Lee’s novel Somebody’s Daughter (2005) was an O. Henry Award nominee and is celebrated as an important contribution to Korean American literature. She more recently published her second novel, The Evening Hero (2022), which The New York Times dubbed a “soulful, melodic, rhapsodic novel.” Beyond her writing for adults, Lee has written many beloved young adult (YA) novels under the name Marie G. Lee. Among these, her novel Finding My Voice (1992) is widely considered to be the first contemporary YA novel with an Asian American protagonist written by an Asian American.

Lee’s Korean identity has been thoroughly explored throughout her writing career. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea for creative writing. She is also one of only fifty writers ever granted a visa to North Korea as a journalist since the Korean War. Lee’s journalism — mostly in the form of stories and essays — has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, and The Guardian, among others. Her work frequently engages with immigration, the effects of partition on Koreans and the Korean diaspora, and the hardship her mother endured to escape her war-torn homeland for a better life in the United States.

Lee earned her BA from Brown University, where she was a writer-in-residence before beginning her current teaching career at Columbia University. She has been a Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellow, in addition to receiving the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Furthermore, she has served as a judge for the National Book Award and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She is also a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

This convocation will also be live streamed — please register in advance to receive information on how to attend via Zoom. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

After each convocation address, Carleton hosts a luncheon with the speaker. Convocation luncheon is held in the Alumni Guest House Meeting Room (unless otherwise noted) from noon to 1 p.m. and is generally limited to 30 people. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP on the convocations website.

Ladau is the author of Demystifying Disability (2021), which covers a broad variety of pertinent topics including disability history and identity, ensuring accessibility, recognizing ableism, and speaking respectfully. Her address will coincide with her book’s content, demonstrating her knack for candid instruction combined with her belief that storytelling is crucial to making the disability experience accessible to the world as well as creating a world that is accessible to the disability community.

Beginning her career at the age of 10, Ladau first became a spokesperson for disability rights through her role starring in multiple episodes of Sesame Street, providing education on living with a physical disability. Since then, she has been awarded the prestigious Henry Viscardi Achievement Award, which recognizes international leaders with disabilities (2022); the Frieda Zames Advocacy Award from the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (2022); Disability Advocate of the Year from the Jewish Federations of North America and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (2022); and the Paul G. Hearne Emerging Leader Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities (2018). In 2023, she was also selected to receive the Progressive Women’s Voices IMPACT Award from the Women’s Media Center.

Beyond her book, Ladau is also the editor of Able News, a monthly publication of The Viscardi Center that amplifies the perspective of New York’s diverse, vibrant disability community and serves as a statewide resource. She also serves as the digital content manager for the Disability & Philanthropy Forum, an organization dedicated to the expansion of philanthropic commitment to disability inclusion. Her writing has been published in outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Vice, and HuffPost, while she has served as a source for media outlets including MSNBC, PBS NewsHour, NPR, and The Washington Post. Her speaking career has addressed audiences from the United Nations to the U.S. Department of Education to Microsoft and Comcast/NBCUniversal. Her speaking reaches further audiences through The Accessible Stall podcast, which she co-hosts. Central to all of Ladau’s work is harnessing the power of storytelling as a tool to engage people in learning about disability.

Ladau previously served as the editor of The Century Foundation’s Economic Justice project and was the founding editor-in-chief of the Rooted in Rights blog.

A Long Island local, Ladau earned her BA in English from Adelphi University in 2013, where she now is a member of the Board of Trustees. She was named one of Adelphi’s 10 Under 10 Young Alumni in 2017.

In addition to the main viewing in the chapel, this convocation will be presented virtually — please register in advance to receive information on how to attend via Zoom. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

Wright Faladé is the author of the novel Black Cloud Rising (2022) and most recently The New Internationals (2025), as well as the co-author of the young adult novel Away Running (2016) and the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (2000), which was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. Wright Faladé was also a recipient of the Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, a prestigious award recognizing Black writers for their achievements. 

He is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and the 2021–22 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. He has also written for The New Yorker, Village Voice, Southern Review, Newsday, and more.

Wright Faladé graduated from Carleton in 1986, completed nine months in Brazil as a Fulbright scholar, and later earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

This convocation will also be live streamed — please register in advance to receive information on how to attend via Zoom. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

After each convocation address, Carleton hosts a luncheon with the speaker. Convocation luncheon is held in the Alumni Guest House Meeting Room (unless otherwise noted) from noon to 1 p.m. and is generally limited to 30 people. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP on the convocations website.

