The Arts | Dana Arts Center, Second Floor
The Collections: What is the role of an art museum on a liberal arts college campus? Since 2013, the collections at Picker Art Gallery have been shifting. Moving away from traditional models of collecting, the museum today holds a larger proportion of artworks by women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ artists and others whose creativity and stories have historically been left out of museum collections.The Core: The revision of Colgate’s Core Curriculum represents the essence of the university’s liberal arts commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Introduced in 2022, the revised Core curriculum has a stronger focus on exposing students to diverse forms of knowledge. Most notably, a new course called Core Conversations was created. Based on five globally significant “texts,” it lays out the common ground for intellectual discussions within the Colgate community. Core Conversations focus on productive discourse and communal learning among students, encouraging them to engage in perspectives and dialogues beyond the limits of personal experience.Core Collections: This is not a typical museum experience. The gallery has been transformed into a space for open-ended dialogue. Visitors will not find a lot of text interpreting the artworks; rather, we pose a series of questions, designed to elicit individual reflection and initiate discussions across communities, identities, and materials.. The exhibition is organized into four broad areas of inquiry: Appearances, Epistemologies, Urbanism and Labor, and People and Land. We encourage you to engage with the questions provided while viewing the works, and to contribute your insights or your own questions to our interactive space.What will you add to the conversation?Core/Collections is curated by Emma Barrison ’24, Cindy Chen ’24, and Wendy Wu ’25

The Arts | Clifford Gallery, Clifford Gallery (101 Little Hall)
2023/2024 Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence jackie sumell and Studio CAJAIR present “The Locker Room.”Artist jackie sumell works at the intersection of social sculpture, abolition and healing. With the principle of abolition always in mind, sumell inhabits the physical materials and architectures of oppression and transforms these physical structures into lived spaces of radical hope.For The Locker Room, a work created especially for Colgate University, sumell worked with a team of students who go by Studio CAJAIR (an anagrammatic nod to the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-In-Residence program, which underwrites this work). Together, sumell and Studio CAJAIR spent the academic year considering the relationship between athletics and activism, ultimately recreating the architecture of a locker room to envisage how sports and locker rooms can be horizons of liberation. They ask, “What happens if the locker room becomes public, seeded with the best of its potential? Can we make the lockers themselves altars to the future[s] we wish to see?”sumell and Studio CAJAIR, along with students they invited from Art & Activism (ARTS 132A), transformed 12 lockers into altars to future worlds. They imagine everything from ecological justice, racial equity, and classless societies to happiness after retirement, as wins.The Locker Room is presented by the Art Department and the Christian A. Johnson Foundation. The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence was established in 1986 as a challenge grant in support of the arts at Colgate. The residency program permits one or more artists to become part of the Colgate community every academic year.Opening reception and gallery talk with jackie sumell and Studio CAJAIR will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 27.Please note that weekend gallery hours are dependent on the availability of student monitors. If driving a distance, please contact the department at 315-228-7633 during regular working hours to ensure the gallery will be open.Learn more at https://www.cliffordgallery.org/

The Arts | Little Hall, Clifford Gallery (101 Little Hall)
In conjunction with The Locker Room exhibition, Colgate’s 2023/2024 Christian A. Johnson Artist-in-Residence jackie sumell, along with Studio CAJAIR, will make The Locker Room accessible to the people, curated by the people, and will get us hyped for the future with biweekly “People’s Pep Talks”, April 3 to May 3.This week's guest coach is Colgate's own Julia Sparks, assistant director of sustainability and environmental studies program coordinator, on "Hope as the Seed for Climate Justice."Full lineup available here. All pep talks begin at noon in the Clifford Gallery. Pizza will be served.This event is also featured as part of the Office of Sustainability’s 13 Days of Green series leading up to Earth Day on April 22. View the 2024 13 Days of Green schedule.

The Arts | Alumni Hall, 111
Join us for a 13 Days of Green event to brainstorm ways sustainability can be incorporated into our next strategic plan.This will count as one credit hour for the employee Sustainability Passport Program.This event is part of the Office of Sustainability’s 13 Days of Green series leading up to Earth Day on April 22. View the 2024 13 Days of Green schedule.

