Academics | Little Hall, 105 - Golden Auditorium
Join us for a Ryan Family Film Series screening of Amazing Grace (dir. Alan Elliott, 2018, 87 minutes).The concert film Amazing Grace documents Aretha Franklin’s gospel performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles in January 1972 while recording the album of the same name, which quickly became the best-selling gospel album in the United States. Due to various technical difficulties and legal disputes, the film was not released as planned and did not make its way to audiences until after Aretha Franklin’s death in 2018. In this performance, Franklin reaches far back to her youth singing in her father’s church, New Bethel Baptist in Detroit, Michigan. Of course, Aretha Franklin was one of the most successful singers of a new genre at the time—soul music—a vernacular remaking of religious gospel music with other popular Black music idioms. If one can speak of the power of Black music, gospel music, as heard here in one of the greatest voices in the history of American music, exemplifies the African musical idioms that are the bedrock of African American music, beginning with the early spirituals and work songs of enslaved Africans.

Academics | Ho Science Center
In 2017, Kristen T. Woodward was able to witness a total solar eclipse in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was moved by the dramatic planetary display. She is looking forward to viewing another eclipse in her hometown of Webster, New York in April, as we will be in that exquisite path of totality. Woodward marvels at how science has allowed us to countdown the minutes while other events in our lives appear random and chaotic. The experience leaves one to ponder what is pre-ordained. By including images inspired by solar eclipse, her encaustic paintings intend to capture this conflict and visual tension between chaos and natural order.Woodward received her BFA in Printmaking from Syracuse University, and her MFA in Studio Art from Clemson University. Her zoomorphic paintings combine encaustic and print processes, and often utilize found collage materials. Woodward is a professor in the department of art and art history at Albright College, teaching drawing, painting, printmaking, and gender and the visual arts. Currently, she is collaborating with an environmental biologist to explore tropical ecosystems in Costa Rica. Woodward serves as is Resident Curator for the online site Artists2Artists.

Academics | 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

Academics | 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/

Academics | Hamilton Movie Theater
Please join Peace and Conflict Studies for the Spring 2024 Film Series.We will be showing Kinyarwanda (2011, directed by Alrick Brown). During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, neighbors interrupt the killings to help each other out and take refuge in the Grand Mosque of Kigali and other madrassas across the country.This screening is free and open to the public.

Academics | Palace Theater
Many grade schools teach the fact/opinion distinction. In this course, we’ll discuss whether this distinction cuts off space for public debate – by presenting ‘facts’ as settled and ‘opinions’ as outside the realm of evidence and argument. We’ll explore whether there is a better way to conceptualize the underlying phenomena.Presenter: Ben Lennertz is a Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University specializing in the Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Mind. He is widely published and has received a number of fellowships and prizes.