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Jim Anthony ’71, P ’03, P ’06 has received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from Michigan State University. The award recognizes long-term, exemplary efforts made during a nominee’s time at Michigan State toward advancing inclusive excellence in enduring ways that have enhanced the institution’s policies, work, climate or organization.

Jim Anthony, Ph.D., is a renowned scholar and advocate dedicated to advancing public health research and fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in academia and public health work. Currently a faculty member at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, College of Human Medicine, Anthony has achieved distinction through a lifetime of groundbreaking contributions to epidemiology and a deep commitment to mentorship since his first faculty appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1972 and through 26 years on the public health faculty of the Johns Hopkins University before coming to MSU in October 2003.

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Printmaker Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. will deliver the Carleton convocation on Friday, February 7, from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. His address is titled, “A Tirade Against Boomers.” Visit the convo website for an introductory poem from Kennedy before his address.

As a self-described “humble negro printer,”  Kennedy harnesses his printmaking abilities to produce social and political commentaries, often through posters. Kennedy’s passion for books and letters began at the age of four, yet it wasn’t until the age of 40, when Kennedy visited the living history museum of Colonial Williamsburg, that he was captivated by an eighteenth-century bookbinding and printmaking demonstration. This was the spark that inspired Kennedy to learn printmaking at a community-based letterpress shop in Chicago. Within a year, Kennedy made the leap and quit his job of nearly two decades as an AT&T systems analyst to further his education, and continued with the master book designer Walter Hamady at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating with an MFA in 1997. Today, Kennedy owns a letterpress print shop in Detroit, Michigan. 

Kennedy’s work is motivated by his understanding of Black identity formed through his upbringing during the Civil Rights Era, witnessing the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1970s, and living in the current Post-Civil Rights Era. Using a blend of social commentary, folk art, and graphic design, Kennedy embraces his unique style to address violence, oppression, and dehumanizing stereotypes that the Black community faces, among many other issues. He is recognized as a Glasgow Fellow in Crafts (2015) and an Individual Laureate of the American Printing History Association (2021), and he received the Outstanding Printmaker Award from the Mid Atlantic Print Council (2022), among other honors. 

This convocation will also be live streamed — please register in advance to receive information on how to attend via Zoom. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

After each convocation address, Carleton hosts a luncheon with the speaker. Convocation luncheon is held in the Alumni Guest House Meeting Room (unless otherwise noted) from noon to 1 p.m. and is generally limited to 30 people. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP on the convocations website.

As a student at Carleton College… Ms. Cade participated in an exchange program with Spelman College, the historically Black institution for women in Atlanta. There, she became active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, the Black campus organization that fought for racial justice.

After graduating from Carleton with a bachelor’s degree in sociology a year later, she went to work for SNCC full time, participating in sit-ins and protests in the South and attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. She continued her activism in the latter half of the 1960s while earning a doctorate in sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Read the full obituary with a gifted link from Carleton.

Read the full announcement on KYMN.

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Wilbur is the creator of Project 562, her crowdfunded initiative to visit, engage, and photograph people from over 500 sovereign Tribal Nations in North America. The project is her fourth major creative venture elevating Native American identity and culture. In 2023, Wilbur’s book adaptation of the initiative, Project 562: Changing The Way We See Native America, was published with praise from There There author Tommy Orange, was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was a New York Times Bestseller.

Wilbur also currently hosts the podcast All My Relations, which invites guests to delve into a different topic facing Native peoples today and explore the connections between land, creatural relatives, and one another. The podcast has been downloaded three million times.

Wilbur has given over 300 keynotes at such places as TED, Harvard, Yale, and Google. In November 2023, Wilbur released her curriculum, A Visual Learning Guide To: Transform. Indigenize. Decolonize., in partnership with the National Education Association; it was adopted by more than 200 classrooms in its first five months of existence.

Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

After each convocation address, Carleton hosts a luncheon with the speaker. Convocation luncheon is held in the Alumni Guest House Meeting Room (unless otherwise noted) from noon to 1 p.m. and is generally limited to 35 people. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP on the convocations website.

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Listen to or read the full NPR story.

