January - March 2025
Exhibition Dates
Peoria Main Library, Peoria, AZ
January 10 – March 28, 2025
Sunrise Mountain Library, Peoria, AZ
January 10 – March 28, 2025
Tolleson Public Library, Tolleson, AZ
January 10 – March 29, 2025
Georgia T. Lord Library, Goodyear, AZ
January 30 – March 26, 2025
Sedona Arts Center, Sedona, AZ
February 7 – February 28, 2025
Looking Back
Founders The 10th Anniversary of Vision & Sound: An African American Experience
Michael and Norma Cunningham approached the West Valley Arts Council in 2016, about honoring the West Valley’s artists of African descent through an exhibition during Black History Month. Michael, an accomplished artist and professional chef, was concerned about the lack of awareness and attention to the art of African American artists in Arizona. Michael wanted that first exhibit to lift up participating artists, provide them an opportunity to show and sell their work thereby building recognition and appreciation during a time when African American history and culture were being celebrated throughout the country. That first exhibit, entitled Illuminating Joy Through Art: Honoring Black Heritage, became Vision & Sound: An African American Experience the next year and lasted four weeks.
Based at Sedona Arts Center since fall of 2021, Vision & Sound has now grown to span three months, and involves multiple exhibits in four cities, fifteen artists and musicians from throughout Arizona.
The ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, which supported Vision & Sound’s opening and closing events in the past, collaborated with Sedona Arts Center on a Vision & Sound symposium that would bring artists, scholars and supporters together for illuminating keynote presentations, artist roundtables and interactive workshops. To date, the Vision & Sound symposia have focused on the powerful connections between art, health, history, nation and culture.
Our first symposium titled, Understanding Culture and Race Through The Arts and featured L’Merchie Frazier as keynote speaker. The 2024 symposium centered on Arts + Health and featured Dr. Chip Thomas as our keynote speaker with a workshop led by Liz Lerman on her Critical Response process. The 2025 symposium focuses on Art & Nation. ASU professor and CSRD Race, Arts and Democracy Fellow LaTasha Barnes will deliver the 2025 keynote address. ASU Institute Professor and CSRD Race, Arts and Democracy Fellow Liz Lerman will facilitate the interactive Critical Response Process workshop.
Vision & Sound co-founder Norma Cunningham, the heart and soul of the program that she and Michael created, passed away after a brief illness in the summer of 2024. She deliberately sought out those who could keep Vision & Sound alive and always kept her eyes open for potential artists, musicians and partners to participate and support the program. Norma was a remarkable woman with a personal story that reads like a novel. She was a mover and shaker. She loved to have fun and she was passionate about her family, her husband Michael’s art and her community. She was groundbreaking in life and love and she is deeply missed by us all.
We are dedicating the 10th Anniversary of Vision & Sound to Norma. May she rest in peace.
Michael Cunningham
Norma Cunningham
Sedona Arts Center ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy
Julie A. Richard
Sedona Arts Center is honored to partner with the ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy on the 10th Anniversary of Vision & Sound: An African American Experience.
Sedona Arts Center began its involvement with Vision & Sound in 2021, when I was talking with my old friend, Norma Cunningham and her husband Michael at lunch. Having just returned to Arizona after an 8-year stint as the executive director of the Maine Arts Commission, Norma suggested that the Arts Center may want to be the new home for her visionary program. I jumped at the chance and our partnership began.
Sedona Arts Center was founded in 1958 and serves and supports more than 1,500 artists from across the country each year. The Arts Center is committed to diverse audiences and programming and embodies that through its school, gallery, exhibits, events and programs. Sedona Arts Center’s local, state, national and international audiences number more than 103,000 and its economic impact exceeds $4.5 million annually.
I invite you to experience all that Vision & Sound has to offer and please consider attending one of our many other programs this year.
Warmly,
Julie A. Richard CEO, Sedona Arts Center
The ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy is honored to continue its partnership with Vision & Sound: An African American Experience and with the Sedona Arts Center.
