On ‘Death of a Salesman’: A Conversation with Ron Himes

In the classic Death of Salesman, Arthur Miller explores the disillusionment of the American Dream and the toll it takes on all aspects of life for traveling salesman Willy Loman and his family. The Black Rep will be performing this seminal work January 11-29, 2023, at Washington University’s Edison Theater in a production directed by Jacqueline Thompson, with company founder and artistic director Ron Himes in the role of Willy Loman. Join Ron Himes, BS ’78, for a conversation about the production, the Black Rep and this moment in American theater. This program is offered in partnership with Washington University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Ron Himes is the founder and producing director of the Saint Louis Black Repertory Company, which has developed a national reputation for staging quality productions from an African-American perspective. Himes founded the Saint Louis Black Repertory Company in 1976 while still a student at Washington University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. In 2003, Himes was appointed the first Henry E. Hampton, Jr. Artist-in-Residence at Washington University, a joint appointment of the Performing Arts and African American Studies departments.

Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration: Beloved Community

The 36th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration honors the legacy of Dr. King and the impact he has made on those who carry the torch for humanity. Washington University Chancellor Andrew D. Martin, Provost Beverly Wendland and Rev. Callista Isabelle, Washington University director for religious, spiritual and ethical life, will provide remarks. The commemoration includes performances by Black Anthology, the Washington University student run production group and the Washington University Concert Choir. A reception in the Danforth University Center (DUC) follows the program. The event is free and open to the public.

Change Gon’ Come

Black Anthology aims to tell stories about the Black experience. Our hope is that viewers are immersed, become a part of that experience, and are motivated to learn more. This year’s play will bring to light the struggles African Americans face in their everyday lives and in neighborhoods. We get to see firsthand generations live through a seemingly similar cycle.

There will be a preshow panel at 6:15 pm each night.

Virtual Town Hall: Equity-Minded Reform of Faculty Evaluation: Principles and Action

Anti-oppressive and De-colonial Approaches to Community Engagement in St. Louis

Against a backdrop of de-colonial challenges, what should be the role of anti-oppressive community work practice? Join Durrell Smith, who has over a decade of experience actively combating institutionalized racism, as he identifies anti-oppressive and de-colonial approaches to community engagement. We will discuss guidance, lessons learned, and practical tips to build healthier communities in the St. Louis region.

This presentation is part of the Brown School’s recognition of Black History Month.

Register online to receive Zoom information on the morning of the event. You can also join us during the live stream.

RDE Faculty Retreat Spring 2023: Community engagement

RDE’s 2023 workshop is for Washington University humanities scholars who seek to incorporate community engagement in their teaching, research and service.

Sessions will:

• emphasize the ethics and process of community engagement and guide participants through designing a mutually beneficial and reciprocal project or course;  
• introduce local experts, on-campus resources and fruitful models of engaged humanities projects; and
• feature frank conversations with community members about the power dynamics and practical aspects of community engaged projects.

Participants will leave the workshop with a working knowledge of best practices for community engagement as well as a draft sketch for a community engaged project of their own design.

Click on the button below for details and registration. Please register by February 1, 2023.
 

Legacies of (De)segregated Medicine: Exhibit Opening and Lecture with Dr. Ezelle Sanford, III

Future Fridays - The Transdisciplinary Futures Initiative: Police Body Camera Metadata

The Graduate Center is partnering with the Arts & Sciences Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures initiative to host informal lunches where graduate students can connect with faculty leading the initiatives. 

The Importance of Racial Socialization Messages in the Lives of African-American Youth

In the MLA tradition of approaching a theme from multiple perspectives, our speakers address bridges and divides locally, internationally, and even across species.

Bridges & Divides

The current presidential administration began with a commitment to bridging political divides, even offering physical bridges in the form of an infrastructure bill to help meet that goal. Locally, the team at Health Equity Works has studied inequity created by geographical divide resulting from conscious choices to create a segregated city, and then explored recommendations and activities that dismantle regional divides.

The MLA lecture series is co-sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

The series takes place every Saturday in February over Zoom.

In Conversation with Michelle Alexander

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics is honored to host Professor Michelle Alexander for a public conversation on the state of legal and social movements against mass incarceration. Since the publication in 2010 of Alexander’s sea-changing book The New Jim Crow, millions more Americans have been incarcerated in prisons and jails, sometimes held for years without a trial. But American conversations about incarceration have changed, with growing abolitionist movements as well as state and federal initiatives for carceral reform. Alexander’s work has done much to bring these issues to light.