Patricia Torres Ray — a former member of the Minnesota Senate, where she represented District 63 — will deliver the convocation address on Friday, October 4 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. Her address is titled, “Immigration as Statement of Conscience.”

After working in public service for 20 years, Torres Ray ran for office in 2006 and became the first Latina elected to the Minnesota Senate. She held multiple leadership roles there, including majority whip, chair of the Parks and Trails Legacy Committee, chair of the New Immigration Policy Commission, chair of the Education Policy Committee, and chair of the State and Local Government Committee.

In 2010, Torres Ray was the first woman of color to run as lieutenant governor with Senator John Marty for governor. She is a recognized local and national leader and has received multiple awards recognizing her contributions to eliminating disparities and opening opportunities for women, low-income people, and communities who live on the margins.

Torres Ray decided not to run for re-election in 2022 after serving in the senate for 16 years. She opened her own firm, PTR Associates, to assist small organizations in managing political and public policy strategies centered around the needs and assets of Indigenous communities, people of color, and immigrant communities.

Torres Ray is a native of Colombia, a public affairs graduate from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, and a parent of two boys.

This convocation will also be live streamed — please register in advance to receive information on how to attend via Zoom. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

After each convocation address, Carleton hosts a luncheon with the speaker. Convocation luncheon is held in the Alumni Guest House Meeting Room (unless otherwise noted) from noon to 1 p.m. and is generally limited to 35 people. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP on the convocations website.

Erica Helgerud ’20 is the news and social media manager for Carleton College.

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Check out the full June 2024 list.

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Artist Talk

The artist talk took place on January 11 at 5 p.m. in the Weitz Cinema, and was followed by a gallery opening at 6 p.m. in the Perlman Teaching Museum. For this event, Sara Cluggish, director and curator for the Perlman, moderated a public conversation with the artists behind the show. The talk began with self-descriptions, explained as a valuable tool for accessibility and archival documentation. In their introduction, both artists directed the audience to “be in this space as comfortably as possible” and encouraging people to “sit on the floor if you want to.” During the talk, a few audience members took these words to heart as they found seating on the stairs or elsewhere. Shannon embodied the very practices they preached by knitting during the conversation “to stay grounded.” 

Cluggish opened the discussion with the question, “How did you start making work around themes of chronic illness and disabilities?” Shannon pointed to the many influences that had guided her on this artistic journey, specifically mentioning Ross Elfline, professor of art history at Carleton, as an impactful force in their career. Through dialogue with mentors and teachers, Shannon built on the themes of chronic illness and disabilities that “were always in my work, but in the past they were quite subtle.” Over time, these themes grew to become “louder” and “more direct” in Shannon’s work, to the point that they now “prioritize disabled audiences.”

For Benus, these themes became prominent through a serious medical event they experienced at 18 years old. They began to recognize their work as making space for “malfunctioning bodies,” connecting to the legacy left by many artists who made art about AIDS and HIV. “Artists build our own community and make that space,” said Benus. 

Cluggish then shifted the conversation to address the theme of relationality within the show, explaining that the show is a “conversation between Finnigan [Shannon] and Ezra [Benus] and others in their lives who hold them up and teach them.” The artists found that their “aligned inspiration” and “overlapping interest” combined to generate an effective creative process. 

“We share an approach to process, spirit of experimentation, understanding, and flexibility,” said Benus. “[This] allows projects to unfold as they need to.”

This creative relationship is displayed in the Kaemmer Family Gallery, a smaller room within the Perlman’s exhibit space, where the installation Hot Hang (Shannon and Benus, 2024) is exhibited. The installation has multiple benches with functional heating pads, a dining table with four chairs and four hot pads on the table arranged in front of each chair like a place setting, and a video providing text for a dialogue between Shannon and Benus that plays aloud within the space. The intensity of light changes over time, with orange light modulating in intensity to more yellow, then red. This room showcases the artists’ shared understanding and experience of using heating pads and treats heating pads as an “object,” “offering,” and “medium.”

Finally, Cluggish’s conversation with the artists turned to accessibility. Shannon defined accessibility as “what is needed for us to be together. It touches every part of our lives and culture.” Benus added that accessibility is a “living practice” which “changes” due to its “contextual nature.” 

