Past Events

• 

  Feb

  2

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE: Priyata Bosamia

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Join RISD MDes Priyata Bosamia in a creative stamp-carving workshop. Around a community table, we will explore what happens when our individual marks come together to build a collective artwork.
  
  This event is a part of RE/GENERATE, a bi-weekly creative humanities workshop series that engages with themes of regeneration, creation, and remix. These sessions offer space for thinkers, artists, makers, and dreamers to build relationships, learn new skills, and engage in creative practice. The series will feature 6 participatory workshops throughout the Spring semester and culminate in a collaborative, accumulating exhibition that will open on May 11, 2023.
  
  Please pre-register here - https://forms.gle/cgd6qKXUa8MKDkBB8

  RE/GENERATE: Priyata Bosamia

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops
• 

  Dec

  8

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Dietrich Neumann

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today: Dietrich Neumann, Director of the JNBC, will speak about the past and future of Public Humanities and the transformative power of public art.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Dietrich Neumann

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Dec

  7

  6:00pm - 7:00pm

  J. Carter Brown Lecture by Brigitte Shim: “Materiality and Architecture”

  List Art Building

  Brigitte Shim, Founding Partner of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto, Canada, will present a talk titled “Materiality and Architecture.”

  Brigitte Shim was born in Kingston Jamaica and immigrated to Toronto which is her home. She studied architecture and environmental studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In 1994, Shim and her partner A. Howard Sutcliffe founded Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto, Canada. Their design practice explores the integration and interrelated scales of architecture, landscape, furniture and fittings. Shim-Sutcliffe have realized built work in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia focusing on place-making.

  To date, Shim and Sutcliffe have received sixteen Governor General’s Medals for
  Architecture from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) and an American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Award along with many other professional accolades for their built work. In January 2013, Brigitte Shim and her partner A. Howard Sutcliffe were both awarded the Order of Canada, “for their contributions as architects designing sophisticated structures that represent the best of Canadian design to the world.” In 2021, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada awarded Brigitte Shim and A. Howard Sutcliffe, the RAIC Gold Medal for their “tireless commitment to advocacy, teaching and mentoring along with their commitment to craft, tectonics, site and ecology in their built work and its lasting impact on Canadian architecture.”

  Professor Brigitte Shim has been a faculty member at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto since 1988. Brigitte Shim is the 2022, Louis I. Kahn Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University’s School of Architecture and has been a visiting chair and lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), The Cooper Union’s Chanin School of Architecture, The University of Auckland, and others. She has served on numerous international, national and local design juries as an unwavering advocate for design excellence.

  This event is sponsored by The Pritzker Foundation’s J. Carter Brown Memorial Lecture Fund at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage.

  J. Carter Brown Lecture by Brigitte Shim: “Materiality and Architecture”

  JNBC Lectures
• 

  Dec

  7

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  Exhibition: In the Absence of: A Collective Biography Through Speculative Archaeology

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This exhibit brings the artifacts of early republic Providence, c. 1790-1830 to life through mixed-media art. Visitors will enter the home of a typical lower-income Providence family and explore material culture, community relationships and the role of debt in everyday life. Curated by Traci Picard (MA’23), it is a final project for the class Public Amnesias and Their Discontents: Theories and Practices of Remembering.

  The Gallery is open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm. Closed for the holidays December 23, 2022 - January 6, 2023 and January 16, 2023.

  Exhibition: In the Absence of: A Collective Biography Through Speculative Archaeology

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Dec

  1

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Dr. Claire Andrade-Watkins

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today: Historian and filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins, Ph.D., a second-generation Cape Verdean American, chronicles the legacy and ‘lived’ memory of the Fox Point community where she was born and raised. She will be in conversation with a little girl who asked her neighbor, “Why do you still have your house, and we don’t?” Dr. Andrade-Watkins is Professor of Media and Africana Studies, MILAIS, Emerson College, and Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Dr. Claire Andrade-Watkins

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Nov

  17

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Andrew Raftery

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today: Andrew Raftery is an artist and Professor of Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design. His recent work explores French scenic wallpaper and Chinese wallpaper displayed in museums and domestic interiors. He will present a portfolio of drawings and watercolors.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Andrew Raftery

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Nov

  10

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: H. Jack Martin

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today: H. Jack Martin, Executive Director of the Providence Public Library, has been working in public libraries since the age of thirteen when his mom volunteered him to work at the Cornelia Public Library in Georgia. He will discuss how Providence Public Library has transformed itself into a 21st century, free, open-source learning university for the public.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: H. Jack Martin

