Lectures
Upcoming Lectures
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Feb2Join 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
Past Lectures
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Dec8This 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.
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Dec76:00pm - 7:00pmJ. Carter Brown Lecture by Brigitte Shim: “Materiality and Architecture”
List Art BuildingBrigitte 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.
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Dec1This 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.
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Nov17This 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.
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Nov10This 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.
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Nov3Today: 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.
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Oct27This 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.
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Oct20This 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.
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Oct13This 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.
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Oct6This 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.
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Sep29This 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.
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Sep226:30pmConversations at the JNBC: Joseph Chazan, Erminio Pinque, and Lenny Schwartz
Nightingale-Brown HouseThis 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.
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Sep15This 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.
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Sep8This 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.
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Apr21This 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.
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Apr21Doreen 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.
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Apr21
Speaker: Rebecca Hernandez, PhD, Community Archivist, and Teresa Mora, Head of Special Collections & Archives, University of California at Santa Cruz Libraries
Talk description: coming soon.
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Apr18Digital media have afforded artists and archivists the ability to document and record at previously unimaginable levels. Yet despite its purportedly infinite storage capacity, the virtual world is also a precarious site for storage and documentation, one where users face the paradox of permanence and impermanence simultaneously. Domains are sold. Links rot. Servers crash. Sharks eat undersea cables. In many ways, the constraints and affordances of physical forms of documentation have been reproduced through the advent of digital record keeping.
This event offers a set of questions about the role of documentation in the digital age, from practices of accountability to community building and the intersections thereof. The capacities and constraints of virtual and physical documentation will be interrogated, from audio-visual archiving to 3D printing to publishing and printing as an archival process. Join us for a panel featuring the work and insights of artists and archivists Regina Longo, Paul Soulellis, and Rosalie Yu, who have actively engaged these challenging questions. -
Apr14This 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: RISD Museum curators, Jan Howard and Gina Borromeo, will share the RISD Museum’s process for deaccessioning a bronze head of an oba from Benin in preparation for its return to Nigeria.
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.
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Apr14Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and headquartered at the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions, the Crafting Democratic Futures project brings together nine university partners, each tasked with leading a local effort to devise a racial reparations plan for their area. This talk will lay out the project in Newark, New Jersey, where Rutgers faculty, staff, and students have engaged multiple community organizations in an effort to imagine a reparations plan that both aligns with national and state-level efforts and is uniquely meaningful to the specific place from which it grows.
Mark Krasovic is an associate professor of history and American studies at Rutgers University-Newark, where he is currently the lead PI on a Mellon-funded project devising a racial reparations plan for Newark. He also works on two local archives projects and is writing a book on community arts and cultural programs funded by Great Society-era initiatives like the War on Poverty and Model Cities.
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Apr7This 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: Camilo Viveiros, Executive Director at The George Wiley Center, the longest running community organizing group in Rhode Island, will talk about the organization’s work and its focus on challenging systems of oppression and making policy changes around many of today’s social issues.
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.
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Apr7Amy Starecheski, Director, Oral History MA Program, Columbia University.
Oral histories are social. They must be used, discussed, and remembered in order to stay alive; they can easily die in institutional archives. How can we curate oral histories in ways that connect them to places and people, creating embodied archives and social networks of oral history caretakers?
Introduction and moderator: Caroline Cunfer
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Apr5Philip Jodidio, born in New Jersey, graduated from Harvard in 1976 and moved the same year to Paris, where in 1980 he became the Editor-in-Chief of the art monthly Connaissance des Arts, at the time the largest circulation monthly art magazine in France. He began to write books about contemporary architecture in 1993 and left the magazine to pursue writing and editing as a full-time occupation in 2002. He is the author and/or editor of over 150 books for publishers such as Taschen, Rizzoli, Thames & Hudson and others, mostly about contemporary architecture. He has also been the editor of several scholarly books on historic Muslim cities published by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. He is currently a resident of Lausanne, Switzerland.
In his talk, Philip Jodidio will discuss the new architecture of Qatar.
This lecture is sponsored by the Pritzker Foundation’s J. Carter Brown Memorial Lecture Fund.
Free and open to the public.
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Mar24This 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: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, visual artist and Professor of Photography at the University of Rhode Island, will present her visual work on the politically complicated role of the 2.5 million South Asians who “volunteered” for their British colonial power during World War II.
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.
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Mar2412:00pm - 1:00pmArchives, Justice, and Community
Primary sources—the materials of which archives and special collections are made—are the building blocks of evidence and storytelling. In this talk, I’ll describe how the Public Knowledge program at the Mellon Foundation is supporting co-creator approaches to archives, helping to cultivate multivocal narratives, and rethinking aspects of technology and infrastructure development.
Patricia Hswe is the Program Officer for Public Knowledge at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which she joined in 2016. As the Foundation’s program area that supports libraries, archives, and university presses, Public Knowledge makes grants that strive to increase equitable access to—and activation of—recorded knowledge that helps to build an informed, heterogeneous, and civically engaged society. Before joining The Mellon Foundation, Patricia worked at the Penn State University Libraries and at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois.
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Mar17This 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: Avery Willis Hoffman, Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute, will explore the challenges (and opportunities) of launching a new institute for the arts during a turbulent pandemic era.
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.
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Mar10This 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: Kate Kraczon, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator of the Brown Arts Institute / David Winton Bell Gallery, will discuss the many ways contemporary curators decide what exhibitions to develop within their programs using examples from her own curatorial history.
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.
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Mar10Kim Gallon, Associate Professor of History, Purdue University.
This talk explores the relationship and place of Black digital humanities as an area of inquiry and praxis within and outside of public humanities. It troubles the notion of “public” and discusses the complexity and challenges of developing and sharing humanistic work that is situated in moments of crisis.
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Mar3This 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: Vanessa Flores-Maldonado (she/her), now a Co-Executive Director of Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), will talk about her personal experience as a queer Guatemalan woman growing up in a low-income immigrant community in Los Angeles, and her journey to PrYSM where, through the queer trans youth program, she learned how to use her experiences and power to help build a world without police, prisons, or borders.
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.
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Mar312:00pm - 1:00pmIn the Center, Looking Around: Learning at the Studio Museum
Nightingale-Brown HouseIlk Yasha, Studio Museum Institute Manager, at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
How can museums be dynamic sites of learning and exploration? In this presentation we’ll explore the power of polyvocality in education, community-building through ideas, and the spirit of intellectual imagination at the Studio Museum Institute in Harlem.
Moderator: Kennedy Jones (MA’23)
