KUT’s Views and Brews: “The City Within Our City”

• 5:30pm                    Doors & bar (in the museum atrium)
• 5:30 – 6:00pm        Contemporary Project gallery will be open for viewing ’The City’ by Vincent Valdez
• around 6:00pm      Program begins in the museum atrium

We’re delighted to co-host a very special edition of KUT’s Views and Brews at the Blanton to discuss “The City Within Our City.” Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy along with Dr. Rich Reddick, art historian Cherise Smith, Rabbi Neil Blumofe, and Blanton Curator Veronica Roberts to view and discuss ’The City,’ the large-scale artwork by Vincent Valdez now on view at the museum. There will be a Q&A session after the panel discussion. The audio at this event will be recorded for broadcast and for release as a podcast by KUT 90.5 FM.

Rebecca and her guests will explore topics that include:

• What is the role of art in community?
• How can art help us combat injustice?
• What does this work of art tell us about ourselves?

Views and Brews is free and open to the public.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Rabbi Neil Blumofe is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Agudas Achim in Austin, Texas. He holds Rabbinic Ordinations from both the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and the Academy for Jewish Religion in Los Angeles. A frequent guest on ’Views and Brews,’ Neil is active in the greater Austin music community, where he is known for his accomplishments, creations and instruction in the jazz genre.

Rebecca McInroy is an award-winning show creator, host, and executive producer for KUT, KUTX and KUT.org. She can be heard co-hosting the fortnightly food politics podcast The Secret Ingredient with food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott, and Raj Patel of the LBJ School of Public Affairs.She is the creator, executive producer, and host of Views and Brews, the live discussion program; creator, executive producer, and editor of the national weekly radio program Two Guys on Your Head hosted by professors Art Markman and Bob Duke; executive producer and editor of the documentary series Stuart Hall: In Conversations with host Dr. Ben Carrington, about the life and legacy of cultural theorist Stuart Hall; and executive producer of This is Just to Say, a podcast about poetry hosted by poet and novelist Carrie Fountain.

Dr. Richard J. Reddick is an award-winning Associate Professor in educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as coordinator of the Program in Higher Education Leadership, with couresty appointments in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies,, and the Warfield Center of African and African American Studies. Dr. Reddick is also the Assistant Director of the Plan II Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts, and serves as a faculty fellow in the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, all at The University of Texas at Austin. Reddick is a Spring 2018 Visiting Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and serves as the faculty co-chair of the Institute for Educational Management (IEM) at Harvard. In 2016, he served on the steering committee and as Education Working Group co-chair of the Mayor’s Task Force on Institutional Racism and Structural Inequity (IRSI) for the City of Austin.

Veronica Roberts was appointed the Blanton’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2013. Her exhibitions at the Blanton include Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser; Donald Moffett; Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt and Vincent Valdez: The City.  Previously, she was a New York-based curator and served as director of research for the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Catalogue Raisonné.  Veronica has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  She holds an M.A. in the history of art and architecture from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a B.A. in art history from Williams College.

Cherise Smith is an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin specializing in American art after 1945, especially as it intersects with the politics of identity, race, and gender. Her book, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Duke University Press, 2011), examines how identity is negotiated in performance art in which women artists take on the characteristics and manners of a racial, ethnic, and gender “other.’ Her articles have appeared in Art Journal, African Arts, and exposure among other venues. She was awarded the Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Research Fellowship at W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University. She has worked in the curatorial departments of the Art Institute of Chicago, the De Young Museum, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among others institutions.