Activist | Artist in Residence (AAIR)
Above Image: Installation view of the 2023-34 Activist Artist-in-Residence exhibition, Rebecca Ustrell: Permanence, at Hinshaw Gallery, February 29 – March 28, 2024. This exhibition is organized by Pitzer College Art Galleries and the Community Engagement Center. Photo: Christopher Wormald.
The Community Engagement Center and Pitzer Art Galleries invites one local activist-artist per academic year for the purpose of promoting interdisciplinary platforms of exchange—through facilitating dialogue, sharing knowledge and skills, and generating impactful experiences—throughout the Pitzer at large. Expected AAIR activities will include: creative and pedagogic engagement between an artist | activist and the Pitzer Community, collaboration with partners on campus (students, staff, and faculty), and community partners in the field, and acting as a resource for partnered academic courses at the college.
Artist | Activist in Residence
Marvin James | AAIR 2024-2025
Marvin James is an artist, educator, and strategist born and raised in Pomona, CA by way of American African migrations, from Coahoma County, Mississippi to West Side Chicago as well as Pine Bluff, Arkansas to South Central Los Angeles. He serves as the founding archive caretaker for ITS-IN-SCOPE, a collective learning and contemporary archiving practice empowering everyday people to remember intuition by contextualizing our shared histories and imagining new futures. His personal work as an artist-archivist weaves different materials together through an artistic approach akin to the scientific method, from design & printmaking, to film photography, poetics, installation, video, and sound, each medium provides another language for presenting research findings. As an educator and strategist, his practices flows from conceptual to tangible by making space for study around his research and making good on his worldbuilding ambitions by developing archive-informed systems for education, affordable housing, food production and land stewardship.
Marvin James
Rebecca Ustrell | AAIR 2023-2024
Rebecca Ustrell (she/her) is a Latinx Jewish artist, educator, journalist and documentarian in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. Ustrell founded Curious Publishing, a non-profit artbook publishing company that supports queer, BIPOC, and femme creatives through the
publication of limited edition art books, zines, and print collections, that uplifts the voices of marginalized artists residing throughout Southern California. In addition to her role at Curious Publishing, she teaches self-publishing and zine-making for teens and adults as well as holds public speaking engagements which drive community involvement in literary arts. Her work focuses on archiving Queer, BIPOC, and neurodivergent artist perspectives in relation to their communities.
Activist | Artist in Residence Support
- CEC Program Coordinator
- Academic Program Coordinator