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Junot Diaz, best known for his fiction about Dominican immigrants, will be a featured guest in this year’s Davies Forum.
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Davies Forum to Explore Art and Social Conscience
This year’s Davies Forum, “Artists and Writers Respond to Their World,” will feature well-known artists and writers in their exploration of how art responds to social issues.
Featured guests include graphic artist Sue Coe and Vietnamese-American poet Quan Barry. Also, sculptor Michael Aurbach will discuss government censorship, and painter Howardena Pindell, poet D.A. Powell, and writer Junot Diaz will consider the way identity is shaped by racial, gender, and class politics.
“We invited these artists because they tackle critical issues in our society and because their work does not rest on politics for its value but is engaging and beautifully crafted,” said Catherine Brady, assistant professor in the master of fine arts in writing and the rhetoric and composition programs, and one of the creators of the seminar.
The forum will be split into two parts: “Soul and Conscience: Artistic Vision and Social Responsibility” will be taught in the fall by Brady and Pamela Blotner, assistant professor of visual arts. The second part, “Artists for a Just World: Seeking Justice Through the Evocative Power of Art,” will be taught in the spring by Roberto Varea, Peter Novak, and Richard Kamler, assistant professors in the visual and performing arts department.
This fall, three categories of social issues will be discussed through slide presentations of guest artists’ work and class reading and discussion of stories and poetry. “Questioning Violence,” “Contending with Assumptions about Race,” and “Breaking the Silence” will provide images and analysis of how artists offer new conceptions of war’s horror, the consequences of racism, and the realities of censorship. Each part will build up to a guest presentation and post-discussion on the topic with students also doing their own creative work.
In the spring, the seminar will focus on the visual arts, with class topics ranging from war to immigration, prisons, and HIV/AIDS. Artists whose work features these subjects will visit classes and students will visit local communities struggling with these issues.
The Davies Forum is a special humanities-focused seminar offered every year within the ongoing theme of “The Search for Values in Contemporary America.” It was established by Louise M. Davies, a Bay Area philanthropist.
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