• Gallery Hours

    The Bell is open daily to all visitors with Brown IDs from 11 AM–5 PM, and both Thursdays & Fridays 11 AM–8 PM while exhibitions are on view.

    In accordance with University policy, visitors without Brown IDs should register for designated public gallery hours through this ticketing page. The Bell’s public gallery hours for Spring 2026 are:

    • Thursdays, 5–8 PM
    • Saturdays, 11am–5 PM

    About the Exhibition

    The Bell / Brown Arts Institute premieres the newest project from internationally-renowned sound, video, and installation artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Featuring interviews with former political prisoners made on location in Palestine, Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom celebrates poetry, music, and art as forms of expressing individual and collective survivance within systems of incarceration across time and space.

    Using strategies of opacity and fragmentation, Abbas and Abou-Rahme incorporate concrete, fabric, and weathered steel—carceral architecture—as the projection surfaces of this sound and video installation to build, in the artists’ words, “a vast counter-archive to document Palestinian life.” “Enemy of the Sun” (1970), by acclaimed Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim, foregrounds the installation; this poem was mis-attributed to Black Panther George Jackson and memorialized in the Black Panther newspaper following his 1971 murder in San Quentin prison. Found handwritten in Jackson’s cell, the poem evokes the long relationship between Black political prisoners in the United States and Palestinian political prisoners.

    Prisoners of Love is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain). Kate Kraczon and Thea Quiray Tagle are the co-curators of this project at The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, an extension of the artists’ ongoing relationship with Kraczon, who produced their first US exhibition and catalog in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

    Moments of exchange between Abou-Rahme and Abbas with Brown’s community have been underway since 2020, with Kraczon connecting them to Nadje Al-Ali, Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), where they were the opening speakers in a series of talks, events, and exhibitions in 2022 jointly organized by CMES and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University on the topics of art, gender and body politics in the Middle East and its diasporas. Abou-Rahme and Abbas have been working with curators at Brown’s John Hay Library since 2023, conducting research in the university’s archival project “Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States” among other international archival sources. In Spring 2025, Quiray Tagle and the artists developed and taught a graduate and undergraduate research-based course, co-taught with Kraczon, that furthered the artists’ research towards The Bell presentation while enabling students’ own research into family archives, community-based archives, and other untold histories of mass incarceration.

    Join us for the opening celebration on Thursday, February 19:

    • Gallery doors will open at 4 pm
    • Artist talk at 6 pm
    • Reception from 7-9 pm

    Credits

    Prisoners of Love is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).

    The project is made possible at Brown through generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support has been provided by the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown.

    Learn more about the exhibition!
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  • Exhibit open March 4 - June 1.

    The appliqué panels in this exhibition come from Odisha, a coastal region in eastern India along the Bay of Bengal, where textile traditions remain deeply embedded in public life and shaped by centuries of trade, pilgrimage, and ritual movement.

    Known locally as chandua, these works serve ritual and communal purposes rather than private display. The tradition is centered in the town of Pipli, where specialized workshops have supported this practice across generations. These panels are created for temple festivals such as the annual Rath Yatra in Puri, as well as for shared civic spaces. Their scale, bold geometry, and symbolic motifs are designed to be seen collectively, in motion, and in public settings.

    In workshops and homes, women cut and stitch fabric by hand, passing techniques and visual language across generations. Recurring motifs such as wheels, eyes, animals, and floral forms carry layered meanings tied to protection, continuity, and communal identity. While the panels appear as unified compositions, their making is collective, reflecting the largely invisible labor of women whose skills sustain the tradition.

    This exhibition presents chandua as a form of civic art. These appliqués demonstrate how ritual objects function as cultural infrastructure, shaping how communities gather and express shared values. In a global context increasingly defined by speed and abstraction, the slow, manual precision of this work offers a counterpoint.

    Bringing these panels into a space dedicated to international and public affairs, the exhibit curator hopes to invite conversation about culture as a vital system through which societies organize meaning and belonging.

    Learn more about Chandua, Odisha’s signature appliqué textile art.

