Chat in the Stacks: Race in the Race

November 1, 2:30 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

Join the Libraries and the Faculty Senate Committee on the Status of Faculty of Color for another Chat in the Stacks! This time, we’ll host a conversation about the racial politics in our national politics during this election year.

As always, our host will be Dr. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, professor of theater. The distinguished panel will include: Dr. David Waldstreicher (History), Dr. Wilbur Jenkins, (History), Sophia Sanders, (Art History) and Philadelphia attorney Michael Coard along with Micah Kleit of the Temple University Press.

Film Screening and Director’s Talk :
Mothers of No Tomorrow
October 17, 3:00 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

This film follows three mothers who lost their sons to violence. Prompted by the “loss of lots of friends” to violent crimes, Sixx King, a 35-year-old writer, producer, director, actor and activist, thought about what his mother would have to go through if something happened to him. Please join the Libraries and Blockson Collection for this moving documentary, followed by a discussion with King.

LECTURE–The American Gallerist:

Sande Webster on 40 Years with Art and Artists

EXHIBITION—Sande Webster Presents 4 x 10, the Work of Ten American Artists

October 5, Lecture, 3:00 PM, Art Sale and Exhibition, 4:30 PM

Program and Exhibition will both take place in Paley Library Lecture Hall

Join us for a conversation with pioneering gallerist Sande Webster as she discusses her more than forty years of experience with art, artists, and the cultural scene in Philadelphia. Webster has enacted her philosophy of diversity at the Sande Webster Gallery, originally Wallnuts, Inc. She was also amongst the first in Philadelphia to display photography, glass, clay, and textiles in a fine art environment. She has also long been an advocate of African American artists, and says, “[I]ndeed, with the passing of Kenmore Gallery, we were alone among the commercial galleries to exhibit the extraordinary talents of numerous African American artists, who, along with the ‘white’ painters, sculptors and printmakers were making a stir among the cognoscenti in and out of the city. Unfortunately, more than thirty years later not much has changed.” A true trailblazer, Sande joins us for Homecoming Weekend to share her ideas on art.

After the program, join us for an exhibition and sale, Sande Webster Presents 4 x10, the Work of Ten American Artists. Works by noted Philadelphia talents in mediums including painting, sculpture and photography will be for sale and featured during this show. Artists partaking are: Andrea Baldeck, James Brantley, Moe Brooker, Miguel Antonio Horn, Brian Dennis, Arlene Love, John McDaniel, Kathleen Spicer, Ron Tarver, and Mark Wallison.

For more than four decades, Sande Webster has been a torch on the Philadelphia art scene….[S]he has been a force for the commercial exhibition of photography, ceramics and textiles as art, and—perhaps most notably—has provided an uninterrupted outlet for the work of African American artists. —Philadelphia Inquirer

Sande Webster and Richard Watson, curator at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, looking over works of art.

The American Idea on Sports and Race: A Conversation with Larry Lester and Rebecca Alpert
October 2, 3:30 PM
Baseball—the great American pastime—also serves as a lens through which to explore and examine broader American ideas on race, heroes and popular culture. Join Larry Lester, a co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, associate professor of religion at Temple University and author of Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2011), to discuss the history of race and baseball. Lester has served as a curator and consultant at numerous cultural institutions, including the African American Museum in Dallas, Texas, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Lester authored The Negro Leagues Book (Society for American Baseball Research, 1994), which has been called “the most complete collection of information on . . . the Negro Leagues ever published.” Alpert has published several journal articles on Jews and baseball, was featured as an expert commentator in the film, Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story (Willow Pond Films, 2010, directed by Peter Miller), and is frequently consulted by the press on the subject. Both Lester and Alpert name Jackie Robinson as a hero and inspiration.