UCSB Arts & Lectures

Culture at a Click

“Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep,” Pico Iyer writes, “but the place where you stand.” Today, as demonstrators across the country stand together to demand equality and justice in the wake of the recent killing of George Floyd, we as a nation are coming to terms with who we have been and reckoning with who we are. Now is a moment when we can decide who we want to become.


We believe in the power of arts and meaningful dialogue to bring communities together, open minds and help us move toward a shared future. This week we turn to A&L artists and speakers to help us understand how we got to the current moment and how we forge a path forward. 


With hope for a just future,

Celesta signature

Celesta M. Billeci

Miller McCune Executive Director

"We stand together in solidarity against hate and injustice."

Read UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang's statement to the University community.

Learning. Listening. Changing.

Watch Jennifer Eberhardt

In Jennifer Eberhardt's 2019 lecture from the A&L archive, the Stanford social psychologist demonstrates how ingrained stereotypes can powerfully shape our visual perception, memory and behavior. A MacArthur “genius” and one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers, Eberhardt offers insight into how bias can lead to racial disparities and renders practical, actionable suggestions for reform.

Video available through Friday, June 12, 2020.

Jon Batiste's Meditations album

Pianist Jon Batiste was scheduled to perform with us this spring, but his event was among those affected by COVID-19 cancellations. Last week, Batiste released a new album with Minneapolis-born guitarist and songwriter Cory Wong. Each song title on Meditations offers a theme to meditate on that unites us during these times.


"It is fitting that we are releasing this album during such a tumultuous time for the black community," Batiste writes. "I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a black artist in America... As you listen to the album, I invite you to also meditate on empathy. Only when we have a deepening of our collective spiritual consciousness can we begin to implement genuine and lasting change." 

Henry Louis Gates

Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s recent book Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow covers the period after the Civil War, when white supremacy was born as white Southerners looked for ways to roll back the newly acquired rights of African Americans. Drawing parallels between then and now, he offers valuable insight into today's cultural moment, and how we might stop history from repeating itself. While Gates' spring A&L lecture was unfortunately canceled, you can listen to his 2019 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. 

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith came to A&L in 2019 as the U.S. Poet Laureate. Her most recent book, Wade In the Water, connects America's dark past and present – from slavery to today's acts of racial violence – weaving in forgotten African American voices. Read two of the poems below, and learn more from her interview with the Poetry Foundation's podcast Poetry Off the Shelf. 

"Declaration" is an erasure poem based on words from the Declaration of Independence that spoke to Smith of "the history of black life in this country."   


"Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury."  


Wade In the Water ends on on a hopeful note with "An Old Story," a poem Smith says is "attempting to write a new myth."


"We took new stock of one another. 
We wept to be reminded of such color."  


You can also check in with Smith's own podcast The Slowdown, which dedicated this week to poems that take up questions of social justice.  

Corporate Season Sponsor: SAGE Publishing