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  •                                                                           
    Exhibition open March 12 - August 28

    “The Future Was Already Buried Here” is a multimedia art exhibition that grew out of Watson School Doctoral Fellow Juben Rabbani’s ethnographic fieldwork in the Salton Sea region of southeastern California during the summer of 2025, where lithium extraction, climate change, and environmental precarity intersect across competing temporalities.

    At the center of Rabbani’s research is a simple but difficult question: Who does the electric vehicle benefit?

    The black-and-white film photographs of the Salton Sea region, shot on 35mm film and printed by hand, engage with slow, sedimented forms of change, including toxic accumulation, colonial dispossession, geological history, and the boom-and-bust cycles that shape the region. Their material process mirrors these slower rhythms. The digital color photographs reflect the speed of modern extraction and the energy transition, including commodity flows, lithium speculation, electric-vehicle development, and volatile climate events. Viewers access the digital images through a QR code, which activates the same infrastructures of acceleration that organize contemporary extraction.

    Through the interplay of these mediums, the project invites viewers to encounter the difficulty of understanding a place where time collapses, and multiple futures are being made and unmade at the same time.
    Made possible in part by a grant from the Brown Arts Institute
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  • This exhibition, Sites of Remaking: Port Cities and Our Present, invites visitors to reconsider and recontextualize port cities, centering Black and Indigenous experiences within the global history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its present-day legacies. It explores themes of freedom-making, resistance, place-making and the legacies of slavery through works by three Rhode Island-based multi-disciplinary artists: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, Kia Lenise and Spencer Evans. Curated by Ivie Orobaton, A.M. Candidate in Public Humanities.

    The exhibition is an artistic companion to the April 23–24 conference, Reconsidering Port Cities: Critical Commemoration of Slavery, and Transatlantic Legacies, hosted by the Simmons Center, and co-convened with the International Slavery Museum, University of Liverpool and the Center for the Study of International Slavery.

    Support for this exhibition was generously provided by an anonymous donor.

    Sites of Remaking: Port Cities and Our Present is on view March 30–April 24, 2026.

    The gallery, located at 94 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02906, is open Monday–Friday, 10am–12pm and 1–3pm. Closed for school and federal holidays. Visit by appointment only.

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  • Join the Simmons Center for an artist talk and exhibition opening reception for Sites of Remaking: Port Cities and Our Present.

    This exhibition invites visitors to reconsider and recontextualize port cities, centering Black and Indigenous experiences within the global history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its present-day legacies. The exhibition emerged as an artistic companion to the upcoming conference, Reconsidering Port Cities: Critical Commemoration of Slavery, and Transatlantic Legacies, hosted by the Simmons Center, and co-convened with the International Slavery Museum, University of Liverpool and the Center for the Study of International Slavery.

    The artist talk will explore interdisciplinary artistic practices around histories and legacies of racial slavery, the built environment and site-making. Curator Ivie Orobaton, A.M. Candidate in Public Humanities, and Artists Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, Spencer Evans, and Kia Lenise will be in conversation with Christopher Roberts, Assistant Professor at RISD.

    Support for this exhibition was generously provided by an anonymous donor.

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  • The Brown Jazz Band performs the 38th Annual Eric Adam Brudner ’84 Memorial Concert at 7pm on Friday, April 3 at the Lindemann Performing Arts Center. With Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, the Brown Jazz Band dives into a musical world between Damascus, New York, and Providence — music beyond the cultural divide. Tickets on sale now!

    Kinan Azmeh’s residency at Brown has received support from the Brown University Center for Middle East Studies.

    About Kinan Azmeh and the Program for this Concert

    Kinan Azmeh is a world-renowned clarinetist and composer. As a soloist, he plays with Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim, the Silk Road Ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Kinan was born in Damascus, where Arabic and Levantine sounds were unmistakably in the air. After attending the Juilliard School of Music in New York, he launched an incredible music career presenting his unique artistic vision: music without confinement.

