Every year about this time Loyola Marymount University puts on a week’s worth of celebration of arts anc culture, but with a social justice twist, they call the Bellarmine Forum.
This year the event’s theme is Women’s Art and Activism and it features an astonishingly rich variety of presentations and performances. (Honestly, the 5-day event is really one of LA’s secret jewels.)
Here is an explanatory clip from the intro to the week’s festivities written by this year’s forum director, LMU professor and celebrated poet, Gail Wronsky:
Women artists have been imagining a world in which men and women have equal rights, equal social and political status, and equal freedom of movement and expression since the beginning of human culture. They have done this with grace, humor, and brilliance- sometimes in difficult situations, in anonymity, to little effect, and sometimes with a great deal of notice and success. Their combined efforts have changed the world, and continue to do so.
The 2010 Bellarmine Forum, the first to focus on women, is a weeklong celebration of women artists/activists, a celebration of artistic visions that have inspired change.
If you check the schedule, you’ll find that the array of offerings is impressive. Among them:
On Monday night the fabulously insurrectionist Guerrilla Girls will perform.
On Tuesday afternoon, women artists and poets from Cuidad Juarez will be represented by Evangelina Arce, poet and mother of one of the girls killed in the ongoing series of atrocities taking place in what has become known as Murder City.
Tuesday night, the international best-selling poet Alicia Partnoy, who was “disappeared” during the military dictatorship in Argentina in the 70s, will perform with her mother and her poet daughter, giving us three generations of women’s experience.
At the end of the day, Thursday, you can have afternoon tea with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Beth Henley, plus other stellar women of the theater, Ellen Geer, artistic director of the amazing Theatricum Botanicum, Oscar nominated actor Amy Madigan, and prodigious playwright, Velina Houston.
Thursday night, I get to play a tiny part in the artistic festivities by introducing one of my personal heroes, who happens to be the week’s keynote speaker, the award-winning and indelible poet and champion of social justice, Carolyn Forche.
Anyway, check the schedule. It’s jammed from stem to stern with an unusually interesting line-up of talented women.
So, com’on down.
NOTE: painting above—pre-scribbling—by Ellina Kevorkian