a justice-oriented public humanities project & community education resource featuring original text, visual media, recordings, and virtual and in-person live events by activists, artists, and academics.
About
CARE SYLLABUS is a cross-institutional, multimodal public humanities project and community education resource. This program was first made possible through a collaboration between Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in partnership with neighboring institutions including The Clark Art Institute and Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA).
CARE SYLLABUS highlights artistic expression, activism, and thinking that fosters a radical communal imagination. The creative impulses rooted in these modes of collaboration and critique spur new ways of exploring the histories of care - and shifting praxes of care - currently at work in our homes, classrooms, and communities. Between 2020-2022, CARE SYLLABUS created 5 modules on varying valences of “care” featuring guest curators, Wendy Red Star, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Johanna Hedva, Rizvana Bradley, and members of the CARE SYLLABUS advisory collective. These interlocutors assembled a range of materials to instruct and inform on their chosen topics, bringing together anti-racist, community-focused strands and strategies of care.
CARESYLLABUS.ORG offers:
A number of guest-curated, themed modules which illuminate specific strands and strategies of care in the arts.
A public education program accompanying each module, organized by the CARE SYLLABUS team, featuring a keynote event with guest-curators, a community study session aimed at educators, and a platform for the stories of community activists and advocacy organizations. Public programs offer invitations for action, and steps to activate what you learn.
A forum, care/of, that offers reflections on art and care submitted by partners and community members.
A resource guide that features directions for further learning and community involvement.
For more information, check out CARE SYLLABUS’s Mission Statement, Land Acknowledgment, and FAQ.
CO-DIRECTORS
Victoria Papa, Associate Professor of English & Visual Culture, MCLA
Victoria Papa is Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture at MCLA. Her research and teaching examine the intersection of creative expression and the survival of structural traumas in the 20th- and 21st-centuries. Her work is especially interested in how writers and artists make use of aesthetic possibilities to enact life-affirming counternarratives of care and kinship.
Victoria is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled, Survival Aesthetics: Creative Expression & the Critique of Trauma. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, Women & Performance, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, ASAP/J, Public Books, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Literature and History. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Laura Thompson, Director of Education, MASS MoCA
Laura Dickstein Thompson has worked in museum education and administration for 30 years. Since 2002, Thompson has directed Kidspace, the award-winning art gallery and studio space at MASS MoCA, for which she has curated 30 exhibition projects with renowned artists and established its ArtBar. In 2012, Thompson’s responsibilities expanded to a senior management position as MASS MoCA’s founding director of education. Thompson is also a visiting assistant professor of arts administration at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Dr. Thompson has presented at various symposia, most recently at the Clark Art Institute’s Radical Practices convening (resulting article forthcoming). She has published chapters in an artist catalogue on Federico Uribe and in the museum education text Building Museum and School Partnerships. Her research and writing focus is on the integration of mindfulness into museum pedagogy and has co-written on the topic for the Journal of Museum Education and Mindfulness. Dr. Thompson holds a doctorate in art education from Columbia University Teachers College.
Levi Prombaum, ACLS Fellow, MASS MoCA
Levi Prombaum (PhD, History of Art, University College London) is a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art. He continues his work on CARE SYLLABUS from his time as a 2020-2021 American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow at MASS MoCA. His research explores the enduring inheritances of civil rights era image-making, and he is currently turning his doctoral thesis, which tracked the development of James Baldwin’s critical styles and close friendships with visual artists, into a book.
Dr. Prombaum was previously a curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim, where he administered the acquisitions program and helped curate exhibitions of American painting and photography.
ADVISORY COLLECTIVE
An advisory collective of institutional partners guides CARE SYLLABUS. It consists of members from Berkshire Cultural Research Center, MASS MoCA, MCLA, The Clark Art Institute, Williams College, and Williams College Museum of Art.
Lisa Arrastia
Originally from New York City, Lisa is an associate professor of education at MCLA after decades as a school leader and founder. She is board president of Kite's Nest, a center for liberatory education, and advisory board member for NYU’s Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity. Lisa has a PhD in American Studies. Her fields of concentration
are audioethnography, aesthetics-based educational research, and Black studies. Lisa’s scholarship investigates pedagogies of culture, masculinity, and the intersection of race, social class, place, and school. Her forthcoming books are Love Pedagogy: An Oral History Remix and Beyond School: Education Outside the System.
Caren Beilin
Caren Beilin is the author of a forthcoming novel Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2022). Her other books are Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and lives close by, in Vermont.