Professor Fannie Bialek will ask Alexander about the state of legal and social movements for carceral reform and prison abolition and their invigoration of religious activism for social change. There will also be time for audience Q&A and a reception immediately following in nearby Umrath Lounge.

We hope you will join us in person or online for this Danforth Distinguished Lecture. Graham Chapel is open seating and doors will open at 6:00 p.m.

Free and open to all.

Black Women in Media - Missouri History Museum

African Modernism in America

Panel Discussion: Collecting and Exhibiting Modern African Art

As part of the opening festivities for African Modernism in America, exhibition co-curators Perrin Lathrop, assistant curator of African art at the Princeton University Art Museum, and Jamaal Sheats, gallery director and curator, and professor of art at Fisk University, are joined by Bukky Gbadegesin, associate professor of art history at Saint Louis University, for a discussion exploring histories of collecting and displaying modern African art in the United States, including the 1961 landmark exhibition Art from Africa of Our Time organized by the Harmon Foundation and the role of Fisk University in exhibiting African artists of the mid-20th century.

Germany’s Forgotten Genocide: A film screening and discussion of Kavena Hambira’s ‘Nuh-Mi-Bee-Uhn’

The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum will present the film Nuh-Mi Bee-Uhn, directed by Kavena Hambira. The film “focuses on the twentieth century’s first genocide—the Herero and Nama Genocide, carried out by Germany in 1905 in his family’s native Namibia. Hambira bridges geography and time to describe the indelible and far-reaching impacts of the genocide and the ongoing struggle for reparations and reconciliation.” The film will be accompanied by a discussion with Hambira and his colleague, Miriam Gleckman-Krut, both of whom are artist-scholars-in residence at the Memory for the Future Studiolab at Washington University. The discussion will examine the linkages between the history and memory of this and other genocides and the Holocaust. Registration required; see website.

Public Tour: Power of Place

Student educators lead interactive tours of the permanent collection designed to prompt discussion and reflection on the power of place in relationship to works by such artists as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Torkwase Dyson, and Martín Chambi, as well as early travel photography.

‘The First World Festival of Negro Arts’ Screening & Discussion

Join us to open the Washington University African Film Festival with a screening of The First World Festival of Negro Arts (1966), the official documentary of the Festival Mondial des Arts Negrès (FESMAN) held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. Over 2,000 artists, dancers, intellectuals, performers, and writers from Africa and the African diaspora gathered to celebrate Black culture in the newly independent nation of Senegal. Director, producer, actor, and writer William Greaves documented this historic event that included exhibitions of classical, modern, and contemporary African art, performances and theatrical productions, and a colloquium of philosophers, authors, and cultural critics.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Baba Badji, postdoctoral associate in Comparative Literature, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, and faculty from the Department of African and African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences.

Future Fridays - The Transdisciplinary Futures Initiative: The Storytelling Lab: Black Joy Collaborative

The Graduate Center is partnering with the Arts & Sciences Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures initiative to host informal lunches where graduate students can connect with faculty leading the initiatives. 

Meet Me Outside the Fair - Missouri History Museum - African American History Initiative

RE: Worldbuilding through Performance

Diaspora Dialogues: African Art Influence across the Atlantic

Following a self-guided tour of African Modernism in America, join the annual Diaspora Dialogues event, a conversation among Black women in St. Louis organized by Vitendo4Africa and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. International Awareness and Involvement Committee. This year’s theme will center on a transnational discussion of African art and its connections to African American artists, the social and political roles of art in African and African American contexts during the 1950s and 1960s, and the importance of teaching these histories to challenge Western notions of African art. Invited speakers include Erin Falker-Obichigha, artist, art historian, and curator; Bukky Gbadegesin, associate professor of art history at Saint Louis University; Yvonne Osei, artist; and MwazaCarol Thompson-Robinson, artist. The discussion on the social and political roles of art in African and African American contexts continues over a modern Congolese cuisine provided by Lady Lauralie.

2023 Peterson Photography Lecture Series: Dr. Krista Thompson

On 24 May 2010, soldiers and police officers—with the aid of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens in search of Christopher “Dudus” Coke. Coke became a fugitive after the United States sought his extradition. After almost four days, at the end of this operation, Coke remained at large, but at least 69 civilians—mostly young black men—and 3 members of the security forces lay dead and with two others disappeared. Examining photographs, surveillance footage, artistic, and archival projects related to the massacre, Dr. Thompson asks why the hunt for a single fugitive led to the detainment, containment, and killing of so many. The talk discusses strategies for critically reassessing the evidence of things not captured in the widely accepted visual and discursive formations surrounding the event and in narratives of state violence in Jamaica more generally.

