Butler is one of nine grantees in the article category, for her article, “Deviance, Penetration, and the Erotic in Aïcha Snoussi’s Drawing Installations,” examining the Tunisian artist’s work. Butler’s research focuses on contemporary Tunisian art, global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia and North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory.
“I am honored to have been selected from amongst many wonderful scholars to receive this prestigious award,” Butler said. “This grant will support 2025 travel to conduct primary research for a new scholarly article on Aïcha Snoussi’s (Tunis and Paris) works. Informed by Heather Love and Audre Lorde, I argue for a new reading of Snoussi’s drawing installations, illuminating intimate relationships between theories of queer of color archives, deviance, and erotics.”
The grant program supports writing about contemporary art, with the goal of maintaining critical writing as a valued way of engaging with the visual arts.
“Artists play a vital role in illuminating key issues of our time, but it is thanks to the attention and insights of arts writers that artists’ visions become widely known and discussed,” said Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant supports and celebrates the crucial contributions of writers who not only transmit but creatively engage with artists’ methods, intentions, contexts, and blind spots to bring their perspectives into focus in the public sphere.”
Assistant Professor of Art History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Anne Marie Butler is a recipient of a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
In addition to nine article writers, the 2024 Arts Writers Grants include nine books and 12 short-form writing awardees, for a total of $945,000 to 30 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 each, the grants support projects targeted at both general and specialized art audiences, from reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies.
“The 30 writers receiving support this year are working on projects asking urgent questions about art’s place in the world today,” said Pradeep Dalal, director of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. “Exploring topics including art’s relationship to fossil fuel extraction, Native art and activism, migration and questions of visibility, internationalist solidarity networks, DIY publishing, and LGBTQ comic artist communities, and covering artists working in Chile, Columbia, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela, this year’s grantee projects actively expand our understanding of contemporary art. Many of these projects make unexpected connections between seemingly disparate aspects of art and culture. Despite the severe contraction of available venues for publishing in the arts, these writers continue to enrich and expand the academic disciplinary frameworks of both art criticism and art history.”
Butler’s writing has appeared in publications including ASAP/Journal, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and the London Review of Education. She recently co-edited a new book, Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (Intellect Press, 2024).
Anne Marie Butler, assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality at Kalamazoo College, co-edited a new book, Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (Intellect Press, 2024), with Sascha Crasnow, assistant professor of art history at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series, the book presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) region from artists and scholars. In addition to serving as editors, Butler and Crasnow wrote one of the chapters, “Transing Contemporary Art: Aïcha Snoussi and Khaled Jarrar.”
The book is important because it stands as the first volume to consider this particular intersection of geographical location, visual arts and queer studies, Butler said—hopefully, the first of many.
“Obviously, it’s a resource for people to learn about queer visual culture in the region and at diaspora, but Sascha and I very much don’t want this book to define that field,” Butler said. “We are more interested in the book generating questions, responses and new inquiry than marking off a territory. We hope it is used to build on.”
Each of the book’s three sections—Unfixed Genders, Intersectional Sexualities, and Sites and Spaces—includes at least one of each type of chapter: scholarly essay, interview and artist contribution.
“I think it’s unique to have that many interviews, and having artists’ contributions is a little bit unique to scholarly volumes,” Butler said. “Especially since this is about contemporary art, we wanted to have those artists’ voices represented. The artists’ contributions are one of my favorite parts of this book. It’s fantastic to read artists talking about their own work in this context.’”
With her research focused on contemporary Tunisian art with an emphasis on gender, sexuality and the state, Butler has long cultivated connection with the artists she studies. Working on this volume allowed her to continue that approach while broadening her lens.
“This volume was great for me to be able to think about some of the things I read, and some of the things that my scholarship is in conversation with, in a little bit bigger way,” Butler said. “Continuing to work with the artists and the people that I’ve made connections with has been important to me. I want to continue to build and maintain those relationships. I also want to continue to ask different questions and ask questions in different ways.”
The work of building relationships served Butler well as she and Crasnow prioritized contributions to the book from people living in the SWANA region, representing diaspora and bringing different perspectives and experiences to the collection.