Cluggish shared how “accessibility is a delicate balance in the museum world… Accessibility isn’t just one thing,” because different people need different, and sometimes conflicting, accommodations. For example, Cluggish offered, “lighting too bright will make it difficult for people with migraines or neurodivergent individuals. But make the lighting too dim, and older people, those who use glasses, and low-vision individuals will struggle.” In the museum industry, this is known as “accessibility clashing.”

“Pure access is not possible,” Cluggish concluded. “You can’t be all things to all people, but we can commit to this conversation and be open to feedback.”

For this exhibit, the artwork was hung lower than typical museum standards and the labels were printed at 18-point font. It was important to Cluggish that Shannon and Benus were not “turned into accessibility consultants,” but the artists did end up sharing much of their vast knowledge on accessibility for museums throughout the process. Cluggish hopes there is further conversation about accessibility at the Perlman “beyond this experiment.” Post-show commitments include alt text, captioning videos, and making accessibility notes tailored to each exhibit. “We also now know how to do [a touch tour], and can put one together in the future when wanted or needed,” Cluggish said.

Touch Tour

Esme Krohn ’24 and Lorelei Bogue ’25, event associates for the Perlman, have led a few touch tours of the exhibition now. Krohn, while having seen touch exhibits before, had never led one herself. Through this experience she learned how touch tours could benefit sighted people as well as people who are blind or low-vision. Touch tours are great for all guests to experience an exhibit in a new way. Bogue was “surprised by the accessible language” and “respectful terms,” gaining awareness of the importance in the way things are described. 

“For example,” Bogue said, “using low vision instead of visually impaired. The term impaired has negative connotations to something wrong, not working, or broken, which is not how you want to describe a human being.” 

This was a new experience not just for the student leaders, but for the museum itself, as this was the first time touch tours were being offered as a part of a Perlman exhibit. To prepare for their roles, Krohn and Bogue drew on a number of resources, including readings and looking at techniques implemented by other museums. 

Beginning with an access check where Cluggish, also present, encouraged guests to “interject if you would like me to talk slower or louder” and “do whatever is helpful for you to feel comfortable,” the team shared self-identifications at the start of the touch tour. These self-identifications incorporated both objective fact and personal anecdotes. Cluggish described herself as a white woman in her late 30s, going on to describe her outfit as well as a gold necklace “from her grandmother” that she “wears every day.” Krohn and Bogue followed with their own self-identifications, providing a visual description with brief historical backgrounds of some of the objects they were wearing. This was an interesting way to humanize the tour guides while also providing context for low-vision guests. 

Krohn introduced the tour group to the first art piece: Touch Me Tenderly (Benus, 2021). This piece is a two-by-four-foot rug made of acrylic, wool, and cotton on poly-cotton cloth. Krohn described the rug before prompting the audience to share what they noticed, encouraging everyone to gather around and touch the rug. As guests discussed their observations, their hands were constantly running through the scruffy material, grabbing on to the little patches sticking up or smoothing down plush areas. 

“This artwork is not precious about itself,” shared Cluggish as the conversation came to an end. “It’s not about keeping it pristine. The work will degrade over time, and that’s actually part of the piece.” This echoes sentiments expressed by Benus during the artist talk, when they shared how they value “art spaces which prioritize the experience as the precious thing and not the art as the precious thing.”

The group then moved on to Portable Mural #2 (Shannon, 2020). Made of chipboard and ink, guests could feel how the individual letters subtly stuck out from the wall on which they were affixed, “jumping out,” as Bogue, leading this portion of the tour, described. Guests also noted how the hand of the artist was evident in the jaggedly cut edges of each letter. By being able to touch the mural, they were able to feel the snips of the scissors as it went around, gaining a more personal perspective. 

“Portable Mural #2 is the first piece you see when you walk in and can be considered as the thesis statement of the show,” Cluggish said. “It is speaking very directly to a [college] audience. I hope it invites people in and serves as a call to action.”

Cluggish also provided insight into the thought process behind the placement of this piece.

“All the letters are independent of each other, they could’ve been placed all around the gallery,” said Cluggish. “But it’s placed this way so you can see it when you’re not in the gallery. It invites people in.” 

The next artwork on the tour was Do you want us here or not (Shannon, 2018), a bench with two sentences written on it: “This exhibit has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree.” Using the international colors of disability, blue and white, this bench transforms sitting — often seen as a passive action — into an assertive message. Such a piece of art “demands to be in an exhibition. It doesn’t make sense in any other context,” explained the tour guide. 

