John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities | Haverford College

The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities provides a place for inclusive and interdisciplinary programming by promoting collaborative engagement with the intellectual and artistic ambitions of Haverford College and broader communities.

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News & Updates

HCAH Awarded Pew Grant

The $360,000 grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage supports “LOOK HERE,” a project that includes multiple exhibitions, a publication, and a symposium focused on the work of neurodivergent artists.

The Ghosts of History

In The Ghosts of History, Magnum photographer Moises Saman commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq by exploring the construction of competing narratives of war through the interaction of images and language.

Ying Li: Weather Report

The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and Gross McCleaf Gallery presents Weather Report, a two-part exhibition of new paintings by Ying Li, the Phlyssa Koshland Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College.

Isabella Otterbein is pictured in a portrait wearing a white headband and a white sweater over a dark-colored shirt.

Summer Centered: Isabella Otterbein '26 Combines Art and Activism to Drive Awareness of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

One of three Hurford Center creative interns, Otterbein is spending the summer as a programs intern for Abortion Access Front and creating a zine designed to educate the College community.

Zainab-Saleh in a floral print top smiling for the camera with a soft focus background of Haverford College

Welcome to New HCAH Director Zainab Saleh

Please join us in welcoming Zainab Saleh, who will serve as the Huford Center's Koshland Director for the next three years!

Sound Abounds at Strange Truth 2024

Now in its 15th year, the film series begins March 27 with a live film performance by Oscar-nominated director Sam Green.

THIS WEEK at the Hurford Center + VCAM! It’s TR

THIS WEEK at the Hurford Center + VCAM!

It’s TRANS WEEK OF JOY, RESISTANCE, AND POWER. Check the Grase Center’s Instagram all week for more events including the GRASE Library Opening, Trans Day of Remembrance, and a screening of “Being Thunder.”

COMING UP:
1. Bravery and Resilience on a Warming Planet: Talk by Sarah Jaquette Ray
(Re)growing a Living Culture - Bi-Co Environmental Studies Speaker Series
Mon, 11/8, 4:30-6pm, VCAM Screening Room

2. Race and Remembrance in the Digital Archive: A discussion with Dr. Tonia Sutherland and Wynn Eakins
Tues, 11/19, 1:30-4pm, VCAM Lounge

3. The Last of the Party People Collage Workshop with Lucy Frank ’25
Tues, 11/19, 7-9pm, VCAM Lower Create Space

4. Hellenic League of Champions: Conversation and Workshop with Robby Smuckler, Founder of Icarus Football
Tues, 11/19, 7:30pm, VCAM Lounge

5. VCAMbient: “200 years of something basically called Song Number 9” with Digital Media Specialist Charles Woodard
Weds, 11/20, 11:40am, VCAM Lounge

6. Piecework and Embroidery Workshop with Amir Khadar
Weds, 11/20, 4:30-6:30pm, VCAM 201

7. DEADLINE 11/20: Join the Hurford Center’s Spring 2025 Student Seminar: Exploring Minoritized Strategies of Thriving Through Contemporary Art and Performance with Umika Pathak ’25
hav.to/studentseminars

8. #ExposeFakeClinics Action Hour with Isabella Otterbein ’26
Thurs, 11/21, 7-9pm, VCAM Lounge

9. The Shining: Forwards and Backwards
Saturday, 11/23, 8pm, VCAM Cinema

Piecework and Embroidery Workshop with Amir Khadar

Piecework and Embroidery Workshop with Amir Khadar
Wednesday, 11/20
4:30-6:30pm
VCAM 201

This workshop will be a lightly facilitated exploration of piecework and bead embroidery. Participants will explore a process I have often used in my artwork that draws from techniques rooted in the West African art canon - piecework/flag making and stitched beadwork using contemporary materials that make the process more accessible. I will briefly introduce the techniques in two parts and participants will draft a project to work on for the duration of the workshop. The products can be very open-ended, but some examples or projects are a small bag or pouch, a brooch, a wall hanging, or a quilt square.