Public Tour: Power of Place

Student educators lead interactive tours of the permanent collection designed to prompt discussion and reflection on the power of place in relationship to works by such artists as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Torkwase Dyson, and Martín Chambi, as well as early travel photography.

Gerard Sekoto and the International Histories of African Modernism

Joshua Cohen, associate professor of art history at the City University of New York, discusses the life and work of the South African painter Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993), who made vibrant Postimpressionist-style works in the 1940s before relocating permanently to Paris in 1947 — a move that allowed him to distance himself geographically from Apartheid, which began the following year. Living as an artist and musician in exile, Sekoto participated in a series of conferences and exhibitions charged with anticolonial ambitions and Cold War tensions. Sekoto’s tumultuous trajectory both reflects and reveals the international histories of African modernism at midcentury.

Virtual Book Club: ‘The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu’

Join University Libraries for a special National Preservation Week book club as we read the fascinating true story of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer. Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world’s greatest smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction. With bravery and patience, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to safety.

Book club will begin with a short presentation on preservation, followed by a discussion of the book.

Public Tour: ‘African Modernism in America’

Student educators lead interactive tours of this season’s exhibition African Modernism in America. Drawing primarily from Fisk University’s remarkable collection of gifts from the Harmon Foundation, the exhibition examines connections between modern African artists and patrons, artists, and cultural organizations in the United States, amid the interlocking histories of civil rights, decolonization, and the Cold War. The exhibition features more than seventy artworks by fifty artists that exemplify the relationships between the new art that emerged in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s and the art and cultural politics of the US.

Juneteenth Keynote: From New Orleans to Galveston to St. Louis and Beyond

Join us for a riveting nine-generation family migration story from Texas to Missouri. Vanessa Slaughter, a native St. Louisan, will join Jim Vincent of the St.  Louis African American History & Genealogy Society in a fireside chat to trace her family’s legacy to Galveston, Texas, in  the 1860s. Each generation builds on the foundation of love, community, and freedom to give us inspiration to dig into our own family histories and celebrate Juneteenth as a community. The  evening will kick off with a brief presentation about the history and meaning of the Juneteenth holiday by Dr. Geoff K. Ward of Washington University in St. Louis and will end with a live performance by the Community Gospel Choir of St. Louis, inspiring us to look deep into our own family legacies of migration, freedom, and community love.

Fire & Freedom: Food and Enslavement in Early America

The National Library of Medicine produced this exhibition and companion website.

The traveling exhibition explores ways in which meals can tell us how power is exchanged between and among different peoples, races, genders, and classes. In the Chesapeake region during the colonial era, European settlers relied upon indentured servants, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans for labor, life-saving knowledge of farming and food acquisition, and to gain economic prosperity. Fire and Freedom looks into life at George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation and the labor of enslaved workers to learn about the ways that meals transcend taste and sustenance.

The National Library of Medicine produced Fire and Freedom: Food and Enslavement in Early America, guest curated by historian, author, and educator Psyche Williams-Forson, PhD (University of Maryland, College Park).

The St. Louis Attitude

Greenwood Cemetery Family & Friends Day

Come to learn more about one of the oldest and largest yet forgotten historically Black cemeteries in Saint Louis, Missouri and a non-profit group’s journey to teach its history, restore, maintain and preserve its legacy. Enjoy refreshments, games, mini tours, and more. 

GC Fam Day 2023 MAIN FLYER.png

Media Root

Public Tour: ‘Adam Pendleton: To Divide By’

Student educators lead interactive tours of this season’s exhibition Adam Pendleton: To Divide By. Pendleton’s paintings and other works address codes of representation and abstraction, visual and literary uses of language, and the aesthetics of Blackness. The exhibition showcases an assemblage of the American artist’s new and recent paintings, drawings, and video portraits that together reveal his interest in creating a conversation between mediums and his belief in abstraction’s capacity to disrupt.

Free and open to the public. Please check in at the Welcome Desk when arriving for the tour to secure your place.

Black St. Louis

Mellon Mays Information Session

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program encourages talented students to develop their academic interests to the fullest, obtain PhDs, and pursue careers in higher education. Washington University joins 46 other colleges and universities as well as the 39 member institutions of the United Negro College Fun in this effort. The program is open to students majoring in a wide-range of fields, who show a demonstrated commitment to increasing cross-racial and ethnic understanding, and who are American citizens or permanent residents.