{"id":733,"date":"2020-09-17T15:58:06","date_gmt":"2020-09-17T15:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/?p=733"},"modified":"2025-05-23T19:27:40","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T19:27:40","slug":"733","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/2020\/09\/17\/733\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Vincent Stephens: Campus Inclusion Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi, I’m Gracyn Bird, a Museum Interpretation Assistant at The Trout Gallery.\u00a0 For this Artful Conversation post I interviewed Vincent Stephens, director of The Popel Shaw Center for Race and Ethnicity about the role that art has played in his life and work.<\/p>\n

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Gracyn: So, today I want to talk to you about Art, Diversity and Inclusion.\u00a0 But first, I know this is a big week for you at The Popel Shaw Center for Race and Ethnicity.\u00a0 Your office is hosting\u00a0Building Campus Inclusion Week at Dickinson College.\u00a0\u00a0Given the circumstances of COVID 19, I imagine your planning process and programming is a bit different this year.\u00a0 Tell me a bit about how you approached organizing Campus Inclusion Week this year and what your experience has been like.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vincent: In previous years, Inclusion Week has taken place on Britton Plaza and has included different offices, departments, and clubs sharing resources and engaging participants in different interactive activities. It\u2019s often been complimented by workshops and lectures. Last fall we decided after doing this for four years it would be useful to think about how we can engage folks more deeply. We built up enough momentum to where we could approach the week almost like a conference, where there were multiple activities that we could engage participants with. We were really interested in capitalizing and utilizing the expertise that students, community members, faculty, and staff have in different areas.<\/p>\n

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Campus Inclusion Week takes place from September 14-18.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Schedule of events for Campus Inclusion Week 2020.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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So, during the summer after we were in remote format the conversation continued and we took a \u201cless is more\u201d approach as we became more virtual. \u00a0What you\u2019ll find this week is that there are nine panels, so each day has a mix of programs, and we also decided all of the programs would be recorded, so if a person was unable to join synchronously they would be able to watch it and absorb its content in whatever way they chose. \u00a0And the library made a library guide, so all the different presenters have shared resources.\u00a0 If a person who wants to follow up and dig a little deeper can just go to the library\u2019s site and get that information. It\u2019s exciting because it\u2019s a new approach and we were very selective about the themes. We wanted to touch on the fact that the COVID-19 virus has obviously impacted the globe and brought out many different social inequities and there\u2019s a renewed discourse about antiracism and allyship. So many of our panels are looking at those topics. Next week we will also offer a one-hour discussion space where folks can process what they absorbed this week and what they can do in the future. Then we\u2019re concluding the week with the art and social justice panel co-sponsored with the Trout Gallery. I\u2019m so excited by the opportunity to bring people together even in these somewhat compromised circumstances.<\/p>\n

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During Campus Inclusion Week in 2018, local artist Chris Varner worked on a collaborative student mural. Photo courtesy of the Dickinsonian.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gracyn: So, I happen to know that art played a role in your upbringing.\u00a0 Can you tell me about how you learned about art when you were growing up?\u00a0 What kinds of messages did you receive about art?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vincent: My father is an artist and made his living as a commercial artist. He did a ton of design work where I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I grew up with art as a natural part of my environment. We had a mural on my wall in the dining room, there were paintings, sculpture and woodwork that was always a part of my life. \u00a0Art was definitely part of the landscape of my homelife. I also took an interest in art and design in my own way; I loved cars when I was growing up and I was a Boy Scout, so I remember I used to design cars for the pinewood derby. I would design the cars and my father would help me carve the wood and paint them and I won a few trophies for automotive design. One of the interesting things about the epidemic is a lot more of us are delving into our interests, so I\u2019ve spent time reading interesting books about the history and practice of automotive design. I would also say I have a parallel love for the performing arts and literature; I love music, I love literary fiction, poetry, film, television, and many of my closest friends are artists. Art has always been an integral part of life. It never felt elite or separate; it felt like art expresses who we are and translates it for others.<\/p>\n

