On Sunday, April 27, the Hunter Museum of American Art will host its first undergraduate student symposium.
Four students from regional colleges have been selected to present their research on the interdisciplinary topic of race in America, including Liz Simakoff, an Economics student from Covenant College, speaking on performance and identity in the photographs of Gordon Parks; Megan Oelgoetz, a Studio Art student from Austin Peay State University, on the cultural history of New Mexico during the colonial period; Heather Murray, an Accounting student from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, on rap and political activism, and Barry Bookheimer, a History and Engineering student, also from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, on perceptions of Vodou and its relation to arts practice.
Dr.
Andrea Becksvoort, lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, will serve as a respondent for the panelists, and Rebecca Theus, a History student at Southern Adventist University, will conclude the afternoon with a special tour of the museum’s current exhibition, African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond, incorporating her research on the labor economy of the South during the Civil War and its lasting effects on the imaginary of artists working in the twentieth century.
The symposium will begin at 1 p.m. and is free and open to the public. To learn more about educational opportunities at the Hunter Museum, visit www.huntermuseum.org/learn-overview.