    With regard to his latest album, FLOW, Azmeh said the following: “I was the Damascene in New York and the New Yorker in Damascus. I am now more interested in being the New Yorker in New York and the Damascene in Damascus… Both cities with all their contrasting qualities are intellectually stimulating to me. Places, people, nature, tragedies and celebrations, all of these elements have found their way into the music I create. Being in a constant state of FLOW is now my new zone of comfort.”

    For this concert, Azmeh and the Brown Jazz Band will perform music from FLOW. It will be a celebration of music that merges Middle Eastern, European, and Jazz sounds — music without borders.

    Learn more about Kinan Azmeh at his website.

    About the Annual Eric Adam Brudner ’84 Memorial Concert

    Eric Adam Brudner graduated in 1984 after distinguishing himself as one of the finest students to pass through the Department of Music in recent memory. Eric was a talented pianist and composer. He was the founder and president of an active Departmental Undergraduate Group that enlivened the department and contributed ideas for curricular and extracurricular programs that have had a continuing impact on our offerings. While still an undergraduate, Eric was a busy professional, playing jazz in local clubs and successfully teaching piano to dozens of fellow students. He was awarded the Buxtehude and Arlan Coolidge Prizes in music in his junior and senior years respectively. Eric was a favorite of faculty and students alike. He brightened our classes and our lives with his effervescent good humor and quick wit, and he touched our hearts with his music. These annual concerts are dedicated to the memory of our student, friend, and family member in celebration of his talent and aspirations.

    The Brudner Memorial Concerts have become an important tradition at Brown. They began in 1988 with a concert featuring compositions by Brown students and visiting composers. Members of the Brown Jazz Band were well represented in the first three concerts. In the inaugural Brudner Concert, Dan Seiden’s Eyes can not was performed by Dan (who sang and played guitar) along with Jon Feinberg (drums) and Ethan Basch (bass). The second and third concerts included original compositions performed by The Jazz Tarboosh (Don Katz, saxophone, Jon Schapiro, trumpet, Andy Woo, trombone, Steve Schenfeld, Joe Mulholland and Russ Faegenburg piano, Greg Levine, guitar, Mark Tourian, bass, Eric Levine and Chris Sbrollini, drums). Beginning in 1991, with the fourth Brudner Concert, world-renowned musicians have visited Brown and performed with Brown student musicians in successive Brudner Concerts.

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  • What connects jazz, classical music, K-pop, and even internet memes? Much more than you might expect: musical history is a continuous thread of ideas, constantly transformed within and across genres through shared tropes, remixing, recontextualization, and arrangement. This lecture-recital by Ryan Lee ’26 presents original arrangements of Rachmaninoff, Red Velvet, and other alliteratively named artists, performed live by myself and my wonderful collaborators, as a means of tracing how musical ideas move across history and genre lines. We will have a reception with snacks and charcuterie in the Grant lobby following the recital!

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  • Stephanie Porras, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University, and currently the Hans Brenninkmeyer Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Netherlandish Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will deliver the fourth lecture of the History of Art and Architecture’s 2025-26 “Implements of Impression” themed lecture series. Her talk, Ink and Ivory: Print, Mimesis and the Market in Early Modern Manila, will reconstruct the print cultures of early modern Manila, considering early Filipino printed illustrations alongside a broader corpus of imported European, American and East Asian prints and print technologies, as well as the shared material practices of carving and incision in ivory and wood and metal by Tagalog, Chinese and Japanese residents of the archipelago. Porras suggests that the praise-worthy diverse print products of early modern Manila reveal how artists working in the Spanish Philippines negotiated colonial control, tactically positioning themselves and their products within an emerging global artistic marketplace.

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  • The Literary Arts department is pleased to host Teju Cole as part of the spring 2026 Writers on Writing series.

    Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. His books include the novel Open City, the essay collections Known and Strange Things and Black Paper, and the experimental photo book Blind Spot. He has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other accolades. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cole is currently a professor of the practice of creative writing at Harvard University and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

    Writers on Writing is supported in part by the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund and the C. V. Starr Foundation Lectureships Fund.