“We have fewer contributors living in the region than we might have liked to, which is a product of some of the tensions that this volume embodies,” Butler said. “This book comes at an unparalleled moment of queer global visibility, and with queer and trans visibility, there’s always this paradox where it’s good that people are more visible, but also it can put people in danger. There’s also, on the larger scale, cultural imperialism, problems with global flows of scholarship, extractive scholarship, misguided ideas about saving LGBTQ people from their cultures, and a homogenization of a global queerness that is the Euro-American perspective of what queerness is. Visibility comes with all of these complications that we need to be really attentive to.”
Anne Marie Butler, assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality at Kalamazoo College, co-edited a new book, “Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa.”
“Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa” is available from the publisher at intellectdiscover.com.
Gayatri Gopinath, a preeminent scholar on visual culture and queer studies, wrote a forward to the book that Butler believes helps to contextualize the importance of the book at this moment.
“Anne Marie Butler and Sascha Crasnow’s astute framing of the uses of a trans methodology in the study of contemporary SWANA art is a reflection on the mobility of many of the artists they study,” the forward says. “For Butler and Crasnow, to actively trans SWANA contemporary art is to foreground flux and fluidity, and movement over origin or destination, as well as to jettison rigid identity categories. … The very formations of ‘SWANA,’ ‘queerness,’ and even ‘contemporary art’ are predicated on an acknowledgement of the difference, heterogeneity, and incommensurability of the various social and aesthetic formations that fall within these capacious rubrics. Rather than flattening out difference to create a coherent, homogenous whole, the contributors to this volume attend to the particularities, divergences and incoherences within and between these categories. They suggest that it is perhaps only in the recognition of the radical difference and unknowability of the other that a truly ethical relationality can be forged.”
Although the edited scholarly volume is primarily intended for an academic audience, Butler believes that the artist interviews and contributions make parts of it accessible to anyone who is interested. She hopes people will encourage their libraries to purchase the volume, making it available to a larger audience, since they were unable to secure the funding to publish the book online with open access.
“I think it’s a really special book, and I think that a lot of times when people hear edited volume or academic collection, they think, ‘Oh, that’s not something that I would enjoy reading or looking at.’ But I think that this book has a lot to offer a lot of different people.”
Butler has taught at K since 2019. She holds a Ph.D. in global gender and sexuality studies from the University at Buffalo, an M.A. in arts politics from New York University, and a B.A. in art history and French from Scripps College.
Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa is available from the publisher at intellectdiscover.com.
Kalamazoo College has appointed six faculty members as endowed chairs, recognizing their achievements as professors. Endowed chairs are positions funded through the annual earnings from an endowed gift or gifts to the College. The honor reflects the value donors attribute to the excellent teaching and mentorship that occurs at K and how much donors want to see that excellence continue.
The honorees are:
Espelencia Baptiste, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Senior Faculty Chair
Anne Marie Butler, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Junior Faculty Chair
E. Binney Girdler, the Dow Distinguished Professor in Natural Sciences
Sohini Pillai, the Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities
Dwight Williams, the Kurt D. Kaufman Endowed Chair
Daniela Arias-Rotondo, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science
Espelencia Baptiste, Anthropology-Sociology
Baptiste is currently on sabbatical in Benin where she is working on a book project focused on different ways Africans and Haitians claim each other across time and space. Her research focus centers on the relationship between Africa and its diasporas. She has been active and engaged within the College since her arrival; most recently, she received the College’s Outstanding Advisor Award in 2023 and served as Posse mentor from 2019-2022.
Her courses include Lest We Forget: Memory and Identity in the African Diaspora, You Are What You Eat: Food and Identity In a Global Perspective, Communities and Schools, and Missionaries to Pilgrims: Diasporic Returns to Africa. Within her teaching, she is invested in challenging students to imagine the production of power, particularly as it relates to belonging, as a continuous phenomenon.
Baptiste has a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University, and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
Espelencia Baptiste, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership senior chair, received the College’s Outstanding Advisor Award in 2023 as presented by President Jorge G. Gonzalez
Anne Marie Butler, Art and Art History; Women, Gender and Sexuality (WGS)
Butler has a joint appointment in Art History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research focuses on contemporary Tunisian art within frameworks of global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. At K, she teaches at the intersection of visual culture and gender studies, instructing courses such as Art, Power and Society; Queer Aesthetics; Performance Art; and core WGS classes, and this is her fourth season as volunteer assistant coach for the swimming and diving team at K.
