Last week, CAMRA hosted their annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival with the theme of portals, an experiment with crossing boundaries, shifting perceptions, and navigating between worlds. For the organizers, portals were “intersections where multiple realities, experiences, and dimensions converge,” and the projects that were highlighted over the two days of the festival blended material and metaphysical approaches to world/art-making across historical, spiritual, and technological terrains. The sun has finally broken through the chill of the never-ending winter – let us experience this as the portal to blooming, pollination, and eventually, summer!

I’m just back from LA where I had the pleasure of hanging out with colleagues at USC’s Society of Fellows, and where I also had the opportunity to see the “Monuments” exhibit, jointly presented by the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, co-curated by Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson, and Kara Walker, with Hannah Burstein and Paula Kroll.  The exhibit, which has been extensively covered across media, mixes decommissioned confederate monuments with the work of contemporary artists who are reconfiguring what memorialization, witnessing, and repair could look like.

Six more weeks of winter, and people have still not been able to dig out from last week’s snowstorm.  I could embrace winter as long as it does not bring six more weeks of children being used as pawns, six more weeks of ICE killings, six more weeks of inflammatory and inaccurate proclamations, six more weeks of normalizing sexual violence, and six more weeks of intimidating people who gather to ask for governmental accountability.

The year 2026 marks the 250^th anniversary of a sovereign United States, freed from the political economy of British colonialism, yet it nevertheless began with a U.S.-orchestrated coup against a sovereign nation in South America.  We have long known that democracy is riddled with subtle complexities, as it were, yet this autocratic action is neither subtle nor complex, nor is it without historical precedent in both the near and distant past.  Let us resolve in this new year to move toward compassion, selflessness, reflection, and actions grounded in study and dialogue.  Let us create and strengthen the communities and practices we know create the conditions for thriving.  And let us imagine worlds in which violence is not lurking around every corner, and in imagining them, bring them into being.  A million welcomes to Daniel Tucker and Gabrielle Goliath, who will help us to dream big this semester!

Deborah A. Thomas

Director, CEE

On this rainy and cold day,I want to register my gratefulness.  I am thankful for the ability to share food with family and friends, and to be able to take a moment out of the hectic routines of life to remember, and to see in action (across generations!) how we will get through and get over.  I am thankful for the opportunity to bear witness to our fall fellow, Courtney Morris, as she braided her own hair all day Saturday in the Pepper Gallery of the Penn Museum while mixed tapes played and people gathered to chat, draw, and expand her altar.