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  • eventually there’s nowhere is an immersive soundscape installation for field recordings and windows, created by James May (PhD student, Music and Multimedia Composition). The installation will be available for viewing in the Fishman Studio at the Granoff Center on Thursday, April 9 and Friday, April 10 from 7–9pm, with an installation activation by the artist during the April 10 exhibit. Registration is required.

    About the Piece

    eventually there’s nowhere is an immersive soundscape installation that evokes possible and imagined soundscapes of New Orleans and the Gulf South. Field recordings made by the artist play in overlapping scenes through a dozen windows, the glass panes functioning as speakers. A sense of “over there”-ness permeates the installation, from the recordings to the diffusion to the structures, a tension that constantly pulls the listener toward elsewhere. The piece cycles through different scenes of witness and separation, posing questions of the entangled forces that shape the Gulf South and the life-making that occurs amidst them.

    This project was supported by the Department of Music, the Brown Arts Institute, the Brown Design Workshop, the Department of Modern Culture and Media, and a 2024 Ucross Artist Residency.

    About James May

    James May is a composer, improviser, sound artist, and photographer. His work explores unfurling, fragile spaces, using improvisation environments, field recordings, and live electronics to generate unpredictable systems in which performers can dwell. He has collaborated on performances and recordings with Ekmeles, Longleash, Re:Duo, Versipel New Music, Chamber Choir Ireland and Paul Hillier, Stephanie Lamprea, Will Yager, and Jamie Monck, and has been programmed and recognized by the Sound + Environment Symposium, International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), MISE-EN Festival, Birdfoot Festival, and New Music on the Bayou. He is a PhD student in music and multimedia composition at Brown University, and previously studied at University College Cork, the University of Louisville, and the College of Wooster.

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  • Join us for Music as a Resource. Take a beat to relax and tap into your creativity. Join us for a listening and drawing process facilitated by local musician Morgan Johnston. Drop-in participation welcome, no experience needed.

    This event is part of BAI’s Friday Feels, a weekly open crafting hang in the Englander Studio at the Granoff Center. Each Friday features a different theme with simple, hands-on projects — or just come to relax and make something alongside friends.

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  • Echo Chamber is a 90-minute solo performance that centers around the multiplicity of internal voice. It dissects what is belief and what could either be memory, habit, or lies. Throughout ten episodes as opposed to acts within a museum-exhibit-inspired staging, Echo Chamber curates one clear voice, until internal voices enter: abruptly and without identification. The piece tackles memory, queerness, and reconstruction of identity. Echo Chamber asks what it means to forget, or to remember something that never happened. The audience is placed in a voyeuristic position, observing a private conversation unfold without closure. Atmosphere changes. So does queerness. So does poverty. Nothing is ever fully there, every piece echoes. Echo Chamber traces the autonomy of thought and what thoughts are truly one’s own. What does it mean to let go of something you remember? To leave your memory behind? To choose to forget. Echo Chamber is not a solution. It’s a think tank. And once you step inside, the voices start. And the room always watches you. 

    Artist Bio: 
    Noah Martinez (he/him) is a third-year undergraduate student at Brown University studying Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, focusing on acting and directing. Noah is from Madison, Wisconsin and works professionally as a stage and screen actor, director, playwright, and dancer.

    RSVPs open Tuesday, February 17, at 12PM!

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  • Students in Brown University’s Chamber Music program perform a concert in Riley Hall at The Lindemann Performing Arts Center. A special feature of our Sketching Sound event is the presence of RISD illustration students who respond to the live music with drawing exercises. Admission to this event is free with RSVP. Enjoy the music and the artwork!