Butler is co-editor for the volume Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia and North Africa, which will be available in October (Intellect Press). She has been published in ASAP/Journal, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and The London Review of Education. She is also an editor for the volume Surrealism and Ecology, expected in 2026.
Butler has a bachelor’s degree from Scripps College, a master’s degree from New York University and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Anne Marie Butler is the the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership junior chair.
E. Binney Girdler, Biology
Girdler is the director of K’s environmental studies program and a biology department faculty member. She focuses on plant ecology and conservation biology with her research involving studies of the structure and dynamics of terrestrial plant communities.
Girdler previously had an endowed chair as the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science. She develops relationships with area natural-resource agencies and non-profit conservation groups to match her expertise with their research needs and the access needs of students. In 2022, she and K Associate Professor of Biology Santiago Salinas contributed to a global research project that proves humans are affecting evolution through urbanization and climate change. The study served as a cover story for the journal Science.
Girdler commonly teaches courses titled Environmental Science, Ecology and Conservation, and Population and Community Ecology along with an environmental studies senior seminar. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, a master’s degree from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Dow Distinguished Professor in Natural Sciences E. Binney Girdler at Batts Pavilion.
Sohini Pillai, Religion
Pillai is the director of film and media studies at K and a faculty member in the religion department. She is a comparatist of South Asian religious literature, and her area of specialization is the Mahabharata and Ramayana epic traditions.
Pillai is the author of Krishna’s Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2024), a comprehensive study of premodern retellings of the Mahabharata epic in regional South Asian languages. She is also the co-editor of Many Mahabharatas (State University of New York Press, 2021) with Nell Shapiro Hawley and the co-author of Women in Hindu Traditions (New York University Press, under contract) with Emilia Bachrach and Jennifer Ortegren. Her courses have included Religion in South Asia; Hindu Traditions; Islam in South Asia; Dance, Drama, and Devotion in South Asia; Religion, Bollywood, and Beyond; Jedi, Sith, and Mandalorians: Religion and Star Wars; and Princesses, Demonesses, and Warriors: The Women of the South Asian Epics.
Pillai has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley; a master’s degree from Columbia University; and a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College.
Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities Sohini Pillai displays some of her personal Star Wars memorabilia including a painting of Grogu gifted to her by a student.
Dwight Williams, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Williams previously was an endowed chair at K, having served as the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry from 2018–2020. He teaches courses including Organic Chemistry I and II, Advanced Organic Chemistry and Introductory Chemistry. His research interests include synthetic organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology.
Williams spent a year as a lecturer at Longwood University before becoming an assistant professor at Lynchburg College. At Lynchburg, he found a passion for the synthesis and structural characterization of natural products as potential neuroprotectants.
Williams learned more about those subjects after accepting a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research fellowship at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical College of Virginia Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. During that fellowship, he worked in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology, where his work was published in six peer-reviewed journals.
Kurt D. Kaufman Endowed Chair Dwight Williams holding a molecular model in his office.
Daniela Arias-Rotondo, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Arias-Rotondo earned a grant valued at $250,000 last year from the National Science Foundation through its Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS). The LEAPS-MPS grant emphasizes helping pre-tenure faculty at institutions that do not traditionally receive significant amounts of NSF-MPS funding, including predominantly undergraduate institutions, as well as achieving excellence through diversity. She uses the funding primarily to pay her student researchers, typically eight to 10 per term, and bring more research experiences into the classroom.
This year, Arias-Rotondo earned an American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund grant, which will provide $50,000 to her work while backing her lab’s upcoming research regarding petroleum byproducts. Her lab traditionally develops molecules that absorb energy from light while transforming that energy into electricity. The grant will allow her and her students to take molecules they have designed to act as catalysts and unlock chemical transformations through a process called photoredox catalysis. In this case, those transformations involve petroleum byproducts and how they might be used.
Arias-Rotondo teaches Introductory Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Structure and Reactivity, and commonly takes students to ACS conferences. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University.
Daniela Arias-Rotondo has been named the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History James Denison will conduct a public lecture from 6 to 7 p.m. Thursday, April 11, at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts titled “Hogan-Minded: Race and Place in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwest.”
