by Leeya Mehta
Steven Luu's photo has become the iconic center of the #Baldwin100. By reflecting on it and our core collaborator, Mason Exhibitions, this short note on the Spring programs brings you some musings.
From February 2025 until May 2025 we will run and support the following programs and classroom initiatives. Our aim is to bridge projects and themes from year to year to incorporate elements of old programs into new ones as a way of sustaining the practice of UNCONDITIONAL LOVE for our past, our present and our future. Steven Luu's 2024 photo above of a woman who was in high school during the 1960s, viewing the Nothing Personal exhibition, in a space filled with students and young people, creates a conduit for us to view the multigenerational span of time as an artifact of the present moment.
By capturing the present moment in 2024 when the photo was taken, we reflect in our constantly changing present, on the impact of community and memory.
Mason Exhibitions collaborates with the Cheuse Center hosting Cheuse events in exhibition spaces with curators in both organizations working with the artists and photographers/videographers, Steven Luu and Klara Kalu to highlight the importance of community organizing and gathering.
By working to curate multi-generational public and civic spaces we aim to impact civil public discourse through literature and art.
FEB 14 2025: JUST LOVE: BRINGING JAZZ AND POETRY FROM BLACK AND PALESTINIAN ARTISTS AND PERFORMERS TO Washington DC. See here.
FEB 24 2025: Two famous writers join us for the 'politics of language/ the language of politics' series: Moriel Rothman-Zecher at 12 noon, and Oksana Maksymchuk at 1:30pm. During Moriel and Oksana's visits, the artist on display at Gillespie Gallery is Morgan Ashcom. These programs are supported by the VCA and the Scholl Foundation.
MARCH 4 2025: THE PRICE OF THE TICKET, SCREENING, DISCUSSION AND RECEPTION WITH DIRECTOR KAREN THORSEN in Fairfax VA. See here.
JAN-APRIL 2025: NOTHING PERSONAL, A COLLABORATION IN BLACK AND WHITE: MASON EXHIBITIONS IN ARLINGTON - with multiple programs, celebrating amongst other things, the collaboration between black and Jewish artists in the 1960s. See here.
MARCH CLASSROOM VISITS: STEVEN LUU'S MASK MAKING PROJECT with a March 22 open house. Sign up here.
SEMESTER LONG TEACHING: Dr Keith Clark & Prof. Leeya Mehta teach James Baldwin with classes around campus also teaching Baldwin.
THE BROADSIDE PROJECT as part of the Cheuse Center's new initiative creating continuity and collaboration across project years, generations, and writers/artists.
Photo credits: Steven Luu & Mason Exhibitions.