The Center is the only only entity at ASU and in the state of Arizona that positions race and democracy in direct relation with each other. The Center advances initiatives and creates programs that intensify engagement with race and democracy in the context of education, social justice, public history, poverty and economic opportunity, the arts, law, government, the sciences and the environment. We are known within and beyond the university for its spirited and innovative programming on issues of race; democracy; equity in education, health and housing; race, gender and civic discourse; race, place and public memory; and the emerging technologies of democracy.
Vision & Sound is a vital component of the Center’s Race, Arts and Democracy programming. Each year, the Vision & Sound Symposium artists, speakers and presenters, inspire us with their genius and innovation. Their work and scholarship in diverse, experimental and traditional mediums expands our state-wide awareness and attention to the work and missions of African American artists in Arizona.
Lois Brown, PhD
Director, Center for the Study of Race and Democracy Foundation Professor of English
Lois Brown, PhD
Symposium 2025 Symposium 2025
Art & Nation Symposium
Saturday, February 8, 2025
MORNING SESSION
Registration
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Julie Richard and Dr. Lois Brown
10th Anniversary Tribute to Norma Cunningham, Co-Founder of Vision & Sound
Artist Round Table One
Break
Keynote Lecture: Journey into the Continuum: Call, Embodiment & Response
Speaker: LaTasha Barnes
Supporting Artists: Diana Toledo and j. bouey
Artist Round Table Two
Art & Nation Symposium
Saturday, February 8, 2025
AFTERNOON SESSION
Lunch Break
Critical Response Workshop
Liz Lerman, Sumana Mandala and Dr. Lois Brown
Artist Round Table Three
Closing and Reception
Symposium 2025 Symposium 2025
Multi-Bessie award winner (2021/2023), and New York Times celebrated Best Dance and Breakout Star (2021) LaTasha Barnes is an internationally awarded and critically-acclaimed dance artist, choreographer, scholar, and tradition-bearer of Black American Social Dance. A Richmond, VA native, co-based in Phoenix, AZ and New York, she is globally celebrated for her musicality, athleticism, and joyful presence throughout the cultural traditions she bears: House Dance, Hip-Hop, Waacking, Authentic Jazz, and Lindy Hop, among them. Barnes’ expansive artistic, competitive, and performative skills have made her a frequent collaborator to The Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts, Summer Dance Forever & Foundation Hip-Hop Center Amsterdam, Singapore-based Timbre Arts Group, Ephrat Asherie Dance, and many more.
Barnes’ leadership and business acumen have placed her in positions of service as Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees for Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival®, Vice President of Marketing & Outreach for the International Lindy Hop Championship®, Directing Board Member of the Black Lindy Hoppers Fund, the Frankie Manning Foundation, and a contributing member to the NEFER Global Movement Collective. In support of this dialogue, Barnes was honored to be a contributing author to the 2022 National Dance Education Organization Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award winning text Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century (UFPress, 2021). Barnes is committed to ensuring that future artists and dance scholars maintain authentic cultural context as they move through the world bearing forth Black dance traditions. To further support this effort Barnes joined the esteemed faculty of Arizona State University School of Music, Dance & Theater in Fall 2021.
Across all her endeavors, Barnes’ eternal purpose is to inspire fellow artists and arts enthusiasts to champion artivism in their creative expressions and daily lives.
Liz Lerman is an acclaimed and distinguished choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid and up to the minute.
A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011, when she handed the artistic leadership of the company over to the next generation of Dance Exchange artists.
Lerman is regularly invited as a keynote speaker to diverse gatherings – from arts presenters to ceramicists, research universities to arts-military convenings. Lerman’s collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 and released in paperback in 2014. Critique is Creative, a collection of essays from Critical Response practitioners from around the world, was published in 2022 by Wesleyan University Press.
