John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage
With 3,000 members throughout the region, the New England Museum Association has been a hub for keeping museums and museum people connected during the coronavirus crisis. Here’s your chance to speak with NEMA Executive Director Dan Yaeger about the latest from the front lines of museum leadership, how people are coping, and the short/long-term prospects for museum careers.
John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage
Having been closed for 18 months of renovation, Providence Public Library was scheduled to begin its grand reopening on March 30th, with events and activities designed to bring crowds into the Library’s beautiful new public spaces throughout the weeks and months ahead. Instead, the Library didn’t open, and all public gathering for the foreseeable future has ceased.
John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage
How many times a year do you visit a museum (when there’s not a pandemic)? How many times a day do you check your phone? Museums’ social media accounts offer great ways to reach the audiences where they are and create unique experiences that you can’t offer IRL. But, it’s harder than it looks.
Join Nico Wheadon—writer, professor of art, and Executive Director of NXTHVN—as she discusses the role of art and artists in building and sustaining culturally-specific institutions.
“Traces” is a collaborative performance project commissioned by Community MusicWorks (CMW), tracing the sonic memory of a place: an empty lot in the West End of Providence that will be the future home of Community MusicWorks. The work will be created by composer Shaw Pong Liu in collaboration with public historian Micah Salkind, neighborhood resident and educator Joanne Ayuso, and the Rhode Island Historical Society, and will present histories and stories of the neighborhood.
Angela DiVeglia, Curatorial Assistant at Providence Public Library; Dr. Taino J. Palermo, RWU Community Development Graduate Program; and Kate Wells, Curator of RI Collections at Providence Public Library.
Mary Tuti Baker is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Brown University, where she teaches courses in Indigenous Political Theory.
Artist and designer Rosten Woo discusses public projects in New York and Los Angeles that interpret spaces that are willfully unseen by those in power. Stories from Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall to Los Angeles’ Willowbrook and Little Tokyo will deal with themes of race, retail, urban development, public memory, and systems of value.
What are the stories a storm drain can tell? Can sanitation be loveable?Under the Umbrella, an immersive game, poetic installation, and community art project reframes the everyday landscape as a place of adventure, quest seeking, and quiet discovery. Therese Kelly will share how architectural storytelling can promote both social and environmental resilience.
Dr. Katia Schörle will come present her latest work as a curator of an exhibit on the Roman Army in Arles, at the Musée Départemental Arles Antique. In France, no one had dared to put together an exhibit on that topic since the First World War. This exhibition, which runs until the end of April and has currently been viewed by more than 25,000 visitors, brings together a rich collection of 250 artworks and artifacts from the Louvre, the MAN in Saint Germain en Laye, and prestigious international loans from France, the UK, Switzerland and Italy. Dr.
How do we build the city? As investment in the public realm declines, what are the possible alternatives to commercial development and public-private partnerships? With these questions as backdrop, Aaron Forrest will present the design and construction of the Southlight project, a performance pavilion and garden built as a partnership between Rhode Island School of Design, the Southside Cultural Center of Rhode Island, and the City of Providence. Aaron will discuss the challenges and successes of the community-engaged design process that led to the project’s construction in 2016.
By mid-century, demographers predict that people of European descent will no longer be the majority in the United States. Newest Americans is a multimedia documentary and storytelling project that explores the implications of this seismic change from the perspective of the campus of Rutgers University-Newark, the most diverse university in the country for the past two decades.
This presentation explores the notion of a “migrant zero” in a collective sense, by exploring the first group of West Indians to settle in the Greater Hartford region. How and why did West Indians move to Connecticut, and perhaps more importantly, why did they stay? This story connects to important and contentious national debates in American public discourse on immigration and globalization: chain migration, guest worker programs, illegal migration, and deportation.
Tea Shop is an autonomous, interactive space that has a simple motto (translated into English): “Free to use by all (in cost and content). No red tape, no exclusion, and no power bill (we use solar energy).” Outside the reach of state censure, this in-progress project uses social sculpture to implicitly engage issues of land-use planning, neocolonialism and listening that is specific to the concerns of those in Yangon using it to creatively express themselves.
Did you know there are over 400 contemporary artworks in the city of New York’s public art collection? Where and how are these pieces situated? What is the process for artist selection, and artwork development, approval, and installation? Reina Shibata will discuss NYC’s public art processes, and what it takes to realize projects in the public realm.
Reina Shibata, MA’10, Deputy Director, Percent for Art, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
Joanne Pope Melish will explore the role of enslaved and free people of color in the rise of Joseph Nightingale, the Providence merchant whose elegant Benefit Street mansion is now the home of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.
