New fund gives Stanford Undergraduates the opportunity to spend a summer working full time in the arts with a focus on racial/social justice issues.  January 16, 2020 It is with great pride that we announce the Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellowship, at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.  This program is…

Angel is a multimedia artist and an IDA fellow. She seeks to create Art that honors her ancestors (the past) as well as what kind of ancestor she would like to be (the future). And while all these are important in her practice, her Art is also deeply rooted in the Now, for her own…

A-lan Holt’s job is to help young people understand the immense power of art. In her new role as the Director of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), she helps train …

On Tuesday, October 22nd, Kimberly Drew, writer, social activist, and curator of “black art and experiences” graced us with her presence to reflect on her experiences working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her decision to leave that space to focus on writing her first book. Ever so accessible and attentive, she shared a…

Investigating histories of archaeology, anthropology and repatriation on Kodiak Island, Alaska, and the work of black and Indigenous thinkers and artists, Lukin Linklater will contextualize her practice in performance alongside and in relation to cultural belongings as gestures towards repatriation. She will speak to a specific work, We wear one another, 2019, a commission for…

Adam Banks, Faculty Director and A-lan Holt, Director are making the arts a core part of the learning experience.

Every month “Artist in the Spotlight” proudly celebrates the work of one of IDA’s multi-talented student fellows.

MAY 15, 2019

Long Live Our 4Billion Year Old Mother:
black feminist praxis, indigenous resistance, and cultures of queer possibility

AFRICAAM 39 / NATIVEAM 39 / CSRE 39 / FEMGEN 39

Week 7: Joy Harjo: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

Joy Harjo’s eight books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry; a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Forthcoming in the fall of 2019 is a book of poetry from Norton, An American Sunrise. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Course Description:
How can art facilitate a culture that values women, mothers, transfolks, caregivers, girls? How can black, indigenous, and people of color frameworks help us reckon with oppressive systems that threaten safety and survival for marginalized people and the lands that sustain us? How can these questions reveal the brilliant and inventive forms of survival that precede and transcend harmful systems toward a world of possibility? Each week, this course will call on artists, scholars, and organizers of color who clarify the urgency and interconnection of issues from patriarchal violence to environmental degradation; hyper-criminalization to legacies of settler colonialism. These same thinkers will also speak to the imaginative, everyday knowledge and creative healing practices that our forebears have used for millennia to give vision and rise to true transformation.

Students gathered in community for Vincent Martell’s Artist Talk on Friday, February 22nd. Martell, a black, Chicago-based film director and creative, came to campus to screen the pilot episode of his upcoming web series Damaged Goods. The series itself revolves around four creatives of color in the Chicago queer, poc, art scene. The group was…

At IDA, we’ve had a beautiful beginning to our year. This quarter we’ve welcomed a new team of 11 student fellows, who have shared with us their artistic crafts and visions for the program. We opened the year with our annual Open House, where we shared music and joy with musician Calina Lawrence, whose music…

On Sunday, March 4th, the Committee on Black Performing Arts (CBPA) hosted our debut event as a renewed collective: “Healing in the Afro-Present*: A Divinity Salon.” Our day together started with a land acknowledgment ceremony by Amara Tabor Smith. We then moved into rose water making and guided meditation with A-lan Holt. Jade A. Fair…

On February 27th, 2019, students and community members gathered at the Stanford Humanities Center to welcome poet Fatimah Asghar. Asghar read from her new collection, “If They Come for Us” which Roxane Gay described as “An outstanding collection of poetry . . . wonderful play with form . . . These poems cover so much—identity,…