    Program

    Bartók: Contrasts, Sz 111, BB 116
    I.Verbunkos (Recruiting Dance)

    Alyssa Yang, violin
    Jabin Lee, clarinet
    Michelle Qiu, piano

    Beethoven: String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, “Serioso”
    I. Allegro con brio

    Naomi Meng and Philip Yao, violins
    Jiayi Qu, viola
    Sam Fasciano, cello

    Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8
    I. Largo
    II. Allegro molto

    Salena Zhu and Tianyue Cantu-Wang, violins
    Zoe Schwartz, viola
    Matthew Sharin, cello

    Farrenc: Trio for Flute, Cello (Bass) and Piano, Op. 45
    I. Allegro deciso

    Angeline Sun, piano
    Kajsa Harrington, flute
    Thomas Gotsch, bass

    Schumann: Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47
    I.Sostenuto assai—Allegro ma non troppo
    III. Andante cantabile

    Kelvin Jiang, piano
    John Qiu, violin
    Talia Tirschwell, viola
    Jaeho Lee, cello

    Dvorak: Quintet in A Major, Op. 81
    I. Allegro, ma non tanto

    Caleb Empig, piano
    Ethan Ye and Minjun Kim, violins
    Daniel Goes, viola
    Josh Ta, cello

    Tchaikovsky: Trio in A minor, Op. 50
    I. Pezzo elegiaco

    Andrew Gao, violin
    Jimmy Cai, cello
    Darian Estrada, piano

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  • Echo Chamber is a 90-minute solo performance that centers around the multiplicity of internal voice. It dissects what is belief and what could either be memory, habit, or lies. Throughout ten episodes as opposed to acts within a museum-exhibit-inspired staging, Echo Chamber curates one clear voice, until internal voices enter: abruptly and without identification. The piece tackles memory, queerness, and reconstruction of identity. Echo Chamber asks what it means to forget, or to remember something that never happened. The audience is placed in a voyeuristic position, observing a private conversation unfold without closure. Atmosphere changes. So does queerness. So does poverty. Nothing is ever fully there, every piece echoes. Echo Chamber traces the autonomy of thought and what thoughts are truly one’s own. What does it mean to let go of something you remember? To leave your memory behind? To choose to forget. Echo Chamber is not a solution. It’s a think tank. And once you step inside, the voices start. And the room always watches you. 

    Artist Bio: 
    Noah Martinez (he/him) is a third-year undergraduate student at Brown University studying Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, focusing on acting and directing. Noah is from Madison, Wisconsin and works professionally as a stage and screen actor, director, playwright, and dancer.

    RSVPs open Tuesday, February 17, at 12PM!

    Get Tickets!
    View Full Event

  • Echo Chamber is a 90-minute solo performance that centers around the multiplicity of internal voice. It dissects what is belief and what could either be memory, habit, or lies. Throughout ten episodes as opposed to acts within a museum-exhibit-inspired staging, Echo Chamber curates one clear voice, until internal voices enter: abruptly and without identification. The piece tackles memory, queerness, and reconstruction of identity. Echo Chamber asks what it means to forget, or to remember something that never happened. The audience is placed in a voyeuristic position, observing a private conversation unfold without closure. Atmosphere changes. So does queerness. So does poverty. Nothing is ever fully there, every piece echoes. Echo Chamber traces the autonomy of thought and what thoughts are truly one’s own. What does it mean to let go of something you remember? To leave your memory behind? To choose to forget. Echo Chamber is not a solution. It’s a think tank. And once you step inside, the voices start. And the room always watches you. 

    Artist Bio: 
    Noah Martinez (he/him) is a third-year undergraduate student at Brown University studying Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, focusing on acting and directing. Noah is from Madison, Wisconsin and works professionally as a stage and screen actor, director, playwright, and dancer.

    RSVPs open Tuesday, February 17, at 12PM!

    Get Tickets!
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  • How to Break (Almost) Anything is Jessica Shand’s M.A. thesis performance. The presentation is an original film with live score and takes place at 7pm on April 11 in Grant Recital Hall. The film is directed by J Wang and produced by J Wang and Jessica Shand. The music is composed by Jessica Shand. Admission is free with RSVP.

    Live Musicians

    Devon Gates, bass
    Charles Overton, harp
    Eliza Salem, drums
    Jessica Shand, flute
    Martine Thomas, viola

    About Jessica Shand

    Jessica Shand is a performer-composer and researcher driven by the belief that music can expand our sensibilities. While her early love for dance eventually led her to pick up her primary instrument, the flute, her original solo and ensemble music now calls on an eclectic set of influences—from classical and jazz to electronic music and the avant-garde—to combine flutes, electronics, vocals, and more. She holds an M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2024) and a B.A. in Mathematics and Music from Harvard University (2022). Learn more about her at her website.

