Join us on Wednesday, April 24 at 4:30pm in the Sculpture Yard of the Art and Design Building for 'The Caged Bird Screams' for Noise Awareness Day 2024. Noise Awareness 2024 fully combines taught moments with experimental opportunities. It brings together artists to engage in the ways sound art and visual art can transcend space, borders, and carcerality and explore themes of isolation, destruction, and transformation.

Artist Maria Gaspar will share her sonic sculpture, ‘We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis)’, a series of iron cell bars salvaged from the deconstructed Cook County Jail in Chicago, to be transfigured into an experimental experience through touch and vibrations.

Professor Thomas Stanley’s Sound Art students have developed artworks incorporating the sounds from ‘We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis)’, which will be mixed into an original performance by Professor Stanley and percussionist Jamal Moore.

Professor Brian Davis and his Advanced Sculpture students will present a collaborative kinetic sculpture in response to the work of Stephanie Mercedes.

All of this emerged from the Faces of Resilience exhibitions in Fairfax during Fall 2023 and Arlington during Spring 2024.

About Noise Awareness:

The Center for Hearing and Communication (CHC) founded International Noise Awareness Day (INAD) in 1996. This yearly event encourages people to minimize bothersome noise where they work, live, and play. In 2010, Professor Thomas Stanley encouraged his Sound Art (AVT 374) students to expand NAD’s focus on safe listening practices to include a deep engagement with listening as a process of self and social inquiry.

Mason's Noise Awareness all-night concert (noise-a-thon) and related activities became an important part of the audio arts calendar in the DC area and an opportunity to interrogate the arbitrary designation of new and experimental music as noise.

From 2010-2017, Stanley and the students of AVT 374 presented a campus-wide observance of Noise Awareness Day that celebrated hearing and encouraged encounters with the socially and sonically unfamiliar.

NOISE AWARENESS 2024/The Caged Bird Screams marks the first on-campus celebration since the pandemic!

Join us on Thursday, April 18 from 12-1:15pm for a Chinese Brush Painting Workshop led by Dongpei He. No experience is necessary, and all materials will be provided!

The workshop will be held in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery of Mason's Fairfax Campus. Paid visitor parking is available in Mason Pond Parking Deck. Campus Map here.

Roots and Reflections: Contemporary Chinese Artists in DC is a group exhibition of Chinese American artists who have been selected from members of The Chinese Culture and Art League of Washington DC. The artists were originally from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and now live and work in the Greater Washington Area. 

Join us on Monday, March 25 from 10:30am-1:10pm in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery for a Chinese Brush Painting and Calligraphy Workshop led by artists Dongpei He and Kit-Keung Kan.

Paid visitor parking is available in Mason Pond Parking Deck. Campus Map here.

Both artists are in the exhibition Roots and Reflections: Contemporary Chinese Artists in DC in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery until April 19, 2024.

Join us on Monday, March 18, 5-7pm for an Artist Reception in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery of Mason's Fairfax Campus. Paid visitor parking is available in Mason Pond Parking Deck. Campus Map here.

Artists Dongpei He and Kit-Keung Kan will offer Chinese Brush Painting and Calligraphy Demonstrations during the reception, and light food/beverages will be served.

Roots and Reflections: Contemporary Chinese Artists in DC is a group exhibition of Chinese American artists who have been selected from members of The Chinese Culture and Art League of Washington DC. The artists were originally from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and now live and work in the Greater Washington Area. 

Visual Voices is an online lecture series hosted by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. This event will be held in Enterprise Hall room 80 on Thursday, October 26 @ 4:45pm-6:30pm.

Enterprise Hall is building #17 on the campus map and paid visitor parking is available in the Sandy Creek Parking Deck.

Sherrill Roland’s interdisciplinary practice deals with concepts of innocence, identity, and community; reimagining their social and political implications in the context of the American criminal justice system. For more than three years, Roland's right to self-determination was lost to a wrongful incarceration. After spending ten months in prison for a crime he was later exonerated for, he returned to his artistic practice, which he now uses as a vehicle for self-reflection and an outlet for emotional release. Converting the haunting nuances of his experiences into drawings, sculptures, multimedia objects, performances, and participatory activities, Roland shares his story and creates space for others to do the same, illuminating the invisible costs, damages, and burdens of incarceration.

Questions about this event should be directed to Jeff Kenney at jkenney5@gmu.edu

Mason Exhibitions and the Native American and Indigenous Alliance will host a film screening of "Art of Incarceration" in the Johnson Center Cinema on Friday, October 20 from 7-9pm. Food will be provided!

