Skidmore Scope Magazine Annual Edition for 2017

6 SCOPE ANNUAL 2017 Top row: Arthur Evans; bottom row: Tang Museum All year Skidmore’s Tang Museum served as a campus crossroads for diversity discussion and programming—es- pecially with its launch of a three-year Mellon Foundation- funded initiative called Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at the Tang Teaching Museum. Here are some highlights: • In the fall, A More Perfect Union was the campus’s town square. Beneath the exhibition’s worn U.S. flags, a range of talks, classes, and performances, including Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas speaking on immigration policy and the election, drew big crowds. • Nigerian artist Viktor Ekpuk created a wall drawing and met with classes to help launch Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science , featuring contributions by faculty members from nine disciplines. • After the presidential election, the Tang and Skidmore’s Idea Lab Steering Committee hosted the pop-up course “What Now?” a six-week exploration into issues of media bias, women’s health, and inclusion. • In March, Tang Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier launched the Accelerator series with a forum on race through the lens of whiteness and the idea of a “default” culture; panelists were Ohio State University professor Treva Lindsey, film- maker Matthew Cooke, and racial justice organizer Dara Silverman. • For her senior thesis, Hannah Traore ’17 mounted Africa Pop Studio, a show on African studio portraiture with work by the Morocco-born Hassan Hajjaj, whom Traore inter- viewed for a video to add to scholarship about his work. She also organized performances by Ujima students and Royal Court African Dance Group, spoken words by Rashawnda Williams, and DJ-ing by Merkeb Tesfa. • In April, the Tang brought several musicians who create work in the tradition of Sun Ra, whose early art and archives were recently acquired by the Tang and shown in the exhibition Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow . Professor Adam Tinkle incorporated the music, art, and musicians into his course and led a roundtable discussion about Sun Ra. I N C L U S I O N VENUE FOR DIVERSITY CROSSROADS Clockwise from top left: Victor Ekpuk explains his Igbo-inspired chalk sym- bols, Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas talks about immigration, an Africa Pop Studio event, a forum on whiteness and “default” culture, and Kamau Amu Patton channels Sun Ra. Y E A R I N R E V I E W 2 0 1 7