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  • We are pleased to invite you to the Elemental Media Lab’s final event of the semester: Artist Talk and Project Presentation: Elisa Giardina Papa, She Flickered In and Out of History. During the talk, Dr. Giardina Papa will be in conversation with Dr. Genevieve Yue.

    PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

    She Flickered In and Out of History is a video and glass installation that explores the geological, mythological, and political temporalities of the Mediterranean, recounting the tale of an island that emerged from and disappeared into the sea. In 1831, an underwater volcanic eruption gave rise to a basalt formation between Tunisia and Sicily, sparking a violent sovereignty dispute among European powers. Six months later, the island vanished beneath the surface.

    She Flickered In and Out of History leaps between the historical and the speculative to meditate on the illuminatory potential of an island that refused to be annexed. Configured as an elemental video environment, the film immerses the viewer in an ecosystem of unstable, submerged, and resurfaced matter. The island, seen as a singular annexable entity, remains elusive—visually and sonically rendered instead as evolving, unbounded formations of seawater ripples, pyroclastic material, volcanic ash, and floating pumice rafts. Filmed on Pantelleria, Stromboli, and the submerged slopes of the actual island, the cinematic scenarios leave historical actors and accounts outside the frame.

    The work forms part of a trilogy of video installations exploring forgotten Mediterranean histories that challenge given understandings of borders and belonging. It follows U Scantu: A Disorderly Tale (2022), which premiered at the 59th Venice Biennale.

    ARTIST BIO: Elisa Giardina Papa’s research-based art practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been disqualified and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Through critical yet poetic framing, she works across large-scale video installation, experimental films, as well as ceramic and glass sculptures, to draw attention to those parts of our lives which remain radically unruly, untranslatable, and incomputable. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Gropius Bau, ICA London, Vienna Secession, HKW Berlin, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, the 6th Buenos Aires Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, M+ Hong Kong, among others. Giardina Papa is also a founding member of the artist collective Radha May. Together with Indian artist Nupur Mathur and Ugandan artist Bathsheba Okwenje, they develop performances and art installations that reveal hidden histories and peripheral sites, exploring their relation to gender, sexuality, and the legacies of colonialism. Giardina Papa received an MFA from RISD, a PhD in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and is an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. 

    THE GUEST DISCUSSANT: Genevieve Yue is an associate professor of Culture and Media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is co-editor of the Cutaways book series at Fordham University Press, a member of the October advisory board, and an independent film programmer. Her essays and criticism have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Metrograph Journal, MUBI Notebook Magazine, October, Representations, Reverse Shot, The Times Literary Supplement, World Records, and elsewhere. She is the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (2020) and Trains, due out in October 2026. She is currently working on a book about the material history of Hollywood.

    RSVP here

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  • CATS is proud to facilitate, a new puppetry workshop by our very own puppeteer extraordinaire, Brett Sylvia! This contiguous workshop is split over two dates, Wednesdays April 15th and 22nd, each at the same time between 12pm and 2pm.

    In the first half of the workshop, participants will learn briefly about Bunraku puppetry, the art of three-person operated large puppets before communally building 2, 4-legged, puppets out of cardboard, foam, and other materials, all while considering the anatomy of a four legged animals and how they move!

    In the second half, participants will work in teams to learn and practice different performance techniques including:

    1. How to communicate without using words
    2. Synchronized movement with other puppeteers
    3. Modeling/engineering prototype of a three dimensional object using two dimensional material
    4. Performing live and interacting with the environment.

    As part of the performance half, weather permitting, teams of 3 will end the day by bringing the puppets outside onto campus and practice improvisational performance together! 

    • No experience is necessary but must have a willingness to be extremely silly, goofy, and creative
    • Must be comfortable crouching and using entire body to move the puppet
    • RSVP is required and is intended for those who can knowingly attend both workshops, not just one or the other. Very limited space is available

     

    About the facilitator:

    Man holding a soft puppet that covers his arm performing in front of a green screen. There is a camera he is performing to.

