Weeknotes: 11/15/25-11/21/25
This Week:
- In MUST205, the students worked on the labels for their final display project, and I started installing my display.
- We welcomed DJ White and the Rise-Up Studio dancers from the Akwesasne Mohawk. They put on an amazing Social dance at the Foothills Performing arts center in Oneonta. SUNY Oneonta (who co-sponsored the event), also welcomed them with a wonderful reception.
- I said goodbye to my friend and colleague Phil Young, who died late last week. Phil was professor emeritus of Art at Hartwick College, and a long and often lonely champion of Indigenous artists, thinkers, and ideas at the College. He and I have been working on putting together an Indigenous Artists Residency at Hartwick, which would bear his name to honor that legacy. My hope is that it can still happen, though I’m sad he didn’t get to live to see it. Rest in Peace and in Power, Phil.
- I gave a guest lecture on Ancient Greece and its afterlife in Museums and architecture, and in American colonialism.
- I did some good work moving our NAGPRA responsibilities forward.
- True Things
- Trump’s Big Beautiful Ballroom by Know Your Enemy–My favorite political podcast uses Trump’s plans to build a White House Ballroom as a window into thinking about the politics of architecture, the contradictions of the right’s “populist” classicism, and the ways that our social orders unevenly manifest in the built environment.
- Good Things
- I bought Pelican’s album “The Fire in our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw”. It’s great; loud and interesting.
- Dominic and I finished reading “City of Ember”. It was well-written, and the characters were rich and interesting. The whole thing felt to me like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in YA novel form.