Denison will discuss his recently completed dissertation, which argues that past interpretations of O’Keeffe’s New Mexican paintings have obscured her engagement with Southwestern indigenous cultures. He will highlight the influence of tourist contexts and period racial thinking on her work, describing how it relied upon and perpetuated romantic stereotypes about those cultures circulating within interwar New Mexico and the Manhattan avant-garde. Ultimately, her paintings and writings show that she saw the region much as countless others had before: as both deeply informed by the presence and history of its native peoples and as open, empty and ripe for claiming.
Denison, a native of the Washington, D.C., area and a graduate of Bowdoin College, completed his Ph.D. in art history at the University of Michigan. He joined the KIA and Kalamazoo College last summer as the postdoctoral curatorial fellow. The event is presented jointly by KIA and Kalamazoo College.
The lecture is free to attend, but registration is encouraged through the KIA website.
James Denison is a postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and a visiting assistant professor of art history at Kalamazoo College.
Heather Boersma ’89 is the artist behind COVID Purse Diary, which is on display now at the Light Fine Arts Gallery.
A Kalamazoo College alumna who got her start in art as a child by making creations out of everything from McDonald’s containers to acorns, will be the guest of honor in a reception highlighting her recent work at the Light Fine Arts Gallery.
The Department of Art and Art History is presenting COVID Purse Diary, an exhibition by alumna Heather Boersma ’89, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through October 12. In the exhibit, Boersma uses recycled materials and random objects to represent a variety of subjects related to the COVID-19 quarantine. At her reception—from 3:30 to 6 p.m. Thursday, September 22—Boersma will read a few poems related to her visual art at 4 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.
Rather than shopping for a new spring purse in 2020, Boersma started taking longer walks, slower bike rides and collecting natural specimens and discarded artifacts that spoke to her about the shifting values of the world through the quarantine. Baking bread, walking on trails, trying to cut our own hair, hoarding toilet paper and wearing masks became global trends that fascinated her, inspiring her art for the exhibit. She hopes that in years to come people will look at the series and be able to find pieces that they can relate to and be inspired to use art to help process challenging times.
Since studying art and English at K and earning a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Western Michigan University, Boersma has taught writing, reading and aesthetic education at WMU and elementary schools throughout Kalamazoo County. She has received multiple grants and awards in Western Michigan shows and at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids. Since the pandemic, she has shifted to creating and she exhibits her artwork full-time in shows and competitions.
The public is invited to the free exhibit and the free reception. No registration is necessary. For more information on her work, visit her website.
Jo-Ann and Robert Stewart Professor of Art Tom Rice is among 25 artists featured in “Points of Return,” an online exhibit dedicated to climate change.
An online art exhibit dedicated to pushing for action against climate change while there’s still hope for the planet features two artists with Kalamazoo College connections.
Jo-Ann and Robert Stewart Professor of Art Tom Rice and alumna Bethany Johnson ’07 were among the 25 international artists chosen from more than 300 entrants for “Points of Return.” The exhibit focuses on the harm humans have caused to the Earth, particularly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, while emphasizing there are still multiple paths and approaches that can be taken to restore an environmental balance.
“Points of Return” is presented by A La Luz, which translates from Spanish as “spotlight” or “to shed light on.” The group was founded in 2015 by environmental artists David Cass and Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero to be a wide-ranging platform for sustainable and environmentally focused creative work. The exhibit unfolds across six sections, defined as viewing rooms, that describe a movement that comes full circle through planetary ecosystems, art disciplines and mediums.
Bethany Johnson ’07, who is featured in “Points of Return,” uses materials such as chipboard, foam, hardboard, paper, plastic, plexiglass, particleboard, plywood and wood in “Safe Keeping,” which deals with material consumption and the resulting pollution, climate change and landfill waste.
“‘Points of Return’ represents artists from many different parts of the world, which is important because climate change is a global issue,” Rice said while calling his selection to the global exhibit an honor. “What we do locally or nationally impacts areas of the world that contribute much less to the climate crisis. The online format of the exhibition ensures that many more people will have the opportunity to spend time with the artwork than if it had been a physical exhibition. Accessibility to information is critical to changing people’s minds and behaviors related to climate-change issues.”