    Brett Sylvia, MFA, worked for The Walt Disney World Company as a puppeteer/character performer. He played in such shows as “The Voyage of the Little Mermaid” and “Muppet Vision 3D”. During this time he was also working with Heather Henson designing puppets for her world tour. While attending college, Brett started street performing in Harvard Square where he met his life partner. They, along with their two children, created Sylvia Family Studios LLC. Brett is also a member of the Brown Art Institute’s Artscrew program. 

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  • The Department of Visual Art at Brown University presents a lecture by Saya Woolfalk ’01.

    Saya Woolfalk (Japan, 1979) is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women’s lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

    Her many public commissions include The Coretta Scott King Peace and Meditation Garden, which was dedicated at the King Center in Atlanta in April 2023. Other commissioned works include murals for Penn Station, the Metropolitan Transit Authority; a public school in Queens for the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs School Construction Authority; and a basketball court in Marcus Garvey Park. A comprehensive, traveling survey of works by the artist is currently on view at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York through September of 2025. Works by Saya Woolfalk are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Chrysler Museum of Art; the Mead Museum of Art; the Everson Museum of Art; the Weatherspoon Art Museum; the Hunter Museum of American Art; and many other institutions.

    Woolfalk earned her B.A. in visual art and economics from Brown University in 2001 and her MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Her many honors and awards include a Fulbright grant to study in Brazil (2005); a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2007); and the 2023 Anonymous Was a Woman award.

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  • Talia Light Rake is a Los Angeles–born, Brooklyn-based writer, director, and producer. A 2023 Film Independent Fellow and NYU Development Lab Fellow, her short film The Captives premiered at Mill Valley Film Festival and screened at festivals nationwide, including the American Cinematheque’s PROOF Film Festival. She has produced content for Sundance, Tribeca, and New York Fashion Week. In 2022, she founded Heavy Shovel Productions, a production company and filmmaker community reaching more than 100k creatives online, where she shares practical insights, resources, and behind-the-scenes perspectives on independent filmmaking. She also created The Big Dig, a curated filmmaker matchmaking event designed to bring artists together through intentional, data-informed pairings that foster collaboration and hiring opportunities. She is currently developing the indie TV series Too Romantic, executive produced by Bachelor couple Ashley Iaconetti and Jared Haibon
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  • The Literary Arts department is pleased to host C. Pam Zhang as part of the spring 2026 Writers on Writing series.

    C. Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey. She is the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, and the California Book Award. Zhang is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, and the American Library in Paris. Her writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Her work has been translated into twelve languages.

    Writers on Writing is supported in part by the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund and the C. V. Starr Foundation Lectureships Fund.

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  • Create your own Friday Feels! Suggest ideas and vote on our Instagram for your ideal way to create, chill, and connect.

    This workshop is part of BAI’s Friday Feels, a weekly open crafting hang in the Englander Studio at the Granoff Center. Each Friday features a different theme with simple, hands-on projects — or just come to relax and make something alongside friends.

    Learn More!
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  • The Pembroke Center’s LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative Presents:
    Thinking at Risk

     

    Monday, April 20, 2026 | 3:00–5:00 p.m.
    Pembroke Hall 305
    RSVP required

     

    How are scholars, cultural producers, educators, and students at risk for the very act of thinking, and how, in turn, must we take risks in our thinking at historical moments such as this? Join us at this pedagogy workshop for those who teach at Brown and RISD to discuss how certain modes and topics of thought are now in peril and how best to deal with this in our classrooms.

    With opening reflections from:

    • Xan Chacko (Science, Technology, and Society)
    • Daniel Kim (English and American Studies)
    • Luvuyo Nyawose (Modern Culture and Media)
    • Sarah Thomas (Hispanic Studies)

    Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

    Image: Michael Schlitz, Thinking to Edge, 2005 (Bett Gallery, Lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia).