The Johnson Center is Building #29 on the campus map and paid visitor parking is available in the Mason Pond Parking Deck.

"Art of Incarceration" provides a view through the eyes of First Nations prisoners at Victoria's Fulham Correctional Centre in Australia, exploring how culture and art can empower Indigenous people to transcend their unjust cycles of imprisonment.

This film will enumerate many of the issues we are confronted with in the Faces of Resilience exhibition in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery from September 11-November 3.

Questions about the event or exhibition should be directed to Yassmin Salem at ysalem@gmu.edu

Join Mason Exhibitions and the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution for a daylong Art & Incarceration Symposium on Saturday, October 14, 10am-5pm in Room D023 of Buchanan Hall on the Fairfax Campus. The closest parking is in Mason Pond Parking Deck.

You will hear three panel discussions featuring formerly incarcerated individuals, scholars, artists, and more discussing the current carceral system in the US and what needs to change! Food will be provided throughout the day.

Program:

10am-11am Breakfast food/coffee and juice served upon arrival

11am-12pm Exhibition Partner Panel

• Barnes Foundation, Carter School, Mural Arts Philly, Mason Exhibitions/Provisions Library

12-1:30pm Lunch break on your own

1:30-3:00 pm Artist Panel 

• Ronald Connelly and Suave Gonzalez from Faces of Resilience

• Mark Strandquist from Performing Statistics

• Nick Ritter and Victoria Mendoza from Poetry Alive!

3:00-3:15 pm short break

3:15-4:45 pm Scholarly Panel 

• Dr. Keesha Middlemass from Howard U

• Dr. Janani Umamaheswar at GMU

• Maria Valdovinos (phD candidate) at GMU 

• Liz Komar from Sentencing Project

4:45-5pm Reception with food/beverages in the gallery

The 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution abolished slavery except when a crime has been committed. This exception left a major loophole in the amendment that has allowed mass incarceration to continue in the United States. 

Mason Exhibitions and the Center for Culture, Equity, and Empowerment will host a film screening of "13th", in the Johnson Center Cinema on Friday, October 13 from 7-9pm. Food will be provided!

The Cinematographer, Hans Charles, will kick off the evening with a few words!

The Johnson Center is Building #29 on the campus map and paid visitor parking is available in the Mason Pond Parking Deck.

In "13th", filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation's prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans.

This film relates to the Faces of Resilience exhibition in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery from September 11-November 3.

Questions about this event or the exhibition should be emailed to Yassmin Salem at ysalem@gmu.edu

Kritikos Anti-Racist Reading Group 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. - James Baldwin

Fridays, 1-2:30 pm, September 29 – November 10

 Please join us for our first topic: Felony Disenfranchisement

 1-2:30 pm on October 13, 2023 

This event is free and open to the public.

Visit https://cvpa.gmu.edu/events/arts-context/kritikos-anti-racist-reading-group for details.

Dear Mason Friends and Neighbors:

Inspired by mass actions and worldwide protests demanding racial justice, CVPA’s Arts in Context continues the Kritikos Anti-Racist Reading Group this semester, moderated by Mason faculty members Jessica Kallista and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati, with help from co-organizers, Cynthia Fuchs, Jordan McRae, and Sang Nam.

Members of the community are called to meet this semester for a 90-minute session once a week with a goal of long-term commitment to relationship building, awareness, reimagining, transformation, and action, around anti-racist practices, racial justice, and the creation of conversations as well as systems of compassion and healing. We continue to focus on anti-Black racism and its effects on society. 
 
Grounded in the knowledge that it is not a question of whether we are racist, but rather, how racism is expressed and experienced in ourselves, our lives, our behaviors, and our institutions, we explore books, music, art, essays, podcasts, and documentaries that allow us to critically question and consider our roles as artists, thinkers, citizens, and creatives in a society founded on racist values and practices.

—The Kritikos Anti-Racist Reading Group Organizing Committee

Fragments of Truth: A Shared History by artist and printmaker Justyne Fischer examines the legacy of racism and memorializes pivotal figures and events in American history. Working between woodcut printing and using wood-burning (Pyrogravure) on live-edge wood panels, Fischer’s socially-conscious images offer graphic indictments of systemic racism and ask us to remember both the victims of injustice and those who have fought against oppression.

RSVP for this event here!