Yañez-Lazcano’s work chronicles family history in the U.S. as it transitions from immigrants to Mexican Americans. Using large-format color portraits and still-life to re-imagine intergenerational narratives and push back on stereotypes, to-scale reproductions of colloquial family imagery address the poetic gaps and overlaps of collective memory. Further inspired by research in linguistics, Yañez-Lazcano creates sculptures and performances that engage with language ideologies. Embracing the element of repetition often found in manual labor, they collect, subtly transform, and compose discarded tools and materials related to immigrant labor in the U.S.
Farmworker Justice Day: (Evans Hall Lobby) Join racial justice organization C2C and Farmworker’s Union Las Familias Unidas por la Justica for the annual celebration of activist and faculty member José Gómez. This annual event honors José Gómez, a faculty member who was been a life-long activist for farmworker justice, LGBTQ+ justice and labor organizing.
Steven Hendricks, writer, educator (Evergreen professor) on his second novel, Now Beacon, Now Sea
“Now Beacon, Now Sea grew from my interest in writing about Samuel Beckett. The title comes from his novel Molloy: “Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.” I began with a conventional concept for a biographical novel, but I knew that form wouldn’t hold my interest in the long run, and more importantly, I knew that Beckett himself was squeamish about his life and work being overly connected. Ironically, he very much enjoyed knowing about the lives of the authors he admired, and he often made allusion to the idea that the keys to understanding his work lay in the works of others. Among those others, one of the foremost is Dante. So that’s where I began.”
Cerny’s sculptures begin with the notion that “furniture” and “mother” are figures that secure a value (to others) for their potential to hold, display, or be absent-mindedly left with things. Putting form and color to work and entrusting no small part to contingency, these works behave as something like gestural understudies for a play about the day-to-day grinding weariness and joyful slapstick absurdity of human relationship—about trying to Work It Out…or not.
https://www.dawncerny.com/
IN-PERSON in the Recital Hall in the Comm Bldg or live streamed on Zoom: https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/86447124526
Catharina Manchanda is the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum.
Originally from Germany, Catharina Manchanda received her Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York (2005), where she wrote her dissertation on conceptual art and photography in 1960-70s German art.
Recent and current exhibitions include: Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams, the artist’s 50-year career retrospective, co-curated with Cecilia Wichmann at the Baltimore Museum of Art (October 17 2024-January 19, 2025); Elizabeth Malaska: All Be Your Mirror (November 17, 2023-June 16, 2024). Upcoming: Bethany Collins: At Sea (November 14, 2024-May 4, 2025); Following Space: Thaddeus Mosley & Alexander Calder (November 20, 2024-June 1, 2025).
https://curatorsintl.org/about/collaborators/18237-catharina-manchanda
Eleni Stecopoulos is the author of Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing (2024), a book of linked critical lyric essays; Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a poetry collection. Her writing has appeared in Pamenar Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing, Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment, Kitchen Table Translation, The Encyclopedia Project, Open Space (SFMOMA), NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards, Datableed, ecopoetics, and elsewhere. In recent years she has given talks on poetry and psychotherapy at the University of Plymouth; on poetics and experimental ethnography at the University of Texas, Austin; on “outsider writing” at the University of Chicago; and on translation and healing at the Paros Symposium in Greece. Stecopoulos holds a PhD in literature and an MFA in creative writing. She taught at Bard College and the University of San Francisco and now works with writers as an independent editor and mentor. From New York, she lives in Northern California.
Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist from Tacoma, Washington. Lacing salvaged textiles such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan simulates cycles of removal to surface questions about human relationships. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his investigations are often staged or permanently embedded in public space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In The Interim – Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023).
https://chrispauljordan.com/
Jonathan Neufeld is an Associate Professor at College of Charleston, South Carolina with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from King’s College, London, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University. In his own words:
My research interests are in philosophy and music, aesthetics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. I began university life as a viola performance major studying with Roland Vamos. After a year of hard practice and being in awe of my colleagues, I discovered the joys of political theory and U.S. constitutional law. After writing an M.A. thesis on deliberative democracy and the limits of public reason, I began to work on a Ph.D. dissertation on legal interpretation where I explored what has turned out to be a very fruitful parallel between musical performance and the interpretation of law in constitutional democracies. This led me carefully to consider the myriad relationships between the public performance of music and the political public sphere and has resulted in two book projects: Music in Public: How Performance Shapes Democracy (under contract with OUP) and Aesthetic Disobedience: Protest, Democracy and the Arts.
https://charleston.edu/philosophy/faculty/neufeld-jonathan.php
Rachelle Mozman is an artist whose work is primarily based in photography and video. Through close study of the history of the Americas and the practice of psychoanalysis, her work seeks to situate the self in historical time, while contemplating possible futures. Born in New York City, Mozman now works between Brooklyn and Panama, “the home of [her] family, and deepest love stories.” Her work makes visual the often hidden mythologies reified by structures of power – “including the internalized kind.” Mozman is a Fulbright Fellow, and has exhibited in galleries in the United States, Mexico, Germany, France, Chile, Uruguay, and more. In 2021 she had a solo exhibition, All These Things I Carry with Me, at South Bend Museum, South Bend, IN. In 2020 Mozman released her monograph, Colonial Echo with Kris Graves Projects.
Alison Cobb (pronouns she/her) is a native of Los Alamos, New Mexico– site of the construction of the first atomic bomb. She carries this history with her in her writing and collaborations. Her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Colorado Review, and many other journals. She has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa, and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Author of Plastic: an Autobiography (2021) her as a way to illuminate the “web of connections” a human life has to plastic, to “make real” for herself “and maybe for others the implication of the human imprint on this planet.” Cobb sits on the board of Fonograf, a literature and record label based in Portland, OR, also her current city of residence.
When: 11:30 a.m.- 1 p.m. Wednesday, October 23
Where: In-person in the Comm Building Recital Hall and live streamed via Zoom webinar
Zoom Webinar Link: https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/86447124526