Do you want us here or not was positioned to be in conversation with a piece of work by Benus, for the world eternal לעולם ועד (Benus, 2022). “A lot of times the sight line is prioritized over functionality for the sitter,” shared Cluggish, so those who choose to sit are left staring at nothing. Conversely, this bench was placed so the visual enjoyment of the sitter was prioritized and they could easily view for the world eternal. 

The tour ended with Hot Hang, the only piece specially curated for the Perlman and made by both Shannon and Benus. “Making something new with two artists is so much fun, and that work was made with our audiences in mind,” said Cluggish. As the tour group entered the room, Cluggish invited them to “sit or lie down, and turn on the heating pads. Feel free to get cozy.” 

The group was struck by how this installation “emphasizes community,” with the benches facing each other and the exhibit encouraging visitors to participate in a typically private activity — using a heating pad — with others. 

“I appreciate how the tour allowed me to play with what art makes us do,” said tour participant Ben More ’24. “Not just sit and stare, but touch. Art can involve any number of senses, not just sight.”

Academic Involvement

Involvement with the Perlman exhibit was also facilitated through academics at Carleton, as students in ARTS 274: Printmaking – Silkscreen and Relief interacted with Hot Hang through a hands-on approach during Fall Term 2023. The idea for collaboration began with Cluggish, who approached Jade Hoyer ’07, assistant professor of art, with the possibility of her students engaging in silk screening for Shannon and Benus. 

Students contributed to the installation by working as printers, silk screening a design created by Shannon and Benus onto fabric used for the heating pads in the exhibit. They thereby built on the rich history of printmaking and the “tradition of artists working in collaboration with printmakers to assist in executing their vision,” explained Hoyer. This assignment allowed students to gain a hands-on understanding of “what it would mean to be a potential printing assistant, what it would mean to work with a client, and what it is like printing beyond works on paper.”

“We don’t make art in a vacuum,” Hoyer said. “We don’t do anything in a vacuum.” Applying that knowledge to her practice as a professor, Hoyer looks for “anything I can do as an instructor to solidify and demonstrate that art takes place across our campus — it isn’t limited to Boliou or the Weitz.”

Hoyer expanded the boundaries of her classroom through a Zoom conversation between her students and Shannon and Benus. “[They were] generous in sharing themselves,” said Hoyer. Through this Zoom call, students were able to learn not only about the artists’ vision for the project they were to contribute to, but also about their careers and artistic journeys as professional artists. This achieved another of Hoyer’s goals. 

“As the only printmaking professor [at Carleton], I feel very cognizant of the responsibilities of what it means to be conveying everything in my art field through the lens of ‘Jade [Hoyer]’ and what the limitations of that viewpoint may be,” said Hoyer. “Allowing students to have collaboration with other artists, directly or indirectly, can further broaden students’ viewpoints from the small slice of art that I’m sharing.”

The kindness of Shannon and Benus was emphasized by all who interacted with them.

“I felt they would be good at working with students,” said Cluggish. “That’s always an important consideration for me when choosing artists to exhibit their work at the Perlman.”

“These artists are making awesome work in their own rights,” added Hoyer, “but they are also navigating their artistic processes in a way that is conversant with the College’s broader values. [Shannon and Benus] were very welcoming and affirming. I have pursued lots of collaborations, and that generosity of spirit is not always present. It was a pleasure to work with those artists in that way. It is a testament to their skill and the broader facilitators at the Perlman to arrange for such a pleasant interaction.”

The Freedom Then, Freedom Now exhibition is made up of work created by students in the course African American History II: 1865 Until Today. Seven weeks of study preceded the creation of the artwork in the exhibition. Through the course, students studied mass protests, particularly exploring the intersection of social movements and protest art. Starting with Reconstruction and ending with protests in the 2000s, students covered a lot of ground, so part of the challenge in creating the artwork for the exhibition was to synthesize all the course material into a single visual.

Students drew on many sources of inspiration to inform their work. Considering the mass activism stage of the mid- to late-1960s, students analyzed posters from Emory Douglas and the March on Washington. Associate Professor of History Rebecca Brueckmann challenged her students to identify which elements of these posters still translate to activism in our present age. Exploring historic primary sources, students sought to uncover the meaning of Black freedom activism today. From there, students constructed their own slogans for Black activism in 2024.