Sumana Sen Mandala is a Bharata-Nrityam artist. She teaches in studio and higher education settings and practices in non-traditional spaces. She focuses on rasa or deep engagement to center collective knowledge, the value of every voice, and responsibility and response in any space she enters. Sumana is interested in engaging anyone who wants to move in a process integrating dance-movement into contemporary lived experiences.
Her ongoing project Look into my Voice, Hear my Dance facilitates survivors of sexual/ domestic violence telling their stories in collaboration with practitioners of Indian dance. Sumana is a Race, Arts & Democracy Fellow at Arizona State University, has published articles on critical pedagogy and belonging and presented her work at several conferences.
Mandala was recognized as 2024 Arizona Dance Educator of the Year by the AZDEO, is Co-director of the Critical Response Process (CRP) Certification Program, and is the Director of Dansense-Nrtyabodha.
LaTasha Barnes
Diana Toledo j. bouey
Supporting Artists
Liz Lerman
Sumana Mandala
Artist Profiles
Amber Doe is a research based, intersectional artist working in textile, sculpture, installation, sound, photography and video. Growing up on the rural Drowning Creek Native American Reservation, she vividly understood the complexities of discrimination. Doe creates generative, immersive works with urgency based on American state sanctioned violence. Doe creates work with a historical and contemporary understanding of American and post colonial western societies’ desire to control and subdue black bodies along with a vivid material portrait of her immediate family, diasporic and interspecies family.
Lived experiences as a black American woman are Doe’s chief contextual frameworks including black femininity, post colonial trauma, autobiographical, ancestral and multigenerational cultural practices and the natural environment. Natural materials and animal sounds used for her sculptures, installations and performances make reference to her lived experience on the reservation and now in the American Southwest: palm leaves, branches, flowers, hair extensions and cotton rope are personal and ancestral.
Doe’s work has been exhibited at the Amarillo Museum of Art, Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Museum of Museums, the LeRoy Neiman Art Center, and a solo exhibition at Snakebite Gallery, in Tucson, Arizona. Doe was awarded the 2022/2023 Projecting All Voices Fellowship through Arizona State University and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. In 2021, Doe was an Abbey Awards Fellow in Painting at the British School at Rome and has been awarded residencies at Arteles in Haukijärvi, Finland, Can Serrat in Barcelona, Spain and La Ira de Dios in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Shown in galleries including Untitled, New York, Irwin Gallery, Detroit, Michigan, MCLA Gallery, North Adams, MA, and Exo Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands and a solo exhibition at Snakebite Gallery, Tucson, Arizona. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Anjola Ayodele is a Nigerian-American mural & digital artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. She founded Jola Studios, where her aim is to tell stories of communities through murals, public art, branding, and interior design. Anjola helps transform spaces and connect communities by storytelling through vibrant, diverse mural and digital art that celebrates representation. Her collaborative approach lends itself to creating pieces that are inclusive and informed by stories. When she’s not drawing, she writes poetry, drums and enjoys eating fried plantains.
International artist Antoinette Cauley was born in Phoenix, Arizona and draws her inspiration from the grittiness and beauty within her place of birth. Her work is heavily influenced by Black American hood culture with a feminist undertone and an overall focus of Black empowerment. Visually, she combines the dynamism of Black American culture with powerful punches of vibrant color and deep, emotionally driven messages. Cauley attended Mesa Community College in Arizona where she studied Fine Arts with an emphasis in painting. During this time she held a two year apprenticeship with nationally renowned American oil painter Chris Saper who taught her the ins and outs of the fine art industry. Cauley was recently inducted into the Mesa Community College Hall of Fame and given the “Alumni Achievement Award”.
Bob Martin is a native New Yorker who surrounds himself with art, jazz, dance, and basketball. Martin has been creating art and exhibiting for close to 60 years. He studied art at the N.Y. School of Visual Arts and The Art Students League of New York with Barry Zaid, Peter Cox, Harvey Dinnerstein, David Lefell, and Ted Seth Jacobs. Martin feels that creating art is a real opportunity to be honest, with no need for explanation or defense. Art is not a prelude to what is to come. It has its own life. He has been a part of the Vision & Sound exhibition for several years and has shown his work in New York and across Arizona.