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Nov

  3

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Kent Kleinman

  Nightingale-Brown House

   

  Today: Kent Kleinman, Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Institute, will talk about the mission of the Brown Arts Institute as an incubator for interdisciplinary coursework, creative practices, and research in the arts.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Kent Kleinman

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Oct

  27

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Renee Ater

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today: Renee Ater, former Professor of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland and current Provost Visiting Associate Professor in Africana Studies at Brown University, will speak about her work at the intersection of race, monument building, and public space.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Renee Ater

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Oct

  22

  12:00pm - 3:00pm

  Center for Public Humanities Open House and Exhibition

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Built in 1792 and home to five generations of the Brown family, the historic Nightingale-Brown House is headquarters of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and home to the master’s program in public humanities.

  Exhibition by artist Deborah Spears Moorehead titled “Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color” is currently on view. In her work, Spears Moorehead draws on her Seaconke, Pokanoket and Wampanoag ancestry as she responds with four large panels to the inaccurate and false depictions of Indigenous people in the 1835 French wallpaper Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord in the main hall of the Nightingale-Brown House.

  Center for Public Humanities Open House and Exhibition

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Oct

  21

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  Center for Public Humanities Open House and Exhibition

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Built in 1792 and home to five generations of the Brown family, the historic Nightingale-Brown House is headquarters of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and home to the master’s program in public humanities.

  Exhibition by artist Deborah Spears Moorehead titled “Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color” is currently on view. In her work, Spears Moorehead draws on her Seaconke, Pokanoket and Wampanoag ancestry as she responds with four large panels to the inaccurate and false depictions of Indigenous people in the 1835 French wallpaper Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord in the main hall of the Nightingale-Brown House.

  Center for Public Humanities Open House and Exhibition
• 

  Oct

  20

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Nirva LaFortune

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today: Nirva LaFortune, Providence City Councilwoman and candidate for Mayor of Providence will discuss her time in City Council and what it means to be from Providence and be an elected official.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Nirva LaFortune

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Oct

  13

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Bob Dilworth

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today, Bob Dilworth, visual artist and Professor Emeritus, University of Rhode Island, will discuss his ongoing attempts to locate and interpret matters of blackness in his artwork during a time of social and political change.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Bob Dilworth

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Oct

  6

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Deborah Spears Moorehead

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today, artist Deborah Spears Moorehead will discuss her new work Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color, a site-specific artistic response to the problematic wallpaper Les Vues d’Amerique du Nordin the main hallway of the Nightingale-Brown House.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Deborah Spears Moorehead

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Oct

  6

  All Day

  Exhibition: Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord: Artists Respond (2021-2022) is an artist residency inviting two Rhode Island-based artists, Jazzmen Lee-Johnson and Deborah Spears Moorehead, to create site-specific artworks that respond to the Center for Public Humanities’ historic wallpaper, Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord.

  Deborah Spears Moorehead’s residency culminates in Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color installed in the Center for Public Humanities from October 6 - December, 2022. In her work, Spears Moorehead draws on her Seaconke, Pokanoket and Wampanoag ancestry as she responds with four large panels to the inaccurate and false depictions of Indigenous people in the 1835 French wallpaper Vues de l’Amerique du Nord at the JNBC.

  Jazzmen Lee-Johnson’s artistic response, Not Never More, that was on view April 28 – September 30, 2022.

  Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

  By appointment during the week of December 19-22. Email [email protected] to schedule.

  Opening Reception: Thursday, October 6 at 6:30 p.m.

  Open for Gallery Night Providence: Thursday, October 20 and Thursday, November 17.

  Exhibition: Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Sep

  29

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Jordan Seaberry

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today: Jordan Seaberry is a painter, organizer, legislative advocate and educator, and serves as Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, a people-powered nonprofit agency. He will discuss his work with the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC), an organization born out of the belief that the transformative power of arts and culture can spark a grassroots movement capable of creating a world rooted in empathy, equity and social imagination.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Jordan Seaberry

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Sep

  23

  4:00pm - 5:30pm

  Racial Slavery, Marronage, and Freedom: Artist Talk

  Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center, 75 Waterman St, Providence, RI

  Join artists Edouard Duval-Carrié, Jess Hill, and Rénold Laurent featured in the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice’s 10th anniversary retrospective exhibition Racial Slavery, Marronage, and Freedom in a discussion about the exhibition, their creative processes, and their connections to the Center. The artist talk will be followed by a reception in the CSSJ gallery at 94 Waterman St., 02912.

