Artist's Lecture: Since 2005, Christopher Sims has been making photographs within fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. military bases as well as photographing daily life at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. A former photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he is the Undergraduate Education Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Jihad Lamp, Fort Polk, Louisiana. 2006. Photograph by Christopher Sims

Peter Richards is a senior artist emeritus at the Exploratorium. He worked with its’ founder Frank Oppenheimer to set up the art programs and served as arts program director through 1998. He is best known for creating Wave Organ, (pictured) a wave-activated sound sculpture located on the San Francisco waterfront.  Peter has permanent outdoor installations at Artpark in Lewiston, New York, and in several sites in California, Arizona and Washington.

For more than 60 years, Paul Taylor has turned his choreographic lens on the United States. He is famous for dances that embody American ideals of democratic equality. But throughout his career, Taylor also has taken stock of the distance between our national mythology and the historical reality, warning of the corrosions of consumerism, the dangers of militarism, and the allure of demagogues. In this illustrated lecture, Taylor’s biographer Suzanne Carbonneau will look at how Taylor’s dances have chronicled both shining ideals and uncomfortable truths about America.

This talk spotlights Youth in Action's dedication to participatory learning through mapping and relocalization projects that invite youth to use maps to better understand themselves and their communities.  A map holds a unique narrative that has no predetermined beginning, and it’s this nature that lends itself to the honest, participatory experience of locating oneself.

Join us for a public forum and discussion on the stories, struggles, and successes of immigrant and refugee populations in Rhode Island.

The panel concludes a month of programming organized the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, which explores the history of the United States’ use of GTMO to house immigrants and refugees, as well as its post-9/11 use as a prison for suspected terrorists.

Oral historians ground their ethics in the principle of “shared authority.” How does this work when the sources are personal but the story is collective? Who has authority over a shared and controversial history?

Jim McGrath (Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Digital Humanities at the JNBC) will discuss his work as Project Director of 

While many cultural institutions in the US and Europe struggle to find funding to support programs and collections, cities in the Persian Gulf are on a tear, building up significant art collections and opening new museums at a dizzying pace. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Doha are at the front of this race, investing billions in new educational and cultural institutions that they hope will provide the foundation for a future post-oil economy.

This presentation explores at least three related but separate levels of memory-making with regard to the incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII. First, the official US Government positions. Second, mainstream media and historical treatments.