Venue: Online

“An Evening at John Sommers … / with /” Minerva Cuevas
Minerva Cuevas is a conceptual artist, based in Mexico City, whose research-based creative practice spans film, performance, installation, mural painting, and technology. Using the language of branding, advertising, and commerce, Cuevas illuminates issues caused by neoliberal policymaking including the exploitation of natural resources and food production, as well as climate change. She blends appropriation, humor, and hyperbole in the creation of unconventional projects that are always in deep conversations with the place and the people of the community in which her work will be developed and exhibited.

“An Evening at John Sommers … / with /”… is a monthly online student-led academic lecture series hosted at the John Sommers Gallery. Lecture Series that is co-convened by Lara Goldman and Elizabeth Shores, PhD student in art history at UNM and UNM MFA alum respectively. Lara and Elizabeth are co-curators of the upcoming exhibition “Minerva Cuevas: consonance//dissidence” that will open at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas-El Paso in January 2022. This lecture series is free and open to the public click here to join Zoom.

For more information contact: sommersgallery@unm.edu

The sixth talk of this Spring’s series with Ethnographic Poets Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Ather Zia, and Adrie Kusserow over Zoom Thursday, April 22 from 2:00-4:00 pm.

Preregistration for this talk is requested at the following link:

Concert Music credit is available for this event.

Talk Description:

In celebration of National Poetry Month, this workshop will feature poetry readings and hands-on writing exercises from three nationally known poet-ethnographers. Workshop participants grapple with the intersections of poetry, ethnography, and how sustained immersion into other cultural worlds informs our work as scholars and artists. No prior experience in poetry or ethnography is required.

Bios

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, a U.S. Fulbright Scholar Ambassador, is a Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. She’s authored five books addressing intersections between language education and the literary, visual and performing arts including one book of poems, Imperfect Tense, and her newest book, Enlivening Instruction with Drama and Improv.   Supported by grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, and the Beckman Award for Professors Who Inspire, her work narrates the heartache, headache, and joy of teaching and learning language. She lives in Athens, GA with her husband and two children, and their rescue dog, Bagel.

Adrie Kusserow is a cultural anthropologist and poet, teaching in the department of sociology/anthropology at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. She has two books of poetry (Hunting Down the Monk and REFUGE) both published by BOA Editions, Ltd as part of their American Poets Continuum Series. She lives in Underhill, Vermont on the land she grew up on.

Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020),  Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” (1999) and another collection is forthcoming. In 2013 Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. 

Any questions may be directed to slarteaga@unm.edu or Dr. Jacobsen at kmj23@unm.edu .