Deborah Jackson Taffa

a Guest Artist Performance

• Date & Time Wednesday, March 11

• Location Peeler Auditorium

• Organized by Brenda Rogers

• ÐÓ°ÉPro

  Join us for an evening with Deborah Jackson Taffa, reading from her memoir Whiskey Tender. Ms. Taffa is a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her work is a look at self and country as a Native American Quechan (Yuma)/Laguna Pueblo).

The Work of Risk: Guerilla Art for Surviving the Carceral Present*

a Lecture

• Date & Time Wednesday, April 1 2026

• Location The Richard E. Peeler Art Center, Auditorium

• ÐÓ°ÉPro

  Faye Gleisser
  The Work of Risk: Guerilla Art for Surviving the Carceral Present
  This event is free and open to the public and made possible by the Karen Connell Speaker Series Fund.  
  
  As laws governing the freedom of expression and right to occupy space continue to change, artists continue to anticipate the presence of police and surveillance technologies, and the consequences of arrest, especially when creating confrontational or participatory performance and conceptual work beyond art-sanctioned spaces. How has the anticipation of punitive encounter taken shape materially and temporally in art? Relatedly, in what ways has the mis- or under-recognition of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions of artists’ differing vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence contributed to the normalizing of carceral relations in the stories told most often about riskiness and resourcefulness in art practice? Art historian and cultural theorist, Dr. Faye Gleisser addresses these questions and their political implications for the present in her book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In this talk, Gleisser draws upon Black feminist and queer of color theories of spatialized power and argues that artists’ calculation of citation and arrest is a form of knowledge—punitive literacy—that reveals salient insights into the ways carceral violence shapes the history of contemporary art. 

  Faye Gleisser (she/her) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and American Studies. Gleisser is an interdisciplinary art historian and curator of 20th and 21st century art, specializing in performance art, archives, and carceral forms. Her scholarship has appeared in a number of exhibition catalogues, as well as in Art Journal, October, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Women & Performance, ASAP/J, and Aperture, and is forthcoming in the Journal for Curatorial Studies. Her first book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), which analyzes the relationship of policing, state power, and guerrilla art practice in the United States, was awarded the ASAP Annual Book Prize in 2024. In her current book project, "Art History & Its Hormonal Methods," she examines the co-emergence of endocrinology, carcerality, and hormonal management alongside artists' use of somatic abolitionist art practice in order to rethink the "sensorial turn" and its political and social stakes.
  
  *This event counts towards punch card credit for students enrolled in an art history, art studio, or design studies course.

Behind the Scenes: Modern Voices – 1960s to Now*

an Exhibition

• Date & Time Friday, April 17, 2026

• Location The Richard E. Peeler Art Center

• ÐÓ°ÉPro

  View works by artists like James Rosenquist, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joyce Tenneson, Romare Bearden, and others, along with a short video artwork from ÐÓ°ÉPro’s time-based media collection. Learn how these works came into the collection and how contemporary materials like photography, prints, and digital files are stored and cared for.  Free and open to the public.

Art + Art History Spring Open House & 5×5 Art Sale

a Gallery

• Date & Time

• Location The Richard E. Peeler Art Center

• ÐÓ°ÉPro

  The Department of Art and Art History will host its annual Spring Open House and 5×5 Art Sale on Thursday, May 7, from 5:00–7:00 PM. This event brings together student, staff, and faculty work and is free and open to the public.  Light refreshments will be available in the lobby.

  Open studios and student work
  All studios and classrooms will be open, showing work by students across all levels and media. This is the only time during the semester when all studio students exhibit work at the same time, in the spaces where the work was made.

  Gallery exhibitions on view

  • Universal Language: The Art of Sexual and Gender Diversity
    Selections from the Kinsey Institute Collection
    January 26 – May 7, 2026

  • Samuel E. Vázquez: Poetic Reflection
    January 26 – June 24, 2026

  • 2026 Senior Studio Art & Design Studies Exhibition
    April 17 – May 16, 2026

  5×5 charity art sale
  Students donate original 5" × 5" artworks. For a $5 donation, you may select one piece to take home. Proceeds support arts programming for at-risk children through the Putnam County Summer Enrichment Program.