The slogans created by each group, while all inspired by the same sources, vary dramatically. “Fight fists with flowers, together we bloom!” reads one poster, hung up beside a poster asserting, “Settling for little is settling for nothing!” Other slogans include, “Pride for martyrs, pride for sacrifice, pride for progress” and “Legacy of resilience, future of promise.”

For Brueckmann, this variety was a lesson in and of itself. Brueckmann pointed to the ways each group took different things from what they learned as an example of how history is not uniform. “There are always different ways of understanding and approaching,” said Brueckmann.

With so many different perspectives, learning how to collaborate was an important part of the creative process. Collaborating with each other connected students to the history they were studying. Breuckmann valued the opportunity to give students “the experience that a lot of people had at the time,” going beyond “just talking about it” by providing “an embodied experience.”

“There was a lot going on behind the scenes [of Black activist protest], and I wanted to give students a taste of this,” said Breuckmann. Through the process of printmaking as a group, the students experienced how social protests require “a lot of collaborative effort.” 

While posters from the March on Washington informed much of the content of their work, the visuals were inspired by artist Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. and his Rosa Parks series. Kennedy Jr. has carved out a unique style for himself in the world of printmaking by layering colorful words on top of each other to form a background upon which he prints a final, overarching message — usually a pithy quote or short sentence. 

The students of African American History II selected words for their layered backgrounds by crowdsourcing. Each team chose three to four terms that encapsulated the most important themes they had learned in class. These words were then put together by Conor McGrann, digital studio arts technician, to form a word cloud. The size of each word on the poster indicated the number of times that word came up in the class. The larger the word, the larger the number of students who had identified that term as a key concept. After McGrann created a digital background from those words, he ran the image through AI to create more variations. On top of these backgrounds, students then screen printed their own slogans on top. Throughout this process, students learned about how to make each slogan the most prominent component of their poster by considering the visual hierarchy of their work.

“I’m just incredibly proud of them,” said Brueckmann, reflecting on the students’ artwork.

Participating faculty and staff: Rebecca Brueckmann, Renee Faulkner, Jade Hoyer ’07, Conor McGrann, Ty Quigley ’22

Participating students: Amina Ali ’27, Aurora Davis ’25, Devin Dennis ’26, Nate Ellis ’25, Bensen Han ’27, Alonna Hannibal ’27, Shauntavia Hooper ’27, Aaron Lobsenz ’26, Tyler Tutt ’25, John Win ’25

Dudley Edmondson—nature photographer, filmmaker, author, and advocate for nature—will deliver convocation at Carleton College on Friday, February 9 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. His address, “My Career Working with the Natural World,” details his unique personal experiences sharing and living in nature. Edmondson has spent more than three decades as a photographer of nature and wildlife. His passion and love for the outdoors motivated him to create his groundbreaking book, Black & Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places (2006), which profiles the lives of many African Americans who are deeply connected to nature. Edmondson’s work highlighting Black outdoor role models contributes to his goal of helping more people of color explore the outdoors. 

Edmondson’s belief that nature has an innate ability to heal the mind and the body has led him on a life path of sharing his love and passion for nature with others. He has worked with a multitude of communities across the country in order to help urban youth and youth of color to experience the beauty of the natural world. His first-hand experience watching the ways that young people’s lives are changed for the better with exposure to nature has reinforced his desire to inspire people to discover their personal understanding and respect for everything that nature has to offer. 

“In wilderness the ability to embrace freedom and be your true self is the healing medicine the mind needs,” Edmondson explains on his website. 

Edmondson is also the author of What’s that Flower: A Beginner’s Guide to Wildflowers (2013), which breaks down the most common wildflowers of the eastern United States. Over the course of his career, his work has been featured in over 100 publications and his photographs have been showcased in a plethora of national galleries. 

Edmondson attended Ohio State University and now calls Duluth, Minnesota home, where he enjoys recreational activities including birdwatching, fly fishing, and trail running, among many others. 

This convocation will also be live streamed—please register in advance to receive information on how to attend via Zoom. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

Learn more and read the amicus brief on the Presidents’ Alliance website.

Award-winning dancer, writer, model, and disability rights advocate Jerron Herman will deliver a convocation address titled, “EMBRACE: On kinship” at Carleton College on Friday, January 19 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. Herman’s artistic process is supported by his personal history with disability as well as the social legacies of disability aesthetics; this process leads him to create art that undermines notions of production—the simple facts of how the art is made—in favor of creating something welcoming. Herman views art as a form of empowerment, reflecting in a feature video by Great Big Story that he has “always been an advocate for those to pursue the antithesis of the thing that is their limitation.”