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Gracyn: Talk about one experience you’ve had with art that was significant in your life.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vincent: The last gallery I went to was the National Portrait Gallery this summer. I\u2019ve been to the Tate, the MoMA, the Whitney\u2014but I would actually say the most pivotal gallery experience I had was when I was growing up. When I was a senior in high school I was taking a humanities course and one of the assignments was to go to a local gallery and write about an exhibit on a sculptor, Gaston Lachaise. And I remember spending time with different pieces and paying attention to materials, understanding what was being represented in both a literal and figurative sense. That was really helpful because I think sometimes when we think about a gallery or museum, we only think about a painting on a wall. We don\u2019t think about sculpture or material objects. And I also think we are very passive. We read the description and say \u201cthat\u2019s good enough\u201d and walk on, but the purpose of this assignment was to do a close reading so that was really exciting because that was the first time I was really being pushed to think about art as something to interpret and analyze on a deeper level.<\/p>\n

Gracyn: At The Trout Gallery this semester we are programming for an exhibition that will be up next Fall called Horace Pippin: Racism and War<\/em>.\u00a0 I understand that you are a fan of Pippin.\u00a0 Could you tell me what you like about his work?\u00a0 Or is there a particular work of his that is your favorite?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice, 1943, Oil on Canvas. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Vincent: A few years ago when I worked at another university, we co-sponsored a trip with their art museum and went to the Philadelphia Art Museum for an exhibit called Represent [200 years of African American Art]. It was an exhibit<\/a><\/span><\/strong> that looked at African American art throughout 20th<\/sup> century. There was everything from Faith Ringgold, to Horace Pippin, to Kara Walker, so it was a very rich exhibit.<\/p>\n

What I appreciated about the Horace Pippin works is that they\u2019re telling a wide range of stories about African American life in the 20th<\/sup> \u00a0century. I think there\u2019s a tendency for folks to only conceptualize African American expression as a response to oppression and suffering. \u00a0And so I think sometimes people look at black art with a didactic lens. But what I appreciate about Pippin is that he uses many layers of techniques in his work to show you many different facets of African American life.<\/p>\n

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Horace Pippin, The Ending of the War, Starting Home, 1930-1933. Oil on Canvas. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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I remember there was one piece that restaged a battle with many different textures and mixed media\u2014that\u2019s probably my favorite by him. He\u2019s one of those expressive voices that\u2019s conveying a more complex and rich understanding of Black American life beyond just one thing. We have to be able to hold multiple ideas at once\u2014his work certainly is commenting on racism and oppression and segregation, but I think there\u2019s a lot more to Black life than that.<\/p>\n

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Detail of The Ending of the War, Starting Home.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Detail of The Ending of the War, Starting Home.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Gracyn: Art has been part of numerous initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion.\u00a0 How do you see art playing a role in these efforts?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vincent: Representation is so central. Since the industrial age\u2014photography, film, radio, television\u2014there\u2019s so many different ways that we have become a mediated society. By representation, I don\u2019t simply mean faces and colors\u2014I mean thinking about the range of stories [represented]. I know there\u2019s been a campaign called #OscarsSoWhite, where folks are saying \u201cWhy is it that in American film, there\u2019s only one film a year that looks at black characters?\u201d I think it\u2019s crucial that we think about the way art can provide access to so many different kinds of stories.<\/p>\n

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The #OscarsSoWhite campaign has sparked online conversations about representation in Hollywood.<\/a><\/span><\/h5>\n

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Dickinson has been able to use our resources to think about what are things that people in our community are going to be excited about, whether it be physical or the performing arts. We\u2019ve done social justice themed pre-orientations, and we often use the Trout Gallery\u2019s collection as a way to stimulate conversations. For example, in the fall of 2018, we looked at indigenous Native American history, and because of the content that was at the Trout Gallery, it fostered some rich conversations and also allowed us to go to the Carlisle Indian school\u2019s former site at the Army War College. \u00a0So I think art is such a stimulating and engaging way to think about yourself, your community, the country, the larger world. There\u2019s no way to talk about diversity and inclusion without thinking about the way different experiences are being represented in media, so I think art is very central to the work we are trying to do for the community.<\/p>\n

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Promotional image from the Trout Gallery exhibition on Shan Goshorn, a Native American artist whose work connected with conversations about the Carlisle Indian School.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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I learned so much from my conversation with Vincent Stephens, and I hope that you all are encouraged to get involved in Campus Inclusion Week and consider the role of art in conversations about social justice.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Museum Interpretation Assistant Gracyn Bird<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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