Art to the Rescue: Cultural Agents Take You By Surprise
Building on the extraordinary intervention made in scholarly and civic life by Doris Sommer’s “The Work of Art in the World,” this presentation explores how the lost promise of the humanities is being realized by artists and activists in aggrieved communities in New Orleans, Houston and Los Angeles who are working with the few tools they have in the sparse arenas that are open to them. In the midst of what Sommer calls “a world gone gray from habit” that is “inured to suffering and afraid of love,” projects of art-based community making are decorating the way to other worlds.
Doris Sommer, Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, specifically through “Pre-Texts” in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America and beyond. Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991) about novels that helped to consolidate new republics; Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature (1999) on a rhetoric of particularism; Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004); and The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014). Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education. She has a B.A. from New Jersey’s Douglass College for Women, and Ph.D. from Rutgers University.
George Lipsitz studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. His books include MIDNIGHT AT THE BARRELHOUSE, FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK, THE POSSESSIVE INVESTMENT IN WHITENESS, A LIFE IN THE STRUGGLE, and TIME PASSAGES. Lipsitz serves as chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and is a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance. He received his Ph.D in history at the University of Wisconsin.