Watch, Read, Listen

Join writer Jack Skelley and “Made in L.A. 2020” artist Sabrina Tarasoff for a virtual screening and conversation on Gail Kaszynski’s 1983 documentary Fear of Poetry. Kaszynski’s film is an improvisatory 40-minute foray into a fervent, formative period in the lives of poets such as Dennis Cooper, Benjamin Weissman, Amy Gerstler, and Bob Flanagan, who took part in Cooper’s famed Wednesday Night Poetry readings. Drawing on archival footage from those gatherings, including interviews and readings, Fear of Poetry presents a snapshot of Venice in the 1980s: a chorus of punks, poets, artists, and performers co-existing in a place where, according to Flanagan, “love is still possible.”

The program is presented by the Hammer Museum.

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Professor Kathleen Belew in Conversation with Distinguished Professor and MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina

Historian Kathleen Belew, CNN contributor and author of Bring the War Home, gives us the history of the white power movement in America, which consolidated decades ago around a potent sense of betrayal after the Vietnam War. She considers how the movement’s soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In conversation with Distinguished Professor Natalia Molina, she explores the manifestations of white supremacy in Southern California, focusing particularly on how they are documented in The Huntington’s collections.

The event will be held online via Zoom at 4 p.m. (PDT). Zoom link will be sent to attendees in registration confirmation email. This event will be recorded.

Join Lauren Mackler, co-curator of “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” for this short and insightful discussion about artist Jeffrey Stuker, as part of the Lunchtime Art Talk series on the exhibition.

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Karlos K. Hill, Associate Professor and Chair of the Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, discusses his new book The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History. 

Roslyn Lee Hammers, associate professor of art history at the University of Hong Kong, discusses depictions of rural life produced for an 18th-century Chinese emperor’s residence. The Qianlong emperor (1711–1799) had stone stele carved with scenes of men and women producing rice and silk, and he situated them in a reconstruction of a village in his Garden of Clear Ripples (Qing Yi Yuan, now known as the Summer Palace, Beijing). Hammers explores the appeal of such an unusual arrangement that enabled the emperor to observe both actual productive farmers and the representation of their labor in an imperial setting that united real agrarian work with ideated imagery of it.