Herman has performed, collaborated on, and choreographed many original works, including his most recent piece, “VITRUVIAN,” which premiered in 2022 as a modern interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virtruvian Man. Through Herman’s expert expression, the Virtruvian Man is portrayed as a Disabled Black Man.

Herman received the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and the Grants to Artists Award from Dance/NYC’s Dance and Social Justice Fellowship Program in 2020. His writing on art and culture has been published in the U.S. and internationally and his play “3 Bodies” was published in Theater Magazine in 2022. He has also featured as a cover story of Dance Magazine. As a model and disability rights advocate with hemiplegia cerebral palsy, Herman has partnered with brands including Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, The Jewelry Library, FFORA, Samsung, and Google.

Herman is a trustee and vice chair of Dance/USA. In the spring of 2022, he became an Artist/Scholar in Residence at Georgetown University. He earned his BA in Media, Culture and Arts from The King’s College in 2013.

Herman’s convocation talk coincides with the Perlman Teaching Museum’s exhibition Towards A Warm Embrace by artists Ezra Benus and Finnegan Shannon ’11. Open January 11–April 14, 2024, the exhibition explores disability justice and accessibility practice with the underlying premise that access is something everyone has a responsibility toward.

This convocation will also be live streamed—please register in advance to receive information on how to attend via Zoom. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. Find upcoming events and archived recordings (including in podcast form) on the convocations website. For more information, including disability accommodations, call 507-222-5461 or email nponder@carleton.edu.

“It struck me that I had joined an organization that didn’t just talk about religion, but actually lived it,” he recalls. “As someone who didn’t identify as especially religious, I found this intimidating—and also wondered if I’d been hired by mistake.”

Sixteen years later, Vogel is back on campus, hired—on purpose—to carry on his mentor’s legacy and establish his own vision as Carleton’s new chaplain. Based in Skinner Memorial Chapel and overseeing chaplains from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, he’ll be focused on both the contemplative life of campus and the more outward manifestations of spirituality, including social justice advocacy. In this introductory interview, we discuss that mission, his aim to minister not just to the campus of today but also the spirit that’ll guide it into the future, and his aim of offering welcome equally to people of all faiths and to those, like him, who have many more questions than answers.

Were you raised in a religious tradition, and what from those early years resonates with you still?

My family attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation until I was in high school, when we switched to a Presbyterian church. I appreciated how the ministers genuinely cared about me. They encouraged questions and honored doubt, which opened up the space I needed to belong. I learned from them the beauty of religious communities that care about people without conditions or strings attached. I’ve tried to model that in my own ministry. 

How do you define yourself spiritually today?

I don’t identify as Presbyterian, or even Christian, today. I love the Christian tradition, its rituals, its stories, its sense of justice, but I don’t believe in its core theological assumptions. Eventually I returned to Unitarian Universalism, where I was ordained as a minister. I probably don’t believe in God, although I believe that we human beings have a moral calling to serve love and justice. I believe in the beauty of the world—and that this beauty is expressed through us and all things—and that we would be happier if we became more sensitive to it. I believe that the universe is too vast and complex for us to understand, and that this should lead us to a place of wonder, and also humility, about what we think we know. I believe that human experience is incredibly diverse, yet we share enough to lead us toward creating societies grounded in care. 

Skinner Chapel has been called “the conscience of the College.” How will you work to live up to that ideal?

Like everyone here, I’m employed by Carleton and fall within the organizational structure. But as the “conscience of the College,” the chaplain is unique in that the role is designed to serve not only Carleton, but what Carleton represents. Not the College of this moment, but the Carleton that could be. The chaplain is a steward of our essential spirit, ensuring that not only is it preserved but that, as time passes and the world changes, the spirit of Carleton is interpreted and applied faithfully. 

Practically, this leads to dynamic, open-ended, and constantly evolving work. It means working with students to cultivate their own moral centers and supporting them to become agents of change. It means collaborating with campus leaders, identifying areas of growth. And it means envisioning Carleton’s moral responsibility, looking to change Northfield and the world beyond for the better. 

