made possible by a grant from The Ford Family Foundation. This exhibition is supported by the Oregon Cultural Trust.

*Accessibility initiatives have been made possible by a grant from the Richard & Helen Phillips Charitable Fund to the JSMA Community Access Fund.

Image: April Bey, I Was Just An Alien That Came Down From The Sky to Save Your Dumb Behind, 2022, digitally printed and woven blanket with hand-sewn "African" Chinese knockoff wax fabric, 80 x 60 inches, © April Bey, Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles | Palm Beach