Welcome to the Arts Research Center!
ARC is offering a terrific slate of free events this fall and throughout the academic year, including our new lunchtime series, The Loft Hour, to showcase new arts faculty; a four-day visit by Artist-In-Residence Tanya Lukin Linklater; an edgy Internet bus tour; and a raft of poetry readings, craft talks, and music events. Read on for the details of upcoming events and check out recordings of past events in our archive.
We look forward to seeing you at ARC!
Maziar Maghsoodnia Memorial Fund 2023 Reading Featuring Solmaz Sharif
September 13, 2023 at 4pm
David Brower Center, Tamalpais Room
Solmaz Sharif will give the 2023 Maziar Maghsoodnia Poetry Fund Reading, in conversation with Lubna Safi, an advanced Ph.D. candidate at MELC and the author of Your Blue and the Quiet Lament: Poems.
Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Asst Professor of English at Berkeley.
Sponsored by: Maziar Maghsoodnia Poetry Fund, Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Arts Research Center
Writing Workshop featuring Maōri Poet Robert Sullivan
September 20, 2023 at 1pm | Online
A program for the Indigenous Poetics Lab Fellows and Invited Guests (registration closed)
Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi and Kāi Tahu), a specialist in Māori and Pacific poetics and wayfinding as a phenomenological, close reading method, will give a two-hour online writing workshop. Sullivan has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children, including the 2022 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry, Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i, the Montana New Zealand Book Award for co-editing Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, the Māori Literature Award for co-editing Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English, and the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year for Weaving Earth and Sky, a retelling of Māori myths and legends. Tunui Comet is his eighth collection of poetry. His book Star Waka, for which he earned a Literary Fellowship at the University of Auckland, has been reprinted many times. He is a great fan of all kinds of decolonisation. His scholarly work is published in Routledge India’s Indigeneity series, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The New Zealand Journal of Literature, Landfall, Biography, and Ka Mate Ka Ora.
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center
All Arts Welcome!
Reception and Open House
September 21, 2023 at 4pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23
Join us at our annual Open House to renew connections and meet new arts faculty at UC Berkeley. We’ll showcase our programming for the year, including our new series, The Loft Hour.
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center and the Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts and Humanities.
CELEBRATE LATINX HERITAGE MONTH
Latinx Poetry Now: Reading and Conversation with
J. Michael Martinez + aracelis girmay
in conversation with John Alba Cutler
September 28, 2023 at 11am
Maude Fife, 315 Wheeler Hall
Join the Arts Research Center for our first Poetry & the Senses reading of fall 2023, featuring incredible poets and multimedia artists J. Michael Martin and aracelis girmay. Following their readings, they will be in conversation with Prof John Alba Cutler (English).
J. Michael Martinez is a multimedia artist and the author of three collections of poetry, including Heredities, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Museum of the Americas, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. He is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.
aracelis girmay makes poems, multigenre texts, picture books, and collages. In collaboration with artist Valentina Améstica and the Center for Book Arts, a limited edition chapbook of her new work will be out later in the fall. She is the editor of So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket, 2023) and is the editor-at-large of the Blessing the Boats Selections. She is also on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. For her work girmay was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She will begin teaching at Stanford University in fall 2023.
Presented by the Arts Research Center and co-sponsored by Engaging the Senses Foundation, the English Department, and the Center for Latin American Studies
dg nanouk okpik:
Craft Talk – Eskimo In The City: Reading and Writing for Life and Lunch Poems Reading
October 05, 2023
Reading: 12-1pm, Morrison Libary
Craft Talk: 4-5:15pm, ARC – Hearst Field Annex D23
Poet dg nanouk okpik will give a public Craft Talk, Eskimo in the City: Reading and Writing for Life, at 4pm at the Arts Research Center. Okpik will discuss the obstacles to and liberations of literacy and poetry in an intersectional Native framework. Her talk asks how Malcolm X, poetic movements such as Cave Canem, and the structures and temporality of Native languages, can inform our sense of what it means to belong in America today. This event follows her 12-1pm Lunch Poems Reading in Morrison Library, both events are free & open to the public.
dg nanouk okpik will give a Lunch Poems Reading from 12-1pm in Morrison Library, followed by a Craft Talk from 4-5:15pm in ARC (Hearst Field Annex D23). Both events are free and open to the public.
okpik is the author of Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), which won the American Book Award and the May Sarton Award. okpik was also the recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Santa Fe. dg nanouk okpik was born in Anchorage, where she spent much of her life, and her family is from Barrow, Alaska. okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit. She received an AFA in liberal arts / liberal studies from Salish Kootenai College, earned both an AFA and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program.
