Endowed Lectures

the value of an informed perspective rather than the finality of a conclusion.

Yo Tengo Nombre extended the institute’s vision of this unique residency opportunity. Dozens of classes from across campus visited the exhibition, with talks and presentations from the artist and curator Amanda Krugliak tailored to each class. We hosted over 500 U-M students from a range of disciplines, including American culture, anthropology, the Residential College, and the Law School. Students from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti high schools also visited, further exploring the history of narrative painting, American visual culture, and Buentello’s work from humanist perspectives.

Buentello also attended and contributed to additional gatherings, lectures and events on campus honoring Latinx Heritage Month, which coincided with her exhibition.

The artist gained invaluable teaching experience, further extending her reach beyond the duration of the residency itself. The extensive and focused class engagement fully activated the gallery’s capacity to enhance academic curriculum through robust arts programming. Most significantly, the exhibition created an opportunity for students to discuss their own histories and family stories, some directly impacted by current immigration laws and politics, connecting research with the personal, and the institution with the world outside.

Yo Tengo Nombre, the Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence program, and the Efroymson Family Fund’s commitment to community and artists, serve as a model for how arts and artists can truly impact a place, buoying our belief in the power of art to benefit diverse publics.

In Buentello’s words: “It’s important that the work is living work, that it lives off it’s viewers and their feedback, and the experiences of them interacting with the work. So, it’s really important for me to have these dialogues with students that are also grappling with these issues.

“I think it’s important for students to see this work, to see an artist that is dealing with how to be sensitive about such a tenuous subject...and to learn about someone else’s identity... that it’s not something at a distance in the media—that this is an experience people are living with all over the U.S. It doesn’t matter whether you are living close to the Southern border or not.”

Watch the artist interview at http://myumi.ch/Gk8vZ.

When Marc Jacobson and his wife Enhancing Constance established the Marc and Constance Jacobson LectureCultural ship in 1989, their hope was that the lectures would enhance “the and Artistic cultural and artistic experiences of present and future generations of Experiences students at Michigan.” The Jill S. Harris Memorial Endowment—established in 1985 by Roger and Meredith Harris, Jill’s parents, her grandparents Allan and Norma Harris, and friends—brings to campus a visitor who appeals to undergraduates interested in the humanities and the arts.

Today, our endowed lectures play an important part in the academic life of the institute and the wider campus. In collaboration with other campus units, we are able to invite Rachel Havrelock giving the 2019-20 Jill S. Harris speakers who engage Memorial Lecture. both academic and community audiences. In fall semester, we collaborated with the Department of Linguistics and the Native American Studies Program to bring Professor Jenny L. Davis from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for the 2019-20 Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture. In recognition of the United Nation’s designation of 2019 as the Year of Indigenous Languages, Davis gave a lecture titled “‘In the Future, Robots will Speak Chickasaw’: Indigenous Language Futurism and the Temporalities of Language Reclamation.”

As a contribution to LSA’s Winter 2020 Great Lakes Theme Semester, we brought to campus Professor Rachel Havrelock, of the University of Illinois, Chicago, for the 2019-20 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture. Just before campus closed in March, Havrelock, founder and director of the UIC Freshwater Lab, spoke on “Freshwater Stories: Optics, Governance, and Adaptation around the Great Lakes.”