“I came to art at a young age and kept it in my life. It has been a vehicle to express my joys and pains.” - Chas Frisco
Frisco lives for landscapes and moments to reenact in his work and utilize memories of places he has been or events he has seen: a hike in the mountains, a tornado in the plains, a rainstorm in the highlands, a whale pod in the inlet. The result is rarely as literal as the original so a new hybrid-scape is crafted. The works are affected by atmospheres and utilizing a wood, soda, gas, electric, pit kiln aids his search for solutions of surface, distance, color shape.
Amber Doe
Anjola Ayodele
Antoinette Cauley
Bob Martin
Chas Frisco
Artist Profiles Artist Profiles
Debra Edgerton, Assistant Professor in the School of Art at Northern Arizona University, explores identity, race politics, perception, and environmental justice in her work. She holds MFAs from the San Francisco Art Institute and Vermont College in Interdisciplinary Art. A recipient of honors such as the Edgar Whitney Memorial Award and National Watercolor Society Master Status, Edgerton has completed residencies in Venice, Italy, and Osaka, Japan, where she presented on race and culture at Kansai University. Her work has been featured in the groundbreaking exhibition Cinema Remixed and Reloaded and is part of Historically Black Colleges and Universities’ permanent collections. Ms. Edgerton received a 2022 Scholarly and Creative Activity Award Grant, a 2022 McAllister Fellowship, and a Research Associate position with the Museum of Northern Arizona. Her current work examines freshwater ecosystems in the Colorado Plateau, their community relationships, and their correlation to human communities of color.
Dorrell Bradford is an American photographer who was born and raised in South Phoenix, Arizona. He documents moments in which he seeks pause and wonder. His minimalist compositions of everyday settings emphasize shape, design, and dimension, encourage viewers to find their own moments of contemplation and discovery.
Bradford graduated from Arizona State University with a Bachelor of Science in Sociology in 2012. Shortly thereafter, Bradford moved to New York City. During this time, he fostered close friendships with artists from a wide array of backgrounds and these provided him with firsthand understanding of an artist’s lifestyle and work. Access to the NYC art world was crucial and became a learning ground for Bradford.
George Welch began his studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 1961. One year later he began his apprenticeship at the Queens Litho Corp. in the Graphics Department. He continued his Graphic Arts studies at Pratt, became a full-time graphics layout artist in the Art Department and met John Chamberlain, whose work he admired. When Welch decided to leave New York, he continued his studies at Central State University in Wilberforce Ohio. There, he worked on literary magazines, the school newspaper and became editor of The Fraternity Journal. He began to focus on painting, jazz, poetry, Paris and the Harlem Renaissance. After travels around the world, Welch began a studio-gallery in ChelseaClinton area of Manhattan called Solution3. George moved to Arizona and started teaching at Pima Community College in 1971. He was the head of Painting and Drawing for 40 years. His poetry took root in Tucson, however, his time in New York remains in his heart and vision, and is mixed with the desert air.
Arizona native Isse Maloi has always been captivated by the street and pop art scene. His appreciation of the diversity each genre has to offer, and finding a way to bring those ideas to canvases has been a lifetime in the making.
As an art enthusiast, Isse has a passion for supporting artists that inspire him. His keen eye and detailed work shows his interpretation of past and current styles. His large scale pieces evoke nostalgia with a modern perspective. Inspired by different elements and heavily based in type font, character, and iconic pop references, he sparks passion and conversation.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Jacqueline Chanda studied painting and drawing at UCLA where she obtained her undergraduate degree. Graduate school led her to Paris, France, where she studied visual arts, art education and plastic arts, theory and aesthetics at the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts and the Sorbonne University. While there she participated in open studio sessions at the Académie de Port-Royal and exhibited at the Grand Palais and at the Galerie Louis Soulanges. After a successful career teaching art education and higher education administration she returned to her initial love: making art. She is now a full time artist living in Tucson, Arizona.
