Slow-Jam the News

Friday, September 26, 10am–noon | Taft Research Center | Register

Experiment with time, perspective, and intertextuality in this beginner-friendly painting workshop led by artist Jeshua Schuster. Inspired by Amitava Kumar’s painting practice and selections from The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal (2022) and The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook (2024), we will learn techniques to record and respond to the world around us through drawing, painting, and writing. We’ll “slow-jam the news,” paint trees, and revel in the quiet art of noticing. Free and open to the public, materials provided. While supplies last, participants will receive a copy of Amitava Kumar’s My Beloved Life.

Good Writing Grows Out of Noticing

Join Taft Professor of Public Humanities Chandra Frank to explore what it means to notice "the everyday" during a critical walking methodologies workshop. We will embark on a collective walk to consider how walking can shape our writing and creative research practice. Participants will be invited to experiment with different walking methods followed by journaling prompts. Inspired by Amitava Kumar’s writing and walking practice, we will draw on the correlations between noticing, walking, and writing. Free and open to the public. While supplies last, participants will receive a copy of Amitava Kumar’s My Beloved Life.

Punctuating Art in Action

Erasure is a process of removing parts of existing text to form something new. More than word play, erasure is a creative and critical tool for exploring possibility within limits. In this hands-on workshop with Risa Cromer, participants will explore the power of erasure art as it relates to the 2025–26 Taft Center theme: Period.
 
Periods end sentences, mark cycles, and signal rupture as well as renewal. Drawing on this theme, we will consider what happens when altering texts to bring forth new meaning. For instance, how might erasure help us reimagine human relationships with more-than-human worlds? What is revealed or reimagined when erasing what forecloses as well as advances social justice goals, like climate crisis policy or reproductive rights? How do acts of removal require reckoning with what persists, what disappears, and what must change?
 
The session will include a brief overview of the history and ethics of erasure, examples across literary and visual traditions, time to experiment with producing erasure art, and group reflection. 
 
No prior experience is necessary and art supplies will be provided! Participants should bring a sense of curiosity as well as printed sources inspired by the theme “period.” Anything printed with writing is a good candidate for erasure, e.g., newspapers, novels, cereal boxes, speeches, diary entries, consent forms, pill bottles, dictionaries, religious texts, FBI affidavits, DNA tests, magazine essays, bureaucratic forms, medication inserts, political speeches, textbooks, sermons, shopping lists, receipts, catalogs, personal writing, etc. What potential sources does the theme “period” generate for you? As you brainstorm ideas, reflect on how you relate to the source, how you feel about it, and how you feel about erasing it. Insights can clarify how you may want to approach the content in your erasure, such as by honoring, challenging, or transforming. 
 
By the end of the session, participants will have new tools for using erasure for reflection, resistance, and re-visioning.

Co-sponsored by the School of Environment and Sustainability and Department of Anthropology.