Alumni Lecture Series

Register for Free Join us for a special lecture by Steven Laxton on the Art and Importance of Personal Projects Join us for this free, virtual event! Now living in Brooklyn, Steven Laxton was born in rural Australia and, after moving to Adelaide, he began shooting for local magazines and clients while he was still a teenager. Recognition came early when, in 2008, he was named one of the 15 Rising Stars of International Photography by American Photo Magazine. When Communication Arts named him a “Fresh” artist in 2009, it coincided with the inclusion of his series on Holocaust survivors in the book and project “Afterwards: Contemporary Photography Confronting the Past” curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer... Read more »

Register for Free How do we turn archival materials into fiction? How can we honor our cultural inheritance with our creative work? Novelist and critic Joy Castro will share the story of how she researched and wrote the historical novel One Brilliant Flame, set in 1886 amidst the anticolonial revolutionary émigré enclave in Key West, while—with the help of a brilliant scholar-translator—restoring her grandfather's volume of 96 poems Lágrimas y flores, which appears in print for the first time since 1918 this October in a bilingual edition from the University Press of Florida as Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West. Join us for this free, virtual event! Joy Castro is... Read more »

Register for Free Join Anneli Skaar for a presentation of her 2021 artist book Monarch, a story about California history, extraction, and extinction told entirely through the story of Monarch–the “last” California grizzly bear–who served as a model for the California state flag. In the 1800s, the gold rush transformed the golden, poppy-covered land of California, with plentiful grizzly bears, into one of the first examples of anthropogenic impact in modern times. The rush for wealth decimated the bears. As a marketing gimmick, William Randolph Hearst, editor of the San Francisco Examiner, had a reporter hunt down the “last” grizzly. Named Monarch after the paper’s slogan, “The Monarch of the Dailies”, the bear would eventually... Read more »