February 13, 2018
St. John’s Staten Island campus is proud to serve as an exhibition site of Citizen: An American Lyric, a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read grant-funded exhibition celebrating Claudia Rankine’s prize-winning book of poetry, Citizen. Yulia Tikhonova, grant awardee and Sun Yat Sen Gallery Director, has installed a provocative exhibition in Loretto Library that explores the book’s themes of inclusion, exclusion, and civil rights.
The Staten Island campus celebrated the opening of the exhibition at our Black History Month luncheon on Thursday, February 8th. The luncheon included a reading of Citizen by students and faculty in the Loretto Library’s Learning Commons, site of the exhibition.
NEA grants promote full community engagement with the arts. To this end, Citizen programs on Staten Island also included a poetry reading and art exhibition in the North Shore art gallery, CANVAS Institute of Arts, Culture, and Civic Engagement, on Saturday, February 10th. CANVAS is located on 150 Victory Boulevard, ½ mile from our campus.
The Loretto Library exhibition will be with us through March. Visit the Library to adopt the text, see the full exhibition in Sun Yat Sen, and learn more about its programs, including those at CANVAS. The NEA Citizen exhibition is both occasion and a catalyst for our university’s Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. A catalog featuring texts by artists, scholars, and poets will accompany the project.
For more information about Citizen and its exhibition in Loretto Library, contact Yulia Tikhonova, [email protected], and Mark Meng, [email protected].”
(Source: https://www.yehgallery.com/claudiarankineindex.html)