Essence community visits Chicago
This fall, students traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago with the Department of African American Studies and Essence Theme Community. There, they attended a private lecture by Dr. Melanie Herzog, an expert on artist Elizabeth Catlett. Herzog discussed Catlett’s background, her engagement with Black feminist and international political movements, and her contributions to modern sculpture and printmaking.
Students then viewed the exhibition “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” which surveys decades of Catlett’s work. Herzog joined students in the gallery space, making herself available to questions that arose naturally when students viewed the artworks. The exhibition includes sculptures, prints, and other pieces that highlight her focus on Black women’s labor, community life, and social justice.
On process and reticence
In her December 2024 Footsteps column, Dr. Ethelene Whitmire ruminates on 20th-century writer Nella Larsen, her semi-autobiographical character Helga Crane from the 1928 novel Quicksand, and time spent navigating Copenhagen. The New York Times’ Footsteps series traces landscapes that shaped major authors, and Whitmire had long imagined contributing to it after encountering Ellery Washington’s 2014 piece on James Baldwin in Paris. Her own engagement with Larsen dates back to her first research trip to Copenhagen in 2010.
Alumni production
“Porcelain Dolls and Chocolate Dreams,” a new student-written and student-directed play by UW–Madison African American Studies alum DeOnna Garrison, brings a rare spotlight to Black experiences on predominantly white campuses, and the cast says the collaboration behind it is just as powerful as the performance. “I wasn’t happy with the representation of women in media,” Garrison said, explaining how she subverted familiar tropes to create complex roles. “I want to give opportunities to people in institutions like this beyond the spring semester.”
Disrupting normalcies in higher education
Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington on the cruciality of a Black feminist education
As a scholar of race, gender, and higher education, Dr. Washington is particularly invested in transforming how we credit the intellectual contributions of women of color, noting, “Women, especially Black women and women of color, live in the shadows of their own theories and contributions. Many people will say ‘I’m a Marxist’ or ‘I’m a Foucauldian’. Scholars who are men get the accolades and schools of thought named after them, but women don’t. By saying I am a bell hooks scholar, or a bell hooksian scholar, I am reclaiming the name and the knowledge and contributions made by women like Audre Lorde and bell hooks. These women have full bodies of work.”
Badgers in NYC
In partnership with The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, the department traveled with fifteen undergraduates to experience African American and Jewish culture in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side through food, museums, and walking tours this April
A visual storyteller
Bob Trondson on the impact of human stories
Trondson’s path to filmmaking was shaped in part by his time in the African American Studies department at UW–Madison. He enrolled in an elective literature course taught by Professor Craig Werner; by the end of his second year at UW–Madison, Trondson became a major. He remembers encountering books like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time. “It was the most exciting literature I think I’ve read in my life,” he shares. “African American literature is based in realism, blending history with personal narrative, and that felt momentous to me at the time. I found African American literature to be endlessly fascinating in contrast to the literature I grew up with.”
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