  Edouard Duval-Carrié is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Miami, Florida. Born and raised in Haiti, Duval-Carrié fled the regime of “Papa Doc” Duvalier as a teenager and subsequently resided in locales as diverse as Puerto Rico, New York, Montreal, Paris, and Miami. His works address the complexities of the Caribbean and its diaspora. He has exhibited in major museums, art institutions, and galleries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Some of his exhibitions are: The Art of Embedded Histories (2019); Decolonizing Refinement (2018-19); Mémoires Encastrées/Memory Windows (2018). Duval-Carrié’s work was recently shown at the fifteenth edition of documenta, a prestigious international exhibition held in Kassel (2022). In 2018, Duval-Carrié was the inaugural recipient of The Ellie’s Michael Richards Award, given to a Miami-based artist who has cultivated an original practice over a long period of time. He has collaborated with the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice on several exhibition projects.

  
  Jess Hill received her BFA in Printmaking, with a minor in Art History, at the University of West Georgia. She is a recipient of the 2017 Emerging Artist Residence from the Atlanta Printmakers Studio and was the Heimark Artist in Residence at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice in 2018. She has been a part of several group exhibitions across the United States. Jess Hill is a mother of three beautiful children. She is currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was also born and raised. Her work focuses on how we view each other through the prisms of race and gender. She explores and celebrates the differences among the human race.
  Other themes that appear in her work include class, religion, and cultural patterns. She uses printmaking and mixed media methods in expressing her art form. Her ultimate goal is to dismantle the barriers and institutions that allow human beings to believe they are separate from each other so we can truly embrace each other’s differences.

  
  Rénold Laurent was born in Source Bretoux, a village at the foot of the Marbial Valley—a few kilometers from the city of Jacmel, Haiti. At the age of ten he began to draw and paint under the direction of his father, Maccène Laurent. Soon he abandoned the style of his father and began to create new perspectives and techniques in his paintings, eventually settling on abstraction as his mode of visual communication. He views abstract painting as the most expressive means to explore the extraordinary powers of the imagination. He has collaborated with several cultural institutions in Haiti including the Haitian Art Museum in Port-au-Prince. In 2019, he was the Heimark Artist in Residence at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice. His work has been exhibited several times in Haiti and in other countries.

  Racial Slavery, Marronage, and Freedom: Artist Talk

  Academic Calendar, University Dates & Events, Arts, Performance, Graduate School, Postgraduate Education, History, Cultural Studies, Languages, Humanities, Identity, Culture, Inclusion, Social Sciences, Student Clubs, Organizations & Activities
• 

  Sep

  22

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Joseph Chazan, Erminio Pinque, and Lenny Schwartz

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today, f amed Rhode Island arts patron & nephrologist Dr. Joseph Chazan, illustrator and founder of BIG NAZO LAB, Erminio Pinque, and writer and playwright Lenny Schwartz will discuss their involvement in creating “Chazan! Unfiltered”, an innovative locally produced graphic novel chronicling the life adventures of Dr. Chazan and his connections to the Arts and Medical communities.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Joseph Chazan, Erminio Pinque, and Lenny Schwartz

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Sep

  21

  6:00pm

  Cristobal Gnecco - Politics of Heritage Making

  Rhode Island Hall

  Cristobal Gnecco is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca in Colombia. His research interests include the political economy of archaeology, discourses on the other, geopolitics of knowledge, and ethnographies of heritage.

  Cristobal Gnecco - Politics of Heritage Making

  History, Cultural Studies, Languages, Humanities, Identity, Culture, Inclusion, International, Global Engagement, Research
• 

  Sep

  21

  5:30pm

  Marisa Bass, “The Monument’s End”

  List Art Building

  Marisa Anne Bass is a Professor in the History of Art at Yale University, where she teaches early modern art with a focus on the creative and intellectual culture of northern Europe. She thinks often in her research about how individuals have used art to find grounding in times of political, spiritual, and cultural upheaval, or to make sense of circumstances that otherwise defy explanation. Her latest book The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic (forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2023) asks whether the making of monuments is ever compatible with the making of a modern republic. In it, Bass explores the tension between individual commemoration and the collective aspiration toward liberty in monumental experiments from the Dutch Republic to the present. She is the author of two prior monographs with Princeton University Press: Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (2016) and Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (2019), winner of the 2020 Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society for the best book in art and music history. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. In 2021, she was named the inaugural Guggenheim Fellow in Early Modern Studies.

