CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A five-part salon series that begins this week will feature the work of Black artists and how they address race, diversity and inclusion. The series launches a new Black Arts Initiative by the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“We Got Next” will present online conversations from 7-8:30 p.m. every Thursday for the next five weeks, July 23-Aug. 20, on Zoom. It will offer a lens into the research of Black artists, then use their work to look at broad issues of racism and the recent protests of police brutality against Black individuals. Dance professor Endalyn Taylor is coordinating the salon series and was selected as an FAA Dean’s Fellow for the year to lead the Black Arts Initiative.
“We’ve been here and we’ve been doing work around race, inclusion and social justice issues – not just within the performing or visual arts, but the environmental arts as well. I felt those voices needed to be heard, and wanted to provide a platform to highlight the work and generate conversations between faculty and with the community. There is a history of art lending its creative voice to movements and racial uprisings as a way of affecting change,” Taylor said.
Each session of the salon series will include a viewing of the featured work and a live discussion. The initial salon series conversation will feature dance professor Kemal Nance and Taylor talking about their work “Chalk Lines,” which addresses the proliferation of violence against African American men. It was performed in 2016 at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The conversation also will feature FAA alumnus Tim Davis, an artist and gallery owner.
The featured faculty members for the rest of the series include Lisa Dixon (theatre), Rebecca Ginsburg (landscape architecture), Patrick Hammie (art), Joyce McCall (music), Stacey Robinson (art), Rochelle Sennet (music) and Lou Turner (urban and regional planning), as well as guest artist James Lee.
The Black Arts Initiative is part of a strategic focus in FAA on research, teaching and engagement in the area of African American and Afro-diasporic arts and cultures. It seeks to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in the college’s programming, faculty representation and faculty research. Taylor’s work with the Black Arts Initiative will include assessing the potential of the college for lasting excellence in Black and Afro-diasporic arts, given its strong leaders in this area; looking at opportunities for supporting work through external partnerships; and determining what barriers need removing for Black faculty to create and thrive, said FAA Dean Kevin Hamilton.
“There are few areas of strength for which teaching, research and public engagement are as tightly coupled. There are also even fewer areas in our college for which those who should be in leadership have been so long excluded and oppressed. We must advance this work in a way that gives back to those from whom much has been stolen, rather than asking for yet more without return,” Hamilton said. “Black arts emerged as not only an area in which a dispersed strength deserved attention, but in which the faculty at hand face particular challenges to success, and indeed at times to merely living.”
Taylor has several goals for the Black Arts Initiative. She said she hopes it will help find ways to make it easier for Black faculty members to navigate the promotion and tenure process; provide creative ways to support Black artists through funding, and venues and opportunities to show their work; and foster more engagement between Black artists at the U. of I. and the community.
“The opportunity to be a candid voice at the table with the policymakers is what we need right now,” Taylor said. “We need people at the table who can tell what is needed – an honest, open request and a conversation about finding real solutions. I believe in what we can accomplish and what we have accomplished as Black artists. I want those things to be acknowledged, recognized and celebrated.”
Fully supporting Black faculty members will make the college stronger, Hamilton said.
The college is creating a new course in Black arts and is looking at offering a minor and possibly a double major that includes Black arts.
“We would like to see FAA as a national destination for those seeking the latest innovations in Black-centric scholarship and creation in the arts,” Hamilton said. “Given our location along the trail of the Great Migration, and as a destination for later moves by dislocated Black communities, we believe we have some unique contributions to make in national and indeed global conversation and creation around Black arts as both a historical movement and a way of imagining the future.”