Elizabeth Denneau, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in the Sonoran Southwest, holds a BFA in Art and Visual Culture Education from the University of Arizona and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A member of the Art21 Educators Institute, she collaborates with community organizers and colleges to integrate social justice into art education.
Her maximalist installations draw from research on respectability politics, its ties to White Supremacy and capitalism, and its dual role in survival and dismantling oppression. Denneau co-founded the Southwest Black Artists Collective and The Projects art space in Tucson, Arizona, advocating for Black creatives in the Southwest. Her awards include the 2024 WESTAF BIPOC Artist Award and MOCA Tucson Nightbloom Artist Grant.
Lizz Denneau
Debra Edgerton
Dorrell Bradford
George Welch
Isse Maloi
Jacqueline Chanda
Artist Profiles
Artist Profiles Artist Profiles
Artist and Chef, is the Co-Founder of Vision & Sound: An African American Experience. Michael is a graduate of the Culinary Arts program at the California Culinary Academy and has had a long career as an Executive Chef in California and Arizona. He owned and ran the Starpointe Café in Goodyear, Arizona for several years before becoming the Executive Chef for several catering Companies. He co-owned the first African American art gallery in Orange County, California with his wife, Norma. Michael has been featured in numerous art exhibits in California and Arizona and he continues to create and exhibit art throughout the region. Michael has also served as a curator and student art instructor.
From her birthplace of Chicago, through 20 years in Atlanta, Georgia, and Goodyear, Arizona, Patricia Bohannon has left an indelible mark on the various art communities of which she’s been a part. Patricia was introduced to the world of art in elementary school by a neighbor and honed that interest later in high school. She knew one day she’d be a painter and sculptor, and was successful creating with paints, glass, fiber clay, ceramic, metal, and mixed media over the years. She graduated with high honors from Chicago State University in 1987. Over her astonishing 60-year career, Bohannon participated in countless individual and group exhibitions, taught art in the Chicago Public School system and the Fulton County Board of Education and received numerous honors and awards. She was celebrated as 2022’s Extraordinary Woman of Color during Black History Month and featured on ABC15’s Sonoran Living.
Patricia Bohannon used her gift to inspire and lift the social consciousness of her viewers: “What sustains me as I create, is my passion and desire to connect with people and share through visual expression, historical information on the unfamiliar.” Patricia passed away in July 2023. Her work is still on display at Sedona Art Center.
Philip Gabriel Steverson, an interdisciplinary artist based in Phoenix, Arizona, hails from West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A 2022 graduate of Arizona State University with degrees in Fashion Design and Poetry, Philip’s interest in fabric manipulation expanded to encompass video, sculpture, and installation, exploring how art interacts with space, viewer engagement, and personal connection.
A 2019 study abroad in Amsterdam deepened his understanding of visual arts as a non-verbal language, shaping his focus on form, materiality, and conceptualism. Philip’s practice incorporates quotes, cinema clips, and found objects, connecting past, present, and future influences. Following his mother’s passing in October 2022, his work has centered on themes of grief, grace, healing, and emotional growth, guided by a spiritual connection to her memory.
Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Shoreigh Williams is known for self-portraiture and for an elegantly morphed, dream-like style. Her experimentation with the scribble texture–mostly using microns and acrylic–has bled its way into a permanent style. She wants her work to take the viewer on a ride of following their intuition. Her influences include her mother Cassandra Hansent and her mentors Antoinette Cauley, Travis Rice, and Ivan Lopez.
Williams believes that “when in doubt, draw it out.” Drawing was a central part of her life as she grew up and she notes that she “drew, drew and drew . . .with no motive. . . “simply because it made me whole.” In high school, Shoreigh began customizing shoes which then led to many other commissions, relationships, and experiences.
Patricia Bohannon
Philip Gabriel Steverson
Michael Cunningham
Shoreigh Williams