  Marisa Bass, “The Monument’s End”
• 

  Sep

  15

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today, artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson will discuss her work Not Never More: On remixing and redecorating a history. Join a conversation and walk through Jazzmen Lee-Johnson’s creative response to the problematic wallpaper Les Vues d’Amerique du Nord.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Sep

  15

  4:30pm

  Eyal Weizman ─ Atmospheric Violence

  Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

  Eyal Weizman will speak about cities, warfare, neo-colonization, and apartheid, not by focusing on built structures but on the air that moves through cities. Airborne toxins, like the colored smoke in a wind tunnel, highlight the dynamics of power and control that we must pay more attention to. Tear gas is deployed to disperse bodies gathering in democratic protest, white phosphorus, and chlorine gas to spread terror in cities, aerial herbicides to destroy arable land and ruin livelihoods, and the smoke rising from large-scale arson to eradicate forests for industrial plantations. Toxic clouds colonize the air we breathe across different scales and durations, from urban squares to continents, unique incidents to epochal latencies.

  Eyal Weizman ─ Atmospheric Violence
• 

  Sep

  8

  6:30pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Darrell Petit

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6:30 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting.

  Today, artist Darrell Petit creates monumental sculptures of granite for public commissions and private collections throughout the world. He will speak about two recent site integrated sculpture projects - Eventat One Dalton, Boston and Standing Stonesin Cambridge, MA.

  The Conversations Series is co-sponsored by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Darrell Petit

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Apr

  30

  9:30am - 1:00pm

  Inheritance Unconference

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Following two days of presentations and breakout conversations on Zoom, the in-person Unconference offers participants to continue conversations, collaborative thinking and project planning in an open-ended format. The Unconference takes place at the Center for Public Humanities. There will be three sessions, with opportunities for participants to submit session ideas twice throughout the morning.

  An unconference is a participant-led day of conversations, collaborative thinking and collaborative doing. Session ideas all come directly from participants — you. Never been to an unconference before? Read about how it works here.

  This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

  Inheritance Unconference

  JNBC Conferences
• 

  Apr

  28

  6:30pm - 8:30pm

  Opening Reception for “Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord: Artists Respond”

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Please join us for a celebration of Jazzmen Lee-Johnson’s Not Never More (2022), a site-specific art installation on the ground floor of the Center for Public Humanities. Read more about the exhibition here.

  This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

  Opening Reception for “Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord: Artists Respond”

  JNBC Conferences, JNBC Exhibitions, JNBC Performances
• 

  Apr

  28

  All Day

  Exhibition: Not Never More

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord: Artists Respond (2021-2023) is an artist residency inviting two Rhode Island-based artists, Jazzmen Lee-Johnson and Deborah Spears Moorehead, to create site-specific artworks that respond to the Center for Public Humanities’ historic wallpaper, Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord.

  Jazzmen Lee-Johnson’s residency culminates in Not Never More, a series of prints installed in the Center for Public Humanities from April 28 – September 30, 2022.

  Artist’s Statement: We inhabit our histories. We feel the pains of the past, we clang in its echoes, feel its residue caked up on our skin. History’s traumas have been perpetually erected in monuments, embedded in street names, stone walled in woodlands, hung, stacked, and plastered in architecture. Not Never More is my gut reaction and visual response to confronting such an architecture—the problematic 19th century French wallpaper Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord (The Views of North America), created in 1834 by Jean-Julien Deltil. This wallpaper adorns the foyer and staircase of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage which is situated in the historic Nightingale-Brown House. Deltil’s wallpaper obfuscates colonialism, genocide, capitalism, and slavery, in its romanticized idyllic nostalgic imagery. My response, Not Never More, is a textile print/quilt installation that remixes, conceals, reveals, and warps this historically fraught and imperialist imagery into layers of possibility, braggadocio, pessimism, blunt historical moments of shame/ contradiction, dance, and critical optimism.

  Deborah Spears Moorehead’s artwork will be installed at the Center for Public Humanities in October 2022.

  Gallery Hours:

  May and September: Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

  June – August by appointment. To schedule: call 401-863-1177 or email [email protected].

  Opening Reception: Thursday, April 28, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

  Open for Gallery Night Providence: Thursdays, May 19, June 16, and July 21 from 5-8 p.m.