My role reports directly to President Byerly and Dina Zavala, the vice president of inclusion, equity, and community. Being included within this new division speaks hopefully to the College’s deep commitment to social change, both within our community and outside it. 

Many religious traditions have individual contemplation at their core, while also helping guide followers in interacting with the world. How will you balance those inward and outward experiences of the spiritual?

To quote the book of James, “Faith without works is dead.” To quote Karl Marx, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point, however, is to change it.” Religion without a commitment to justice and collective liberation is hollow. It seeks to reassure us of our virtue, without asking from us. It invites us to abdicate our responsibility to our fellow human beings, many of whom are suffering, often very close to us. 

In Northfield, we can think of those living in subhuman housing conditions just blocks from campus. We can think of those struggling to afford quality medical care, those who fear the police because of the color of their skin, those who are undocumented and fear they will be separated from their families. 

Religion throughout time and place has both an inward and an outward nature. At best, we carry both within us. To not look inward is to be without heart or conscience. To not look outward is to be selfish and callous.

Skinner Chapel is stunning, but, as an English Gothic Revival building, it may not feel welcoming to everyone. How will you practice welcome, inside and outside of this space?

Skinner Chapel was created for a very different community than we are today. Beautiful as it is, it communicates and prioritizes Christianity, a tradition which, although well-represented at Carleton, no longer represents a majority of our community. For many Jewish, Muslim, Indigenous, queer, and non-religious students, the Chapel space may not feel welcoming, and those who have been actively harmed by Christianity may find it difficult to feel safe and at home there. It’s important that we as a community honor these sentiments. 

Many college campuses have designated multi-faith spaces, designed to lift up the faith diversity on campus and ensure that all traditions feel at home. Until such a space can be created here, we’ll do our best to communicate our values of welcome. We’ll be hanging a pride flag prominently in the Chapel for the first time. We’re installing art that highlights our religious diversity and creating better signage about the multifaith aspect of the Chapel. It also means broadening the definition of “the Chapel” to include other sacred sites on campus: the Japanese Garden, the Indigenous sacred site, the Druid Circle, and the Labyrinth. And it means continually reinvesting in the Muslim Prayer Room and the Buddhist and Hindu Meditation Room, located in the Chapel basement, and making sure those spaces are not overshadowed by the main sanctuary space. 

We often turn to spirituality during times of trauma and uncertainty, and many faith traditions focus on discipline, self-restraint, self-awareness. All admirable… but what about joy? How, in your work, can you cultivate all facets of an engaged, spiritual life: healing, community, self-love, celebration?

What a great question! Religion can do many things. Hopefully it will make our lives better. By engaging with religious and spiritual questions, we should find ourselves experiencing more joy, more happiness, more peace, and more hope. It should offer us solace and comfort, healing, and wholeness. 

One way we do this at the Chapel is to make space for people to feel safe and loved. When we feel judged, or controlled, or fearful, we hide our real self. We are trying to shield ourselves from others, but often we end up building a barrier within ourselves, too, walling off our ability to feel free and cared for. When we experience acceptance, we feel comfortable as our real selves. We smile more readily. We trust more. We breathe more easily and feel lighter. We do so because we know we are OK, we are not alone, and we know our true self is worthy of love.

While legacy status has historically not played a significant role in decisions at Carleton, it has at times merited a slight advantage within a pool of academically qualified applicants, where other characteristics are generally comparable. 

“Nevertheless, we recognize that in a highly competitive process, even a slight advantage can have an impact on outcomes,” Byerly said. “We believe that our goal of expanding access makes this the right time to discontinue legacy preference.”

She noted that Carleton’s Community Plan for Inclusion, Diversity and Equity states a goal of increasing representation of historically underserved students at Carleton, and the College’s upcoming strategic plan outlines strategies for improving access for students from a range of backgrounds, including first-generation students and students with high levels of financial need.

In recent years, somewhere between 6 and 9 percent of the class typically has a Carleton parent, with a higher percentage claiming another family affiliation.

“We have benefited greatly by having students who bring a deep history of family connection and a special understanding of Carleton traditions and culture,” Byerly said. “We expect that we will continue to welcome many such students to Carleton. There may be no greater mark of an alum’s deep connection to Carleton than their willingness to trust us to educate and nurture their own children. With this decision, we strive only to expand that impact, and to continue welcoming new families into our remarkable community of Carls for generations to come.”