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  • Come to the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology’s Open Collection Hours!  

    Explore the Institute’s (hidden!) Collection of ancient ceramic vessels, lamps, figurines, lithics, sherds, and more. And try to figure out which “ancient” artifacts are authentic, and which are just trying to trick you! Expert docents will be on hand to answer questions.

    Free and open to the public! All ages are welcome!

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  • The Literary Arts department is pleased to host Daniel Saldaña Paris as part of the spring 2026 Writers on Writing series.

    Daniel Saldaña París is the author of four novels—Among Strange Victims, Ramifications, The Dance and the Fire, and My Father’s Names—as well as a collection of personal essays, Planes Flying Over a Monster. His work has been translated into multiple languages and earned him a place in Bogotá39, which recognizes the best Latin American writers under 40. He has received numerous fellowships and residencies, including those from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires, Art Omi, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. He was also awarded the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award in the UK and was a finalist for the Herralde Prize in 2021. In 2022, he was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and he is currently a Fellow at the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts and a grantee of the Mexican Endowment for the Arts.

    Writers on Writing is supported in part by the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund and the C. V. Starr Foundation Lectureships Fund.

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  • The J. Carter Brown Memorial Lecture Series, curated by History of Art and Architecture Professor Dietrich Neumann, highlights contemporary architects from across the country. In this, the final lecture of the 3-lecture series, Eric Howeler of Howeler & Yoon will share their recent work projects.

    Registration is required.

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  • April 24, 6:00-7:30PM
    Location: MCM, 155 George Street, Room 106
    Book Launch and Reading

    The Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies presents a reading and book launch of Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, the latest publication by Professor Joan Copjec.

    Professor Joan Copjec’s book illuminates the connections of Iranian cinema and Lacanian psychoanalysis to an unlikely precursor: the Gnostic tradition of Islamic philosophy.

    The book launch and reading will be followed by a symposium including screenings on Saturday, April 25, 2026.

    The event is supported by Magic Lantern Cinema, the Pembroke Center, the Center for Middle East Studies, the Department of English and Film Thinking and co-convened by Lachlan Kermode, Harper Shalloe, and Urvi Vora.

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  • The Literary Arts department is pleased to host Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky as part of the spring 2026 Writers on Writing series.

    Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her most recent book is Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023), which Publishers Weekly named one of the Top Ten Books of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her earlier collection is boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey.

    Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the U.S, in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

    Writers on Writing is supported in part by the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund and the C. V. Starr Foundation Lectureships Fund.

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  • The Providence Medical Orchestra celebrates our intersections between medicine, science, and music. Russian composer & chemist Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances exemplify musical passion, while Nimrod from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations reminds us of community resilience. The world premiere of Ruth Hertzman-Miller’s The Things Between Us brings poetry by patients with Alzheimer’s to musical life, and features soprano Kayla Kovacs and baritone Alec House-Baillargeon. Finally, neurologist Natalie Erlich-Malona performs Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto, resonating with her research on the “Mozart effect” in patients with epilepsy.

    Program:
    Providence Medical Orchestra Spring Concert
    Julian Gau ’19, conductor
    Saturday, May 2nd at 7:30 PM (doors open 7:00pm)
    Central Congregational Church 
    296 Angell St, Providence, RI (please enter on Diman Place)

    Alexander Borodin - Polovtsian Dances
    Edward Elgar - Nimrod from Enigma Variations 
    Ruth Hertzman-Miller - The Things Between Us - Kayla Kovacs, soprano; Alec House-Baillargeon, baritone
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor - Natalie Erlich-Malona, pianist

    Tickets: 
    Regular admission - $10
    Students free with student ID
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  • During their final year in the program, each Brown|RISD Dual Degree student delivers a Capstone Presentation that draws upon their experience at both institutions. Join us in the RISD Museum’s Metcalf Auditorium (and via livestream) on 5/26 and 5/27 as we celebrate the students of the BRDD classes of 2026 and 2026.5! Click the BRDD Capstone Presentation Website link for details.

    BRDD Capstone Presentation Website
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