  Closing Reception: Thursday, September 15, 5-8 p.m.

  Exhibition: Not Never More

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Apr

  28

  All Day

  Inheritance Symposium

  Recordings of all sessions from the Inheritance Symposium are available on  YouTube (Inheritance Symposium Playlist)

  Inheritance brings together activists, curators, educators, tribal leaders, artists, historians, heritage workers, and policy makers to explore the range of strategies that institutions and communities are using to respond to contentious representations of race, Indigenous lifeways and history in public art and architecture. Over two days on Zoom, speakers from the US, UK and Canada will offer first-hand accounts of initiatives and actions that resulted in the removal, reinterpretation, or recontextualization of public and commemorative artworks, heritage sites and museum collections, while others will present on efforts to protect and preserve sites that have been ignored or under-resourced. We are in the midst of a reckoning, as communities seek to reshape how (and whose) history is told and commemorated in public space. This may entail radical changes to the art that hangs on our walls, the monuments in our public squares, and the stories that are told at historic sites as the public landscape that we have inherited continues to evolve.

  This symposium, organized by the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, includes a mix of online and in-person events and opportunities over four days. In-person events at the Public Humanities Center include an artist’s talk and participatory performance with Haus of Glitter on Wednesday, April 27; an exhibition opening for Jazzmen Lee-Johnson’s Not Never More on Thursday, April 28; and an Unconference on Saturday, April 30. The symposium takes place on Zoom on Thursday, April 28 and Friday, April 29, with opportunities for audience conversation during breakout sessions at the end of each day. Please check the Program page for a detailed schedule of events.

  The symposium and all associated events are free and open to the public, but registration is required. Inheritance is made possible through a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

  REGISTER HERE

  Inheritance Symposium

  JNBC Conferences
• 

  Apr

  27

  5:30pm - 7:00pm

  QTPOC Liberation Lawn Party!

  Nightingale-Brown House

  The Haus of Glitter Dance Company has spent the last 2 years living + healing + creating in the former home of Esek Hopkins, commander of the slavery ship “Sally”, hired by the Brown brothers of Brown University. Join The Haus of Glitter for a Artist Talk + Lawn Party + Protest Demonstration that celebrates Queer Feminist BIPOC led historic intervention and our beloved intersectional cultures of dance, music and creative community. Come strut the runway with us! Music by DJ Sita (Haus of Glitter) + Food and Beverages provided!

  This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

  QTPOC Liberation Lawn Party!

  JNBC Performances
• 

  Apr

  21

  6:00pm - 7:00pm

  Conversations at the JNBC: Barnaby Evans

  Nightingale-Brown House

  This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting. 

  Today: Barnaby Evans, artist, urban consultant, and creator of WaterFire, will talk about his work creating artworks involving large scale, urban interventions and site-specific installations that serve to catalyze broad citizen involvement in transformational change for their communities.

  The Conversations Series is funded by the Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of the Fine Arts.

  *All individuals – regardless of vaccination status – must wear masks indoors, unless in a private, non-shared space or when actively eating. In addition, social distancing of at least six feet must be maintained when unmasked. Unvaccinated individuals must continue to wear a mask outdoors when social distancing of at least six feet is not possible. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all COVID-19 University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event.

  Conversations at the JNBC: Barnaby Evans

  JNBC Conversations, JNBC Lectures
• 

  Apr

  21

  1:00pm - 2:30pm

  J. Carter Brown Lecture: Doreen Adengo

  List Art Building

  Doreen Adengo, AIA, is Principal of Adengo Architecture, LLC in Kampala.

  Adengo is an architect and the founder of Adengo Architecture in Kampala, Uganda. She has taught studio courses at The New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute, and worked previously for Adjaye Associates. Her firm’s recent work in Uganda includes the design of affordable housing, schools, and a mobile medical clinic that incorporate ecologically sensitive elements such as solar panels and water harvesting capabilities. Adengo is the Conservation Architect on the Uganda Museum, a 1940s modernist building selected for a Getty conservation grant in 2020, and is an expert on modernist architecture in Africa. Adengo’s presentation will discuss architecture in post-colonial Kampala.

  Adengo will present on Zoom. Link will be posted soon. Limited seating will be available in List 120.

  This event is sponsored by The Pritzker Foundation’s J. Carter Brown Memorial Lecture Fund at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage.

  J. Carter Brown Lecture: Doreen Adengo

  JNBC Lectures