Rice used an Alberta-area oil refinery as the main visual resource for “Precarious Living.”
“I hope that my work will help people be self-reflective and ask questions about the climate crisis,” Rice said. “‘Precarious Living’ is a large-scale drawing installation that poses more questions than it answers. The subject matter is focused on an oil refinery made up of a mass of pipes, upgraders, holding tanks, chimineas and flares that amount to an absurd maze of fragile connections. What is really going on here? How can we comprehend the impact of an industry that is the very foundation of our economy, but threatens our very existence? The drawings have large sections of redacted information. For me, these redacted or negated elements represent both subterfuge by the fossil fuel industries, and our own self-imposed delusion that we can continue burning fossil fuels and that technology will save us. ‘Precarious Living’ is about being at the tipping point of global warming.”
Johnson’s artwork is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston, Texas, and she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. Her work in “Points of Return,” titled “Safe Keeping,” deals with material consumption and the resulting pollution, climate change and landfill waste. She feels those are important issues for artists to face given the work they pursue and how they pursue it.
“I think there can be an attitude in the art world that one’s conceptual ideas must be realized by any means possible; that essentially, the scale, media and production methods must inherently follow from the artist’s greater conceptual idea,” Johnson said. “This can lead to an incredible amount of material consumption, energy use, and the utilization of toxic, unsustainable materials within the art world. Under the current conditions of our climate crisis, I feel that the art world is in desperate need of material and energy ethics; that we think seriously about the impacts of our work on the environment, and strive toward artmaking practices that are renewable, environmentally sensitive and even climate positive in their impacts.”
In line with the overall exhibition, Johnson’s display embodies anxiety and hope along with grief and joy as she uses layered materials that are reminiscent of geological core samples, land formations and geological processes. Her materials include paper, plastic, foil food wrappers, aluminum and foam that bring new life to discarded waste.
“I hope to offer an opportunity for discussion and reflection on the issues of human consumption and material waste, while also generating works that are entrancing and poetic, independently from their environmental themes,” Johnson said. “In this way, my goal is for them to contain ‘layers’ of meaning, which hopefully allows them to reach a wide audience in different ways.”
Johnson said she doesn’t blame artists—or any individuals for that matter—for the climate emergency as the problems that contribute to it are systemic, and intrinsic to capitalism, energy systems and powerful corporations. However, individuals must grapple with the results of it.
“This is where I think we can all recapture some power from that system by mindfully adopting ethical, responsible and sustainable models of living and working,” she said. “It can be, at its best, a hopeful, even joyful, act of resistance and psychic repair.”
Johnson feels that individuals who stay politically active can have great power against climate change and environmental problems by acting locally when they act together.
“Much environmental policy and action happens at levels beyond the individual, so voting and getting involved with local and regional politics can be hugely impactful,” she said. “For example, I live in a neighborhood in Austin, Texas, that used to house several environmentally toxic commercial facilities where oil had been leaching into the ground for years. A small group of concerned neighbors spent many years advocating for the cleanup and environmental remediation of these sites, and were eventually successful. The fact that I can live here with a sense of safety for my own health is thanks to a dedicated group of people working on a specific, concrete goal. Both in terms of the actual environmental impact as well as the sense of personal agency that it can create, I think finding a specific, actionable and realistic goal on a local level can have a great impact.”
Rice agrees that the collective actions of individuals are likely to be beneficial.
“Timothy Morton asks in his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, ‘does my driving a Prius or recycling my plastic bottles really help,’” Rice said. “I think the answer is no, of course not, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to do those things. I think it was Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction who points out it will take mass social movements to create real change related to the climate crisis. Social change happens a person at a time. Individually, we can’t initiate real change, but we are part of a larger network. What we do individually matters.”
A major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will provide new learning opportunities for Kalamazoo College students and faculty seeking solutions to societal problems and promote the critical role of the humanities in social justice work.
The $1.297 million three-year grant will provide funding for the College’s Humanities Integrated Locational Learning (HILL) project, which is building student coursework rooted in K’s commitment to experiential learning and social justice to address issues such as racism, border policing, economic inequities, homelessness and global warming, while examining history, how humans share land, and the dislocations that bring people to a communal space.
