Imagining America’s Engaged Art Summit Sparks Connections and Creativity

Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life hosted 20 national student fellows from 17 IA member campuses in Davis, CA for an Engaged Arts Summit October 17-19, 2024. The summit convened eight undergraduate IA/Joy of Giving Something (IA/JGS) fellows, eight IA Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) fellows, and four PAGE co-directors for three days of camaraderie, connection, and creativity.

IA fellowship programs are open to students at IA member campuses and provide mentorship, financial support for community-engaged projects, and connection to the IA national network of artists, designers, scholars, and cultural organizers. The Engaged Arts Summit gathered a community of inspiring and insightful student leaders from across the country who share a commitment to community engagement and a powerful vision of a university where social justice and equity are centered in all learning. We practiced new ways of being together and embodied IA’s commitment to inviting people in as our full selves in critical yet hopeful spaces to imagine better ways of living, learning and working collectively and collaboratively.

The summit opened with a social reception and dinner for IA/JGS fellows, PAGE fellows, and IA staff to meet and connect. The next full day’s activities began at the Imagining America offices with a thoughtful grounding and welcome led by PAGE co-directors that invited everyone to share our different roles within the university – as students, teachers, scholars, colleagues, mentors, organizers, and more – from across diverse locations including the performing arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural and physical sciences. Through this circle of sharing, intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections were formed between graduate and undergraduate students, and IA staff on our shared commitment to community-engaged scholarship and questions of self and collective care. 

A Friday morning working session allowed space for IA/JGS fellows to explore the Imagining America Public Scholar Tools and for PAGE fellows to brainstorm and collaborate towards their blog salon submissions. Using the IA Public Scholar Imagination Guide, the IA/JGS fellows worked independently with the Self-Reflection Spiral activity and then had a group reflection on shared stories of immigration, displacement, and alienation under US empire as well as shared imagination for hopeful, creative, and joyful futures.

The PAGE fellows used this time to gather into clusters to receive input from their colleagues on how best to showcase their individual research projects for the IA community. The IA office was transformed into a creative laboratory as pairs broke off to record a podcast, to offer in-depth feedback on a visual poetry project, or to brainstorm how best to honor ancestral voices in an ethno-musicology project.

After lunch, the entire group traveled to nearby Woodland, CA for an engaging hands-on workshop at Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer (TANA). A collaborative partnership between the Chicana/o Studies Program at the University of California, Davis and the greater Woodland community, TANA offers a fully functioning silkscreen studio, Chicano/Latino Arts exhibition space, and a teaching center for the arts. Through exhibiting, printing, and teaching, TANA cultivates the cultural and artistic life of the community, viewing the arts as essential to a community’s development and well-being. 

TANA co-founder Malaquias Montoya welcomed us to the space with stories of his childhood, his role in the social serigraphy (or silk-screening) movement in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1960s, and the early years of creating TANA. Director José Arenas then led the group through a process to co-create a mini-zine that was transferred to silk screen and printed live in the studio. Everyone had an opportunity to make a design and pull a print. After our collective artmaking, the group returned to Davis and the day ended with friendship bracelet making, music, conversation, and dinner. 

For the second day’s activities, fellows visited the Davis Farmers Market to pick up local foods before gathering at the IA offices. PAGE fellows continued to tinker in the creative laboratory, developing their projects for the blog salon and sharing snippets of performance and writing that they had produced the day before. IA/JGS fellows embarked on a walking tour of UC Davis campus, stopping at the Native American contemplation garden in the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, where IA Communications Director Anuj Vaidya led fellows in an eco-media experience. At the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, IA/JGS fellow and UC Davis Design student Jadzia Pho led our exploration of the main exhibitions as well as the participatory reflection activities co-created by Jadzia as part of an internship project.

Over three days, this community of makers, thinkers, and doers created new relations across disciplines, social locations, geography, and ways of knowing. IA student fellows typically convene annually at the IA National Gathering, so in lieu of that event this year, IA staff are grateful to have gathered our student network for the first time at the IA offices to explore, share, and foster new friendships. 

The Engaged Arts Summit was a rich and transformative experience for IA staff and student fellows, and reminded us of the power and importance of imagining together – so we may cross-pollinate our futures with a diversity of methods, stories, and possibilities for collective resurgence.

Learn More About the IA/JGS and PAGE Programs
The IA/JGS program supports photography, digital media, and community-engaged artmaking as pathways for undergraduate students to pursue their careers and to make a difference in their communities. The PAGE program is IA’s network for publicly engaged graduate students in humanities, arts, and design. PAGE enhances the praxis and pedagogy of public scholarship; fosters a national, interdisciplinary community of peers and veteran scholars; and creates  opportunities for collaborative knowledge production.