I intend for this to be a relaxing and restorative time because I don’t know how the election is gonna go down or what emotional state people will be in.
Amir Khadar (They/Them) is a Sierra Leonean-American transdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator based in Philadelphia, PA, originally from Minneapolis, MN. Their work has been central in creating visual language in social change movements centered on decolonization, de-carceration, and environmentalism. Amir’s commitment to social change is evident through collaborations with justice organizations such as Thousand Currents, ACLU chapters, Initiative Sankofa Afrique D’ouest, Queer Crescent, and Forward Together. Amir’s work spans posters, reports, book designs, art installations, exhibitions, and educational projects that envision new ways of being for their communities. They also evoke these themes through textile and digital art techniques, integrating ancestral technology into their creative expression through mixed media quilts, adornments, digital weavings, and soft sculptures.

Email meswarapu@haverford.edu with any questions. Sign up via the link in our bio!

Part of the Hold on Tight Philly Artist Workshop Series, organized by Kelly Jung and Manasi Eswarapu.

TODAY: Distinguished Visitors Talk by Dr. Yaba Bla

TODAY: Distinguished Visitors Talk by Dr. Yaba Blay, Independent People’s Worker
Talk on Friday, November 15th at 11:00 am in Lutnick 200

“The Whites of Our Eyes”
We will be screening Dr. Yaba Blay’s The Whites of Our Eyes, a short documentary film that follows Dr. Yaba Blay as she returns to her familial homeland of Ghana to explore the relationships between beauty, bodies, and b/Blackness. In addition to recreating the groundbreaking Clark Doll Test among schoolchildren, the film follows a young hustler as he prepares for his community’s annual harvest festival by bleaching his skin. Amid the ghosts of colonialism and the gods of whiteness, The Whites of Our Eyes questions ideas and ideals of beauty in contemporary Ghana.

Sponsored by the Bi-Co Department of Education, Mellon Together with Humanities: Language, Community, Power Grant, and the Hurford Center in conjunction with the Distinguished Visitors Program.

Join us TODAY, Thursday, Nov 14, 4:30pm - 7pm, Whi

Join us TODAY, Thursday, Nov 14, 4:30pm - 7pm, Whitehead Campus Center 313, Haverford College, for an artist talk and reception for the exhibition The Ghosts of History with artist Moises Saman and poet Sinan Antoon, moderated by Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of HCAH Zainab Saleh.

In The Ghosts of History Magnum photographer Moises Saman commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq by exploring the construction of competing narratives of war through the interaction of images and language. Moises’s photographs taken in Iraq during the past two decades are presented alongside texts, US military maps and graphs, redacted official transcripts, and pop culture references relevant to the Iraq War that reflect a sinisterly ironic lexicon of this conflict. Presenting Saman’s photographs in dialogue with the sourced texts reveal a clash between the photographer’s visual representation of the conflict and official discourse provoking questions about narrative formation in war, and the creation of memory.

More information at exhibits.haverford.edu/theghostsofhistory (link in bio)

•••
The Ghosts of History is a traveling exhibition organized by Magnum Photos in collaboration with the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Support for the exhibition has been provided by Haverford College’s John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Magnum Photos, and Haverford’s Distinguished Visitors Program.

Image: Baghdad, 2003. A boy with a hunting rifle runs through the British Cemetery in central Baghdad during a sandstorm. © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos

Distinguished Visitors Talk by Dr. Yaba Blay, Inde

Distinguished Visitors Talk by Dr. Yaba Blay, Independent People’s Worker

Talk on Friday, November 15th at 11:00 am in Lutnick Library 200
“The Whites of Our Eyes”

We will be screening Dr. Yaba Blay’s The Whites of Our Eyes, a short documentary film that follows Dr. Yaba Blay as she returns to her familial homeland of Ghana to explore the relationships between beauty, bodies, and b/Blackness. In addition to recreating the groundbreaking Clark Doll Test among schoolchildren, the film follows a young hustler as he prepares for his community’s annual harvest festival by bleaching his skin. Amid the ghosts of colonialism and the gods of whiteness, The Whites of Our Eyes questions ideas and ideals of beauty in contemporary Ghana.