The project was envisioned by Associate Professor of English Shanna Salinas (Co-PI), Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Assistant Professor of Sociology Francisco Villegas (Co-PI) and Professor of English Bruce Mills. HILL will invite K faculty to build curricula that foreground how power structures produce destabilizing dynamics and the collective response(s) of affected communities through the development of course materials, collaborative faculty-student research and community engagement, the development of program assessments and the sharing of oral histories tied to partnering projects and organizations.
Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Assistant Professor of Sociology Francisco Villegas
Each class within the curriculum will fit into one of two cluster programs: the first focuses on hubs outside of Kalamazoo such as New Orleans, St. Louis and San Diego; the second looks within Kalamazoo with themes relevant to the city such as prison reform and abolition, and migrants and refugees. Both cluster programs will contribute to a digital humanities initiative for publishing, archiving and assessing coursework and partnerships. Each will provide opportunities for immersing students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences.
Salinas and Villegas will co-direct the HILL initiative. The three sites outside Kalamazoo—New Orleans, St. Louis and San Diego—were chosen for their current or historical dispersion of people from their homeland, as well as dislocated communities with strong histories of social justice movements. About 15 to 20 students at a time will go to those cities to further their experiential learning. Salinas added that faculty and students will first put in research and legwork related to their collaborative partnerships with a year of concentrated work. Then, by about December 2022, they will be ready to conduct in-person learning, first in New Orleans.
Professor of English Bruce Mills
In addition to co-directing the project, Salinas will also serve as the curriculum coordinator for New Orleans. “We hope that students will develop an understanding of place as a living entity with a storied history and people who are a part of that location,” Salinas said. “We want students to learn what it means to be a part of a particular place. We want them to contend with histories, and meet the residents and people who inhabit the spaces we study with a real sense of generosity and purpose. We want to change students’ understanding about how they approach space and operate within it.”
Villegas plans to build on his strong connections within Kalamazoo County in leading the cluster focused on issues inside Kalamazoo. As a member of an exploratory taskforce (and now advisory board chair), he helped Kalamazoo County launch a community ID program in 2018, allowing residents, including those otherwise unable to get a state ID, to obtain a county ID.
“I think the grant speaks to the Mellon Foundation seeing promise in the kind of work we are imagining,” Villegas said. “It’s encouraging that they are willing to invest so greatly in such a project. They’re also recognizing the ethics of the project. They’re trusting that we’re going to engage with cities, including our home city, with a sense of respect and with a recognition of furthering community agendas already in place rather than imposing our understandings to other spaces. Most importantly, we’re invested in thinking about how students can consider the humanities in these projects as a way of producing nuanced understandings toward addressing very big problems.”
Mills will lead the digital humanities portion of the initiative. He noted that one measure of success for participating faculty will be how HILL shows the enduring dimensions of its partnerships with the digital project playing a large role.
“When you create classes, writing projects, oral histories or collaborate on community projects, these efforts often get lost when they just go into a file or a paper or are not passed along in local memory,” Mills said. “The digital humanities hub is an essential part of this initiative because faculty, students and city partners will have a site for a collective work to be published or presented. Community members will have access to it. That means the work being done will not disappear.”
Associate Professor of Music Beau Bothwell
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology Espelencia Baptiste
Professor of Art and Art History Christine Hahn
In addition to Salinas, Villegas and Mills, Associate Professor of Music Beau Bothwell and Professor of Art and Art History Christine Hahn will be curriculum coordinators for St. Louis and San Diego respectively. The first four courses that will be offered in the HILL project are Advanced Literary Studies (Salinas, English); Missionaries to Pilgrims: Diasporic Returns (Associate Professor Espelencia Baptiste, Anthropology and Sociology); The World Through New Orleans (Bothwell, Music); and Architecture Urbanism Identity (Hahn, Art and Art History).
The Mellon Foundation’s grant to K is one of 12 being issued to liberal arts colleges as a part of the organization’s Humanities for All Times initiative, which was created to support curriculum that demonstrates real-world applications to social justice pursuits and objectives.
“Kalamazoo College’s commitment to social justice is most profoundly realized through students’ opportunities to connect the theoretical with hands-on work happening in our communities,” Kalamazoo College President Jorge G. Gonzalez said. “We’re grateful for the Mellon Foundation’s generous support, which will enable us to build on our foundation of experiential education and demonstrate to our students how the humanities have a practical role in fostering positive social change.”
