@SALON
An interdisciplinary artists salon, ISU’s @Salon welcomes artists and arts enthusiasts for an afternoon of conversation, poetry, music, and visual art.
In addition to featuring renowned local and regional artists, @Salon includes presentations and discussions of works-in-progress using Liz Lerman’s Format for Critical Response—a format for feedback that affords the artist an active role in the dialogue.
OUR HOST
Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora and cofounder of the Black Took Collective, Duriel E. Harris is the author of Drag, Amnesiac: Poems, and Speleology (a video collaboration with Scott Rankin). A recipient of grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and post-doctoral residencies at UIC and the University of California, Santa Barbara, Harris’s work has been featured and published internationally. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, recent writing appears in Fifth Wednesday and Kweli as well as BAX (Best American Experimental Writing), The Force of What’s Possible and The &Now Awards 3. Recent appearances include feature performances at the Art Institute of Chicago, Babylon Cinema (Berlin) and off off Broadway at The Wild Project (NYC). An associate professor of English at Illinois State University, Harris is a member of Douglas Ewart & Inventions creative music ensemble and Call & Response—a dynamic of Black women in performance. Current projects include the sound compilation “Black Magic” and Thingification—a solo play in one act.
LIZ LERMAN’S FORMAT FOR CRITICAL RESPONSE
Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is a widely recognized method that nurtures the development of artistic works-in-progress through a four-step method for facilitated group feedback that affords the artist an active role in the dialogue.
The Process engages participants in three roles:
The artist offers a work-in-progress for review and is prepared to question that work in a dialogue with others; responders, committed to the artist’s intent to make excellent work, offer reactions to the work in a dialogue with the artist; and the facilitator initiates each step, keeps the process on track, and works to help the artist and responders use the Process to frame useful questions and responses.
After the presentation of artistic work, the facilitator leads the artist and responders through four steps:
- Statements of Meaning
- Artist as Questioner
- Neutral Questions
- Permissioned Opinions
OUR SPONSORS
Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora
The Department of English at Illinois State University is dedicated to providing an environment that facilitates the individual and communal work—creative, intellectual, administrative, and outreach—of our faculty, staff, and students. Our vision is guided by the University mission statement, Educating Illinois, and includes the following:
- Create a work environment that values all members as people and fosters positive morale and transparency where possible, acknowledges and honors the professionalism of all faculty, staff, and graduate assistants in our various roles, and recognizes the interdependence of our work through informal and formal discourse;
- Promote innovative and dynamic pedagogical research, scholarship, and practice in the classroom and the curriculum;
- Support—through reassigned time and co-teaching opportunities—interdisciplinary research and publication, while continuing to value the forms of research and publication that are appropriate to a particular field;
- Continue to articulate and revise a multi-dimensional understanding of English Studies that responds to the changing needs of our students, the field, and the world;
- Maintain our commitment to providing students with a learning environment and community that supports growth as a individual, professional, and citizen;
- Strengthen diversity in the composition of our faculty, students, and curricular and pedagogical approaches through individual, programmatic, and departmental action; and
- Secure the facilities and resources required to support excellence in scholarship, teaching, and research.
The ISU Creative Writing Program
Situated in a department that emphasizes interdisciplinarity, the Creative Writing Program at Illinois State University has a 10 distinguished and national reputation for encouraging alternative and hybrid forms of writing while emphasizing the study of theory and creative writing pedagogy. We are a program that respects and encourages innovation. We offer both undergraduate and graduate courses. Our graduate program offers emphases in creative writing at both the MA and PhD levels and attracts students from all over the world.
The ISU Women’s & Gender Studies Program
The ISU Ethnic Studies Program