Sponsored by the Bi-Co Department of Education, Mellon Together with Humanities: Language, Community, Power Grant, and the Hurford Center in conjunction with the Distinguished Visitors Program.

TODAY! VCAMbient: Paoli Thorndale Line with HCAH A

TODAY! VCAMbient: Paoli Thorndale Line with HCAH Assistant Director Kelly Jung
Wednesday, November 13
Noon - 1pm
VCAM Lounge

This is my commuting playlist. From mornings when I’m hurriedly power walking down 9th street, to the days when I have to take a pause on the nature trail to take in the morning view, from the dead of winter cold to the peak of summer heat, these are the voices that take me from the heart of the city to VCAM. There’s nothing some Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass, IU, and Frank Ocean can’t fix. –Kelly Jung

Now in its fourth year, VCAMbient is an opportunity for students, staff, faculty, and guests to fill the cavernous space of VCAM with their favorite sounds–at a volume that permits the ongoing business of teaching, learning, and working in the building. Make a Spotify playlist, or better yet, bring an instrument, start playing/streaming, and see what happens. You can have a theme, or the theme can simply be “stuff I like.”

Contact HCAH & VCAM Associate Director James Weissinger to sign up for your VCAMbient set! jweissin@haverford.edu 🎧🎧🎧

TODAY: Towers of Ivory and Steel - Conversation wi

TODAY: Towers of Ivory and Steel - Conversation with Maya Wind
Tuesday, November 12
4:30 p.m.–6 p.m.
Stokes Auditorium

Free copies of “Towers of Ivory and Steel” will be available for the first 30 attendees 📚

Join us for an evening with Dr. Maya Wind, a scholar of Israeli expertise and militarism. In her latest book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, Dr. Wind explores the complex role of Israeli universities in the context of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Drawing upon extensive research, she examines the intersections of academic institutions with broader societal issues and debates concerning education and human rights. Dr. Wind is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Black Study and Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California Riverside.

Organized by Zainab Saleh, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director, the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Part of Haverford’s Meeting the Moment: Community in Dialogue initiative. Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, IDEA, the Early Career Scholars (ECS) Fund, the Office of the Provost’s Early Career Scholars Fund, and the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities.

In ONE WEEK... Bravery and Resilience on a Warmin

In ONE WEEK...

Bravery and Resilience on a Warming Planet: Sarah Jaquette Ray
Monday, November 18, 2024
4:30-6pm
VCAM Screening Room

Part of (Re)growing a Living Culture: The Bi-Co Environmental Studies Speaker Series

Drawing on her book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray will talk about the role of emotions in the youth climate movement. Ray will outline strategies for engaging anxiety, grief, despair, and also joy, desire, and pleasure in service of cultivating a more just and regenerative world.

Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray works at the intersection of climate, emotions, and justice. She is a professor and chair of environmental studies at California Polytechnic, Humboldt. An environmental humanist with a BA in Religious Studies, an MA in American Studies, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy, Dr. Ray draws on an eclectic range of disciplines and epistemologies in service of climate justice. Her first book, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Arizona, 2013), explores the logic and affects of social control in environmental thought. Her second book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (California, 2020), is an existential toolkit for the climate generation. She has published on emotions and the climate movement in the LA Times, Scientific American, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Edge Effects, KCET, Zocalo Public Square, and One Earth Sangha.

Suggested Reading: Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (2020), and The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World (2024), both books are available through UC Press.

Contact: Dylan Gauthier dgauthier@haverford.edu

Organized by the Bi-Co Environmental Studies Program. Supported by the Distinguished Visitors Program, The Uncertainty Academy, and the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities. 🪴

Events

Tuesday, November 19th, 2024

7:00PM

The Last of the Party People Collage Workshop

Wednesday, November 20th, 2024

12:00PM

VCAMbient: “200 years of something basically called Song Number 9” with Digital Media Specialist Charles Woodard

Friday, December 13th, 2024

4:00PM

December 13th All VCAM Opening

Friday, February 21st, 2025

9:00AM

2025 Mellon Symposium

Contact

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John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities
Haverford College
370 Lancaster Ave
Haverford, PA 19041

(610) 896-1336
hcah [at] haverford.edu