The Mellon Foundation notes that humanities thought and scholarship efforts influence developments in the social world. However, there’s been a sharp decline in undergraduate humanities study and degree recipients nationwide over the past decade despite students’ marked interest in social justice issues. The initiative targets higher student participation in the humanities and social justice while building their skills in diagnosing cultural conditions that impede a just and equitable society.
“The Humanities for All Times initiative underscores that it’s not only critical to show students that the humanities improve the quality of their everyday lives, but also that they are a crucial tool in efforts to bring about meaningful progressive change in the world,” said Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon Foundation’s higher learning program director. “We are thrilled to support this work at liberal arts colleges across the country. Given their unequivocal commitment to humanities-based knowledge, and their close ties to the local communities in which such knowledge can be put to immediate productive use, we know that these schools are perfectly positioned to take on this important work.”
Anicka Yi’s “Force Majeure,” 2017, is made out of Plexiglas, aluminum, agar, bacteria, refrigeration system, LED lights, glass, epoxy resin, powder-coated stainless steel, light bulbs, digital clocks, silicone and silk flowers. Yi has created art containing olfactory effects.
An Asian American conceptual artist whose work includes a mix of fragrance, cuisine and science along with collaborations with biologists and chemists will be the subject of a Kalamazoo College faculty member’s presentation at noon on December 7 at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Art History Eunice Uhm will discuss Anicka Yi, a Korean American artist, who has created memorable works of art that have famously contained olfactory effects. Uhm’s presentation will analyze how Yi’s work transgresses the boundaries that are established and sustained by the conventions of Western aesthetics to investigate the racialized and gendered politics of space. The presentation considers the deodorization of the museum in the context of a larger cultural and political process of deodorization in the U.S. that simultaneously excludes smell from aesthetic judgments and establishes aromatic phenomena to be “non-Western” or primitive.
Born in 1971 in Seoul, Yi began working as an artist about 15 years ago after a career in fashion. Yi’s work has won her top honors, including the Guggenheim Museum’s $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize in 2016, which included an exhibition there the next year. Yi’s work elicits visceral sensorial responses in the visitor, demonstrating the subversive aesthetic possibilities of smell to underscore and negotiate biopolitics of race and gender.
Uhm, who serves as a postdoctoral curatorial fellow at K and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, specializes in modern and contemporary art, with a transnational focus on the United States and East Asia. Her work examines the conditions of migration and the diasporic aesthetic subjectivities in the works of contemporary Japanese and South Korean art from the 1960s to the present. She has previously taught courses on modern and contemporary art, East Asian art, and Asian American studies at Ohio State University. She has organized panels and presented her work on Asian American art at national conferences.
In-person and virtual tickets to Uhm’s presentation are available at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts’ website.
Padlet is a colorful online system of boards, documents and web pages, which has been convenient for art classes in distance learning.
In examining how Kalamazoo College students, faculty and staff have adjusted to distance learning this spring, it’s easy to see the community’s ingenuity in shifting from in-person instruction.
For example, if it’s true that art imitates life, what is an art professor to do when distance learning forces a college’s classes online? If you’re Sarah Lindley, the Arcus Center of Social Justice Leadership Professor of Art, you paint plans that provide students with the personal interaction they expect, sculpt activities they can do at home with common household materials, and craft an environment that stimulates creativity in technology.
Padlet has been a convenient tool in distance learning for World Pottery, a class that introduces a variety of clay-forming techniques and historical perspectives.
Lindley this term is teaching World Pottery, a sophomore seminar ceramics class, and Mold Processes, an intermediate sculpture class for juniors. The first requires student research and reflection in a class that introduces a variety of clay-forming techniques and historical perspectives. The intermediate class uses mixed media casting processes to develop the more advanced body of work expected of art majors.
The sophomore seminar’s technology is Padlet, a colorful and easy-to-populate online system of boards, documents and web pages that looks a lot like many social media platforms, especially Pinterest. The format allows an asynchronous course model where students view instructions through mediums such as video and submit their projects before meeting individually with Lindley.
