College of
Arts and Sciences

Arts and Sciences

Home / Shutz Lecture Series
The UMKC Trustees and College of Arts and Sciences are proud to introduce the Marilyn T. and Byron C. Shutz Lecture Series starting Fall 2021. This annual series will host lectures, seminars, and workshops in fields such as creative writing, literature, and art history.


For its inaugural year, the Marilyn T. and Byron C. Shutz Lecture Series is entitled "SPEAK UP! Building Racial Justice through Art, Writing, and Pedagogy." Hosted by the departments of Art and Art History and English, these events will bring speakers from around the nation with expertise in the fields of studio art, art history, composition, rhetoric, creative writing, and literature.
SPEAK UP: Building Racial Justice through Art, Writing, and Pedagogy

Cultivating Antiracist Assessment Practices: A Faculty Workshop Series

Thursdays, October 14, 21, and 28, 2021
4:00-5:00 pm
Zoom

Register for workshop series

This three-part workshop series will engage and challenge participants to interrogate their biases associated with assessment in efforts to develop and implement antiracist classroom assessment practices. The first part of the workshop will ask participants to examine their own positionalities as instructors in order to critically reflect on their classroom assessment practices. Part two will focus on the process of creating assessment practices, such as grading contracts, in order to practice inclusive and antiracist assessment in the classroom. The third part of the workshop will be putting these assessments in conversation and building the capacity for ongoing work. Led by Antonio Byrd (Assistant Professor of English at University of Missouri-Kansas City), Virginia Schwarz (Assistant Professor English at San Francisco State University), and Lizbett Tinoco (Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University).

 

Join us for:

Reimagining Suppressed Histories of Racial Violence

Thursday, November 4, 2021
4:00-5:30 pm
Zoom

Register for this event

Artist Isaac Julien and art historian Krista Thompson will be speaking about the haunting power of images. Julien will discuss his recent film installation Lessons of the Hour, which reimagines the life of statesman and freed slave Frederick Douglass. Interweaving poetic images of Douglass with his resonating statements on the struggle for freedom, the work asks the viewer to become immersed in a historical re-enactment which is both aesthetically pleasing and psychologically disquieting.

Similarly concerned with how the past can be reassessed, Krista Thompson will address the civil uproar which emerged in Tivoli Gardens (Jamaica) when the police launched an operation to catch fugitive Christopher “Dudus” Coke in May, 2010. Based on photographs and surveillance footage, she will assess how the visual narrative of this violent event culminating in the death of 69 civilians —mostly young black men— ties in with broader cultural, social, and political forces shaping the postcolonial state.

Image: Isaac Julien, The North Star from Lessons of the Hour series, 2019, inkjet photograph. Courtesy of Isaac Julien.

Isaac Julien, The North Star from Lessons of the Hour series, 2019, inkjet photograph. Courtesy of Isaac Julien.
Isaac Julien is a critically acclaimed British artist and filmmaker. He is Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California Santa Cruz and leads the Isaac Julien Lab together with Arts Professor Mark Nash. Julien’s works have been exhibited at prestigious venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and Centre Georges Pompidou. Julien is the recipient of The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award 2017 and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2017.
portrait of Isaac Julien
Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (2006) and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (2015). The latter book received the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association (2016). Thompson is currently working on The Evidence of Things Not Captured, a book manuscript which examines notions of photographic absence, fugitivity, and disappearance in Jamaica (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
portrait of Krista Thompson
Follow us on Facebook
Find us on Instagram
Join our mailing list

Past Shutz Lecture Series Events

Re-Envisioning Native American Identities in Visual Art and Literature

Thursday, September 16, 2021

Roundtable conversation on art, cultural appropriation, and indigenous rights, moderated by Lisa Tatonetti (Professor of English at Kansas State University), with Gregg Deal (artist and activist), Kate Morris (Professor of Art History at Santa Clara University), and Malea Powell (Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University).

Watch recorded panel