Colloquium Series

Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain
Professor Meghan Moe Beitiks
Friday, September 22, 2023, 12:00 pm (lunch included), in 3331 Sterling Hall (the CRGW)
Co-sponsored with the Center for Visual Cultures

While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work “Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience,” artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research, Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy, Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-person process of making the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored within it as an expansion of the work itself. Embodied encounters prompted by the experience of the research and material in the book will lead to a workshop of creative exploration and communal brainstorming.

Meghan Moe Beitiks (she/they) works with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology through the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that examines relationships with the non-human. The work emerges as video, performance, installation, writing or photography depending on what arises from her process of research and improvisation.

She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied playwriting, acting, movement and scenic design. She has an MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied Bio Art, Social Practice, Environmental Chemistry, and performance methodologies.

She has presented work in California, Chicago, Brooklyn, Wales, London, Latvia, Australia and Russia. She has been a Fulbright Student Fellow in Theater to Latvia, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, an OxBow LeRoy Neiman Fellow, a Bemis Artist in Residence, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s recipient for the Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists.  She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, with a focus on Ecology, Performance and Design.

Conjure: Art and the Black Supernatural
Professor Bridget Cooks
Monday, September 25, 2023:

1:15-2:30 p.m.  Workshop for grad students and faculty, Hagen Room, Rm 150, Dept. of Art History, Conrad A. Elvehjem Building: “Art, Museums, and the Fear of a Black Planet“

5:00-6:00 p.m. Reception, Chazen Lobby, Chazen Museum of Art

6:00-7:15 p.m.  Public Lecture: “Conjure: Art and the Black Supernatural,” Chazen Auditorium, Chazen Museum of Art

Tuesday, September 26

9:30 -11:00 a.m. Gallery Conversation about Exhibiting the Emancipation Group and Lifting the Veil

Co-sponsored with the Department of Art History

In the public lecture, “Conjure: Art and the Black Supernatural” Prof. Cooks will discuss visual expressions of faith and the supernatural as a quotidian feature of African American culture. Beginning with the presence of paranormal sensory communication during the enslavement period, Cooks will address spiritually inspired visions and magic as critical to the struggle for racial freedom over time. For many artists, the supernatural is one explanation for the resilience of Black people. It offers hope for complete liberation in future worlds. Examples of artworks from the nineteenth century to the present will be featured.

Bridget R. Cooks is Professor of Art History and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received the M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from University of Rochester, and the BA “cum laude” in Art History from the University of California-Irvine.

Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She is author of the book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Her writing can be found in dozens of art exhibition catalogues and academic publications such as the journals Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly.

Cooks has curated several exhibitions including, Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California, (2018) at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective at the California African American Museum (2019) (CAAM), The Black Index (four venue national tour), Dissolve (Langson IMCA, University Art Gallery, UC Irvine) and Lava Thomas: Homecoming (2022) at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

Prior to her appointment at UCI, she taught in the Department of Art and Art History and the Program of Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University. She also served as museum educator for the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Who Supports Gender Quotas in Autocracies?
Professor Marwa Shalaby
Wednesday, October 25, 2023, 1:30 pm, 3331 Sterling Hall (in the CRGW)

What are the drivers of citizens’ support for electoral gender quotas in transition- ing and authoritarian states? Despite extensive research examining public support for women in politics in democracies, we know little about how the public perceives them in less democratic settings. The talk will focus on the determinants of citizens’ attitudes toward gender quotas in authoritarian Morocco and transitioning Tunisia – two Arab countries hailed for their progressive gender policies.

Marwa Shalaby is an assistant professor in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin, Shalaby was the Fellow for the Middle East, Director of the Women’s Rights in the Middle East Program at Rice University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Governance and Local Development Institute (GLD), the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Shalaby’s research areas are gender politics, authoritarianism, and legislative politics. Her work focuses primarily on the intersection of legislative politics, authoritarianism, and women in politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Politics and Gender and the Review of Economics and Political Science. Shalaby is also a steering committee member of the GLD Institute. Shalaby’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Parliamentary Affairs, and the Middle East Journal, among others.

Webbed Attachments: Psychedelic Lessons from the Multiverse
Professor Ramzi Fawaz
Monday, October 30, 2023, 6:00 pm, Elvehjem Building, Room L140, 800 University Avenue
Co-sponsored with the Center for the Humanities

Trans Migrations: Journeys through Art, Architecture, Comics and Gender
Bishakh Som
Tuesday, November 28, 2023, 6:00 pm, 1310 Sterling Hall

Charting my personal history of cultural and geographical displacements, I will propose that such continuous movements have been integral to my reckoning with myself not only as part of a South Asian diaspora, but also as a transgender femme. I will trace how ideas of travel, migration, language and longing for a sense of home/belonging have been crucial to my art-making as it has itself migrated from its roots in comics, through architecture and painting to now roosting firmly back in comics, a medium which has allowed me to integrate these previous endeavors into one practice.

Bishakh is an Indian-American trans femme visual artist and author. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Review and The Georgia Review, amongst other publications. Her graphic novel Apsara Engine (The Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda finalist.

Bishakh’s artwork has been exhibited at The Society of Illustrators, the Grady Alexis Gallery, De Cacaofabriek, and Art Omi.

You can see her work at www.bishakh.com.