Arcus Center of Social Justice Leadership Professor of Art Sarah Lindley provided video through Padlet of how to create a pinch pot at home when a special guest made a cameo appearance.
Their first project involved creating pinch pots with paper and egg whites in an activity like papier-mâché. A second assignment asked students to stack objects from around the house, look at their curves and see how they might emulate pottery.
The juniors also utilize virtual classroom technology, including the use of Microsoft Teams, a collaborative platform that combines chat, video meetings, file storage and more to allow for regular face-to-face exchanges. Lindley wants her advanced students to build confidence for creating art under any circumstances and learn they can start a project from nothing. Lindley added creating something from nothing can feel like one of the hardest things to do and developing that skill will help her students for the rest of their lives.
“A lot of what we are doing this term is creative problem solving,” Lindley said. “Course planning is creative problem solving. This is just a more extreme version than we are used to. I’m also hearing from a lot of students that they really appreciate a curriculum that acknowledges different learning styles.”
So, given the term in distance learning, how does Lindley measure the success of her teaching methods this term?
“I look for indications of depth of learning in lots of little ways—an unanswered question someone raises in a reflection paper, a connection to contemporary pop culture in a presentation on historical objects from a distant past, or an “aha” exclamation in a one on one virtual chat,” Lindley said.
“My goal would be for everyone to participate in each activity this term,” she added. “The students still have rubrics, but students would have to persistently not respond to assignment prompts and feedback not to pass. So far the quality of work has been pretty good to great.”
ARTifact, fueled through K students serving as civic-engagement scholars, is a weekly studio-workshop series for high school students interested in visual art and social justice, while otherwise having limited access to art instruction. The culmination of the ARTifact workshops for the academic year came in an exhibit at the June 7 Art Hop.
When artists create, they express a piece of themselves. Art, therefore, can provide an outlet for underrepresented people to communicate their feelings, struggles and realities with those who will listen. That makes ARTifact, a program offered through Kalamazoo College’s Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), an empowering resource.
ARTifact, fueled through K students serving as civic-engagement scholars, is a weekly studio-workshop series for high school students interested in visual art and social justice, while otherwise having limited access to art instruction. The program creates a space in which participants communicate about complex social issues and express their identities through art.
The program, including the cost of materials, is offered at no cost to participants thanks to the CCE. Since its founding, the CCE has provided service-learning courses, research opportunities, internships, and student-led programs, engaging more than 10,000 K students in partnerships that foster academic learning, critical problem-solving and a lifetime of civic engagement. Through the CCE, students, faculty and staff have worked with thousands of community residents, more than 50 organizations, and in more than 30 community-based courses across K’s academic disciplines.
The CCE employs 25 civic-engagement scholars including Angela Pastor ’21 who are student leaders facilitating programs with community partners in which they and their peers learn from communities. The scholars are supported by generous endowments and grants.
The culmination of the ARTifact workshops for the academic year came in an exhibit at the June 7 Art Hop, a fun evening of art exhibits and events in and around Kalamazoo, sponsored by Arts Council Kalamazoo, that takes place during the first weekend of every month. ARTifact’s exhibit during Art Hop was stationed at the Park Trades Center, a former manufacturing facility on West Kalamazoo Avenue that houses a creative community of more than 100 designers, entrepreneurs and small business representatives.
The ARTifact workshops gathered participants for three hours every Saturday, where they created art, physically crafted their displays and created advertising posters before spreading word of its Art Hop show.
“It’s an honor to be able to provide this experience,” said Pastor ’21 of Los Angeles, a Posse student at K who also benefited from participating in a similar experience as a high school student. “When I went through it, it taught me a lot about what I could create. I know high school is a time for questioning for a lot of people. Art, I think, is a way to figure out yourself.”
Pastor said she enjoyed ARTifact week to week, although long term success would mean expanding the program to more high school students by getting more K students to volunteer. That would also mean realizing ARTifact’s full potential.
“I know some of the high school students explore their identity through sexuality or mental health,” Pastor said. “It’s a way to use art as a tool that educates and helps students explore their identity. It can be used to support their social justice issues and anything they’re passionate about. There was one workshop where we used only recycled materials. We also talked about what makes art worthy of being exhibited and we questioned what art is and what it can be. It makes me feel proud (the high school students) were able to learn about art and have all these experiences.”
