2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Artist/Scholar Collaboration

Artists: Ellen Hagan, David Flores, Renee Watson, Kamilah Moon

Scholar Respondents: Shirley Steinberg, Stephanie Troutman

As teaching artists, we are called to create art and build curricula that encourage our students to both engage with the current state of the world as well as disrupt the status quo through their own art and activism. In this session, we will share poems and art installation videos that address and respond to the murders of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott, the historical context of white supremacy via the murder of Emmett Till and others, as well as the wide range of responses through protest and art. We will share community building techniques, pedagogical strategies, prompts and ideas for group art making in response to current events in relation to our history of racial oppression. We will discuss ways in which our young people begin to take ownership over studying, distilling and creating poetry as a dialogue and response to police brutality and racial profiling. We will introduce social media platforms and share the collective response of #BlackPoetsSpeakOut. During the session, participants will be asked to create their own poems that will engage with this history.  Scholars who have engaged with the Black Lives Matter movement will lead a discussion that will contextualize our art and our pedagogical practice within historical and critical studies frameworks.