Goal 3: Scholarship & Teaching

In keeping with its goal of connecting students with artists and designers from across the globe, the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan invited NYC-based performance artist Ayana Evans to be a Roman J. Witt Visiting Artist during the Fall 2020 semester. Internationally known for guerilla-style street performances that explore the body, race relations and gender bias, Evans has performed internationally at New York’s El Museo Del Barrio,the Barnes Foundation, arts festivals in Great Britain and Ghana and more. The visit was organized by Stamps professor Rebekah Modrak, who brought together cheerleaders from the U-M Cheer team, vocalists and actors from the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance and professional artists based in Detroit to bring Evans’ new performance to life on U-M’s Elbel Field. Stamps students in Modrak’s “Dressing Up and Down” course created costumes for the performance. With Evan directing remotely from NYC, the group created a video performance entitled You Better Be Good to Me.

“While there was planning done for the performance, there were also many decisions that had to be made on the day of filming, and I was really grateful that she put so much trust in us to deliver her message,” said Stamps senior Shannon Yeung (BFA ’21) of the collaboration with Evans.

The performance, which was supported by the U-M Arts Initiative, was featured at the 2021 U-M Reverend Martin Luther King Junior Symposium and can be viewed on vimeo and as part of Evans’ Penny Stamps Speaker Series talk.

This $900,000 OVPR Anti-Racism Grants program was created to catalyze innovative research and scholarship that advances knowledge around complex societal racial inequalities and can inform actions to achieve equity and justice. Developed in partnership with the Provost’s Anti-Racism Initiative and the Anti-Racism Collaborative supported through the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the grant program is intended to support rigorous, intellectually ambitious and technically sound research relevant to society’s most pressing questions and compelling opportunities in relation to racial equity and justice. Another goal is to make primary investigator teams competitive for future external funding at the federal, foundation and industry level. The program welcomed submissions from diverse research/scholarship teams without regard to discipline/field, race/ethnicity, gender or faculty status. In all, there were 41 proposals from across campus, demonstrating our faculty’s capacity to address critical issues ranging from technology and police surveillance among Black communities to anti-Asian xenophobia and activism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Library’s recent project to discover, document and digitally share findings on the history of African American students at the University of Michigan proved to be extremely productive, despite pandemic-related limitations that prevented the Bentley team from conducting onsite research for several months. The now-completed project reveals valuable—and fascinating—information and insights on the collective identity of African American students at the University of Michigan over time. A website is currently under development and will be made available to the public in fall 2021.