Presented by the Arts Research Center with the English Depts Lunch Poems Series and co-sponsored by Engaging the Senses Foundation
Internet Tour: Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations
An in-person journey through the physical Internet infrastructure––a tourist route of non-touristic places
OCT 12, 2023
Bus Tour, 9am – 1pm (ticketed event)
Bus pick-up and return: Hearst Museum
Treats from Cafe Ohlone to follow
“Internet Tour” is an initiative by Barcelona-based artist Mario Santamaría, whose successful bus tours have explored the hidden digital infrastructures of many European cities. Now in Berkeley, in collaboration with Prof Alex Saum-Pascual, and together with the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Arts Research Center, we’ll embark on a collective exploration of the world’s preeminent technology hub, the San Francisco Bay Area, as we unearth its Internet infrastructure. Traveling by bus and on foot across Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland, this guided tour will also feature poetic and artistic experiences. We’ll visit the places through which our voices, images, cryptocurrencies, and future intelligences circulate as cursed matter that flows from the same wound. Where to go from there?
Sponsor(s): Berkeley Center for New Media with the Arts Research Center, Insitut Ramon Llull, and the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study
The Loft Hour: Zamansele Nsele + Nicole Starosielski
in conversation with Roshanak Kheshti
Oct 19, 2023 from 12 – 1pm
ARC – Hearst Field Annex D23
Elevate your lunch break with The Loft Hour, a new year-long series that invites new arts faculty to riff on their work over lunch, in an informal conversation moderated by an ARC-affiliated faculty member. The October program features Zamansele Nsele (History of Art) and Nicole Starosielski (Film & Media) in conversation with Roshanak Kheshti (TDPS).
Zamansele Nsele is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art. She is widely published and active as a critic, journalist,and cultural organizer. Nsele’s interests in critical theories of Blackness in visual art; with a particular emphasis on the tradition of resistance art movements in the United States and South Africa. Her research interests also explore the citationality and curatorial adaptation of the Black literary tradition into visual artworks and art exhibitions
Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media, conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, and teaches classes and supervises projects on digital media, environmental media, media and communications infrastructures, media history and theory, and integrated media theory and production, among other areas.
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center and the Deans Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities
Tanya Lukin Linklater
ARC Fall 2023 Artist in Residence
November 1 – 4, 2023
Read the blog post here!
Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth.
Open rehearsals to the public, held at BAMPFA:
Wed Nov 1st: 3 – 7pm
Thu Nov 2nd: 3 – 7pm
Fri Nov 3rd: 2 – 5pm
Sat Nov 4th: 2 – 5pm
Artist/choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater will lead a series of open rehearsals with dance artists, Ivanie Aubin-Malo and Ceinwen Gobert, entitled Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth. These sessions respond to the cyclical, seasonal, affective, and formal qualities of selected works in Duane Linklater: mymothersside, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The public is invited to view the in-situ, unfolding processes of embodiment, gesture, and sensation.
Tanya Lukin Linklater is compelled by audiences viewing open rehearsals, or the process of making dances. Through experimentation, structured improvisation, prompts from objects in exhibition, place, and writings, she facilitates a choreographic process. In 2022 and 2023 Lukin Linklater is staying with this slow unfolding of making dances, refusing to culminate these processes in finished performances. In this way, she centres the intellectual, affective, and physical labor—and relational aspects—of making dances.
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center, BAMPFA, The Townsend Center for Humanities, and the Dept of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies
Claudia Rankine + Pamela Sneed: A Conversation on Commemoration
in conversation with Simon(e) van Saarloos
Nov 8, 2023 at 6pm
Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
ARC co-sponsored event
How to care for erased stories, while simultaneously creating different ways of storytelling: stories that do not rely on legibility, relatability, certainty and factual proof? Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting and Rhetoric PhD student at UC Berkeley, invites poets Claudia Rankine and Pamela Sneed for a conversation on commemoration.
In Citizen. An American Lyric, poet, playwright and MacArthur fellow Claudia Rankine writes: “This would be your fatal flaw–your memory, vessel of feelings …” The accumulation of everyday violence and racism forms heavy memories that make it difficult to imagine a present and future different from the past. In Funeral Diva, poet and visual artist Pamela Sneed laments surviving the AIDS crisis in NYC as a Black lesbian. While grieving the friends she lost, Sneed also mourns the erasure of Black lesbians and their labor and asks: “Who takes care of the caretakers?”
Sponsored by the Departments of English and Rhetoric, the Arts Research Center and Engaging the Senses Foundation, Black Studies Collaboratory, Holloway Poetry Series, the Othering & Belonging Institute, and Townsend Center for Humanities
What Gets Amplified: Raven Chacon with Berkeley New Media Center
Nov 13, 2023 at 5pm
Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex, D23
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Raven Chacon will discuss his recent works, using scores and field recordings as the medium for relaying narratives of outdoor spaces (Aristotle’s Lyceum) and indoor spaces (Catholic churches).
An Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium lecture, presented as part of BCNM’s Indigenous Technologies initiative. Co-sponsored by the Arts Research Center, the Department of Music, the Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Department of Art Practice.
The Loft Hour: Marié Abe (Music) + Luanne Redeye (Art Practice)
in conversation with Angela Marino
Thursday, Nov 19, 2023
12 – 1pm
Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex, D23
Elevate your lunch break with The Loft Hour, a new year-long series that invites new arts faculty to riff on their work over lunch, in an informal conversation moderated by an ARC- affiliated faculty member. The November program features Marié Abe (Music) and Luanne Redeye (Art Practice) in conversation with Angela Marino (TDPS).
Marié Abe is a scholar of music and sound with ongoing ethnographic commitments in Japan, Okinawa, Ethiopia, and the US. Her research explores the political and affective affordances of (musical) sounds in contexts ranging from everyday life to social movements, driven by her interest in exploring how auditory culture produces social space, and how sound’s materiality and ephemerality are entangled with affect and sociality. She founded and organized the BU Global Music Festival in Boston (2018-2023), and has performed, recorded, and internationally toured with various groups, from indie pop to Ethiopian jazz and free improvisation, appearing at major venues and national and international festivals. Prior to joining Berkeley, Abe taught at Boston University and Harvard University.
Luanne Redeye is an assistant professor in the Department of Art Practice, where her works utilize a Native lens to share her experiences and perspective of navigating a modern world as a Native woman. Having grown up on the Allegany Indian Reservation in Western New York and an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and Hawk Clan, Redeye incorporates community, family and culture into her artwork. Her collections have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Seneca Art & Culture Center at Ganondagan; the Institute of American Indian Arts; Saint Lawrence University; the New York State Museum; and El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe. https://luanneredeye.com.
Sponsored by the Arts Research Center and the Deans Office of the Division of Arts and Humanities
A Day With(Out) Art
Everyone I Know Is Sick
Friday, December 1st, 2023
ONLINE
ARC is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2023 by presenting a video program on the ongoing HIV epidemic. Visual AIDS announces a program of six videos generating connections between HIV and other forms of illness and disability. Inspired by a statement from Cyrée Jarelle Johnson in the book Black Futures, Everyone I Know Is Sick examines how our society excludes disabled and sick people by upholding a false dichotomy of health and sickness.
Image: Still from Hiura Fernandes and Lili Nascimento’s video ‘That Child with AID$’
Echoes from the Borderlands
with artist Valeria Luiselli
Thur, November 30, 2023 from 5 – 6:30pm
Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall
Renowned writer Valeria Luiselli presents and discusses Echoes from the Borderlands, a sonic essay that documents the histories of violence against land and bodies in the US-Mexico borderlands. Soundscapes, music, poetry, essays, interviews, and archival material interweave in this experimental sound piece.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She teaches at Bard College and is a visiting professor at Harvard University.
A BCNM Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium special event, presented with the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Arts Research Center (ARC), the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS), and as part of BCNM’s Latinx & Latin American Media Ecologies program. Co-sponsored by the Latinx Research Center, the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) and the American Cultures Center.
Fall 2023 Poetry & the Senses Reading
with Cody Achin, Julian Ankney, Al-An deSouza, Ayling Dominguez, Ines Hernandez-Avila, Chris Hoshnic, Fede Kong-Gonzalez, Marisa Lin, Cristina S. Mendez, Angel Sobotta, Aimee Suzara, Taté Walker, and Sa Whitley
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
5:30 – 7pm
ONLINE – livestreamed and captioned
LINK HERE
The Arts Research Center (ARC) celebrates our Fall 2023 ARC Poetry & the Senses Fellows with a reading of work created during their fellowship semester. Please join us in welcoming thirteen extraordinary poets to ARC’s virtual stage. They will be joined by ARC’s fall 2023 facilitators, poet Natalie Diaz (Mojave) and ARC Director Beth Piatote (Nez Perce). UC Berkeley’s poetry fellows were joined by writers from Arizona State University and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (Diaz) and the community-based Nez Perce writing collective, luk’upsíimey (Piatote). The expansion of the Poetry for the Senses model in 2023 created connections around Indigenous issues across multiple western states and explored poetry and the politics of language in a wider framework. The interest was in creating a trans-Indigenous conversation, with juxtapositions that decenter European thought and begin to translate an oceanic-to-river-to-forest poetic imaginary.
This event is part of the Arts Research Center’s Poetry & the Senses program, that explores the relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act of care, mindfulness, and resistance. Sponsored by the Arts Research Center in partnership with Engaging the Senses Foundation.