MULTIMODAL WORKSHOP

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.

MULTIMODAL WORKSHOP

Good Writing Grows Out of Noticing

Thursday, October 2, 3:30–5pm | Meet at the Taft Research Center | Register

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.

MULTIMODAL WORKSHOP

 

The Breath of Life 

Thursday, October 16, 10am–noon | Taft Research Center | Register 

Join our fall keynote speaker Amitava Kumar for a workshop whose title comes from a line by William Maxwell: "After forty years, what I came to care about the most was not style but the breath of life." How are we to find in what we read but also, crucially, in what we write that particular feeling or intimation, touch, unyielding grit or, for that matter, the elusive trace of what we understand as the authentic or the real? Also, how to proceed from specific details to questions of voice and structure. Three short writing exercises will be built around a discussion of passages from Joan Didion, Arundhati Roy, David Foster Wallace, James McPhee, Amy Hempel, and Lydia Davis. 

FALL KEYNOTE

Writing About Others

Thursday, October 16, 4–5:30pm | Valentine Overlook, Clifton Court Hall 5280 | Register

In sharing portions of his current nonfiction project on India, Amitava Kumar will examine the process through which a book gets assembled: a starting idea, what is repeated or developed as a theme, the changes in the work's conception, missteps, revisions. Professor Kumar has also been assembling a visual archive while doing this project and his talk will include a discussion of his interviewing technique and the rules he tries to follow during his travels. The questions he is struggling with include how to structure time and how to order the multiple narratives. He hopes that an interactive discussion will yield insights about how each one of us chooses to write. 

TAFT&

Portals, Pathways, and the Space Between Us

KADIST & The Carnegie | October 18 

Taft is proud to sponsor The Carnegie and KADIST's collaborative exhibition that explores placemaking, shapeshifting, and the temporalities of Kentucky through the Ohio River. Thinking of movement, fluidity, ephemerality, and environmental activation, this exhibition consists of outdoor pop-up video exhibitions that spans six venues across six cities in Kentucky, once a month from June to November 2025. The traveling exhibition is composed of two videos and a soundscape that represent international and regional voices that interweave disruption and contemplation through placid yet subversive temporalities. Learn more here. 

MULTIMODAL WORKSHOP

Punctuating Art in Action

Friday, October 24, 10am–noon | Elliston Poetry Room | Register

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 artist and anthropologist Risa Cromer, participants will consider what happens when altering texts to bring forth new meaning. 

THEMATIC LECTURE

Hubert Harrison and the Forbidden Periods of Radical History

Monday, October 27, 4pm | Taft Research Center | Register

This talk by Brian Kwoba explores the political life of the journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, the full scope of Harrison's revolutionary legacy has been largely erased from popular memory. Until now.

THEMATIC LECTURE

The 1911 Triangle Fire: A New York Story that Resonates across Time and Space

Friday, November 7, 1:30pm 

Unlike most events in US labor history, the passage of time has not erased memory of the Triangle fire. The story continues to inspire labor, immigrant, and women’s rights movements in New York, around the US, and in different parts of the globe. Triangle memory is nurtured by Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a stalwart band of volunteers who connect individuals and groups to the story through the annual commemoration ceremony and other initiatives. In this talk Mary Anne Trasciatti explores how memory work that is grounded in a single moment and location can connect people across time and space. 

THEMATIC LECTURE

Period. The Real Story of Menstruation 

Thursday, November 13, 4pm | Taft Resarch Center 

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Blending interviews and personal experience with engaging stories from her own pioneering research, Kate Clancy challenges a host of myths and false assumptions.