For ’91, the upcoming “Creative Activity as a Human Right” event is two months in the planning but decades in the making.
James Haywood Rolling Jr.
Rolling, a dual professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and teaching and leadership in the School of Education, is the new co-director of the . Marvin Lender ’63 and his wife, Helaine Gold Lender ’65, created the interdisciplinary Lender Center to fulfill their enduring mission to develop ethical and courageous citizens.
The center provides research support, faculty and student fellowships, and symposia such as the upcoming Nov. 11 Lender Center Conversation, which this fall is focusing on the “Creative Activity as a Human Right” theme that was first advanced in a special issue of that Rolling published in July 2017, when he was the journal’s senior editor.
Art Education is the official journal of the , which Rolling currently leads into its 75th anniversary next year as the organization’s president. As he was contemplating that issue in 2017, two main questions ran through his mind.
“What would it mean for artists, art and design educators, and arts institutions to reconceptualize creative activity as a universal and inalienable human right?” Rolling says. “How might it change our conception of the visual arts and design in practice and in education?”
Those questions will be at the heart of “,” which is co-sponsored by and the . The public is invited to attend. for the “Creative Activity as a Human Right” virtual event.
The event will feature “interdisciplinary artists, activists and educators with expertise in the arts, humanities and social sciences joining together to examine what it might mean to rethink creativity as a universal and inalienable human right, a remedy for complicated histories of inhumanity and carelessness, and a change-making, emancipatory form of social intelligence.”
The event includes keynote speaker , panel discussions and a spotlight conversation with celebrated contemporary artists, ’81 and University Artist in Residence . to attend the virtual event.
Rolling has spent his entire career as an educator focused on developing the next generation of diverse, creative leaders who travel paths of self-evident worth they weren’t at first aware they could trailblaze. Here is what he says about the history behind “Creative Activity as a Human Right”:
“Social justice has a long history in the arts and education. As W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain LeRoy Locke, John Dewey, Maxine Greene, bell hooks and other pioneers of emancipatory philosophy understood, there is an essential relationship between participation in creative cultural production and the making of a free, democratic society.
“Creative activity opens up alternate possibilities for thinking, feeling and doing. In its most hopeful form, it enables us to adapt, connect, relate, join forces and pool our resources in new ways so that we are all less alone, less vulnerable and less unable.
“Creative activity and invention have been the collective fuel necessary for human survival, the evolution of social relations, and our creative leaps as a civilization along the way. Indeed, repressive social systems are quite effective, at least in part, because they restrict creative activity as an agency for defining individual identity while curtailing and controlling access to the shaping of cultural content and currency.”
As the Lender Center formalized plans for the event and lined up its prominent panelists, Rolling has posed the following key questions for all participants and audiences to consider:
Here is the schedule for the Lender Center for Social Justice Conversation “Creative Activity as a Human Right” on Nov. 11:
Keynote speaker Amelia Kraehe
Rolling will moderate this discussion.
, professor of practice in African American Studies and executive director of the Community Folk Art Center at ϲ, will moderate this discussion.
Carrie Mae Weems, Artist in Residence at ϲ
, co-director of the Lender Center and professor of communication and rhetorical studies in ϲ’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, will moderate this discussion.
Featured throughout the day will be a series of small original drawings about the human condition by Jewish American artist . Her three-year study of refugees across people groups, man-made crises, wars, persecutions and social traumas offers a profound visual argument for why creative activity is essential in the address of the acts of inhumanity that have erased and displaced so many lives.