The Arts | WRCU
Join us for a free concert at WRCU, featuring Bloomsday.The way Bloomsday’s Iris James Garrison writes songs feels like somewhere between a mirror and a memory. Spacious, full-bodied folk songs, they are an ode to things that are good no matter how small; they sometimes feel like the ghost of a Mary Oliver poem. Bloomsday’s new record, 'Heart of the Artichoke', is a relic of unfettered creativity and community. They recount the miracles of the mundane, the memories that become sacred, an ode to all that is holy: nightswimming, songs plucked from the ether, the ways friendship can endure.Like earlier Bloomsday songs, the work here is threaded with warmth; it’s simmering, crisp and deeply human, an encapsulation of the present moment. Recorded across 10 days in June 2023 in upstate New York at duo Babehoven’s studio and co-produced by Babehoven’s Ryan Albert, with mixing by Henry Stoehr of Slow Pulp. The record was built out with a wide-ranging group of collaborators, including inventive drumming from Andrew Stevens (Lomelda, Hovvdy), Alex Harwood, Richard Orofino, Babehoven’s Maya Bon, Hannah Pruzinsky (h.pruz, Sister.), and Chris Daley. It was an insulated and collaborative experience: all family dinners on the back porch, bonfires, feeling a full sense of joy, of friendship, of purity in the artistic self.Collaboration is an integral part of Bloomsday’s musical process. Garrison is malleable in the studio, their songwriting generous and spacious. But in listening to the record, there’s a sense that Garrison leaves room for the players, for the listener; for songs to find the shapes they’re meant to take. Garrison’s role as maestro is crucial, singular – it’s a collaborative, exploratory spirit harnessed by Garrison’s intuition, and by an honest commitment to carve out creative space for play, to delve into what’s known – or pushing past that, into unknown.Garrison is a true-blue songwriter and their structured, earworm compositions have the tendency to get stuck in your head, sometimes reminiscent of the big alternative radio hits of the mid 90s, a la Joan Osborne. “Dollar Slice” is the sweeping centerpoint of the record – Garrison’s cavernous crescendoing vocals, the chaotic tapestry of New York the backdrop, a sort-of 2024-update of “One of Us.” “I'm not religious,” Garrison says, “But I am into the idea of mystical, higher power – whatever that means – and that power seeing me and calling it out. That’s kind of godly to me.”“The ghosts of the past still come up and haunt me,” Garrison says, “but I sit in what I have and see it. All of these songs are about loved ones, about personal struggles with getting out of my head and being present.” Heart of the Artichoke was written from a healed, matured place – written in a moment of safety from chaos. It’s a prayer for the present, an appreciation of tenderness and what happens once we give ourselves the space to really see, and really feel – becoming free and whole – an ode to the way healing allows us to bloom.

The Arts | Dana Arts Center, Brehmer Theater
The Colgate University Department of Theater presents the spring 2024 production of The Good John Proctor by Talene Monahon. The producation is directed by Adrian Giurgea and performed by Colgate students.Step back in time to a world where innocence and fear collide in the gripping play, The Good John Proctor by Talene Monahon. In this evocative and thought-provoking reimagining of the Salem Witch Trials, the young women of Salem take center stage as they navigate the treacherous path of adolescence.Registration through Ticketleap is strongly encouraged to ensure seating.**This play acknowledges the reality of sexual violence/abuse, miscarriage/abortion, & substance abuse.** **This play uses atmospherics (haze) and real hay.**Co-sponsored by: ALANA Cultural Center, Brown Commons, Campus Culture and Inclusion, Ciccone Commons, Colgate Music Initiative, CORE Conversations, Department of Art, Department of English, Department of Music, Department of Religion, Division of Arts & Humanities, Film & Media Studies Program, Office of Equity and Diversity, Office of LGTBQ+ Initiatives, Office of the President, Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality StudiesFor any accessibility questions or concerns, please email theaterboxoffice@colgate.edu.