Christina Yang
Christina Yang is Deputy Director of Engagement and Curator of Education at the Williams College Museum of Art. She specializes in contemporary global art, performance theory, social practice, and artist collaborations. She has held positions at the Guggenheim Museum, Queens Museum, and The Kitchen. She is a Ph.D candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. She serves on the editorial board of Women & Performance, a journal of feminist theory including acting as performance reviews editor from 2018-20. She holds an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and a BA from UC Berkeley.
Additional Members of the Advisory Collective:
Tu Le
Melanie Mowinski
Nicole Porther
J. Antonio Templanza
Chris Fernald
Caroline Fowler
Zack Finch
Zack Finch is a poet, essayist and scholar of modern and contemporary US poetry and poetics. He has received awards and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Wallace Stevens Society. His work has appeared in places including American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Fence, Jacket2, Poetry and Tin House. A graduate of Warren Wilson's Program for Writers (MFA in poetry) and University of Buffalo's Poetics Program (PhD), he currently teaches writing and literature courses in the English Department at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Mohamad Junaid
Mohamad Junaid is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He has a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY, with research on violence, youth activists and political subjectivity in Kashmir. His work on military occupation, history writing, space, and memory has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East, Identities, The Funambulist, and several edited volumes and anthologies.
Amanda Tobin
Amanda Tobin is a practicing museum educator working to support social justice through arts education. She currently works as the Associate Director of Education at MASS MoCA, where she has developed community and school engagement programs, particularly for area partner schools, since 2014. Tobin holds a B.A. in Art History and East Asian Studies from Oberlin College and an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Alexandra Foradas
Alexandra Foradas is a curator and art historian based in North Adams, MA, and New York, NY. She specializes in modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on systems of knowledge and typology and their relationship to montage, collage, and assemblage. Foradas is Curator at MASS MoCA, where she has organized solo exhibitions by Taryn Simon (2018), Jenny Holzer (2017, 2019), and Janice Kerbel (2017), among others, and the group exhibitions Bibliothecaphilia (2015) and Kissing through a Curtain (2020; catalogue forthcoming). She teaches at Hunter College, and is a PhD candidate at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
Gage McWeeny
Gage McWeeny is Director of the Oakley Center for Humanities & Social Sciences and Professor of English at Williams College. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He is the author of a study of Victorian literature and the thin but powerful social bonds of modern urban life, The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form (Oxford UP, 2016), and co-edited the Longman Cultural Edition of Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times. His writing has appeared in Novel: a Forum on Fiction, Victorian Poetry, and in the art journal Cabinet, and he has been a contributor of reviews and essays for BBC Radio 3 and 4.
Ronna Tulgan Ostheimer
Ronna Tulgan Ostheimer has worked in the education department of the Clark for more than twenty years, first as the Coordinator of Community and Family Programs and for the past eleven years as Director of Education. Her goal as a museum educator is to help people understand more fully that looking at and thinking about art can expand their sense of human possibility - their own, each other's and in general. She holds an EdD in Psychological Education from the University of Massachusetts and a B.A. in Sociology and American Studies from Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Guangzi Huang
Dr. Guangzhi Huang is from Guangzhou, China, and came to the U.S. for graduate studies in 2007. He received a master’s degree from St. Louis University, and a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018, both in American Studies. This increasingly globalized field, however, trained him to become a scholar of transnational connections. He specializes in the dialectic relationship between race and urban development. In particular, his research focuses on how race, especially blackness, contributes to the gentrification in Guangzhou, and the formation of a new middle class in China.
Nina Pelaez
Nina Pelaez is a writer, educator, and art historian living in North Adams, MA. She works at the Williams College Museum of Art as Curator of Public Programs and Interpretation, developing experimental projects and participatory experiences with artists, performers, students, scholars, and museum visitors, among others. In her work, she is interested in fostering practices of unknowing, surfacing absences, building community, and working collaboratively. She holds a B.A. in Art History and English from Swarthmore College and an M.A. in Art History from Williams College.
Erica Wall
Erica Wall is the Director of the MCLA Berkshire Cultural Resource Center. In her role, she oversees MCLA's public art programs and spaces, including Gallery 51, DownStreet Art and MCLA Presents! Before coming to MCLA, Wall founded ERICA BROUSSARD GALLERY in 2016 in Orange County, California and in 2017, an artists’ residency, 36 Chase & Barns in North Adams, Massachusetts. Both spaces were dedicated to supporting the creation, exhibition, criticism and documentation of work by historically underrepresented artists.
Erica’s career started in museum education where she worked at both large and small art institutions, most notably, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Crocker Art Museum, The Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Erica is also a previous Smithsonian Fellow and holds a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and a master’s degree in Art Education and Museum Studies from California State University, Los Angeles.
Project Partners
