Providence Garden Blues
Date: May 23, 2024
Location: George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space (BassPAS), Churchill House
Written by George Houston Bass
Reimagined by Lisa Biggs, Assistant Professor | Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre
Featuring original music by Akua Naru and Becky Bass'13

A celebration and staged reading of The Providence Garden Blues, a 1970s play written by George Houston Bass. Based on true events drawn from oral histories with local seniors, The Providence Garden Blues recounts one African American family's fight to stop the destruction of their home on the city's historic Eastside. 

Elemental Media Conference
Department of Modern Culture and Media IGNITE Series Event
Date: October 16-18, 2024
Location: Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Curated by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Chair and Professor | Modern Culture and Media

A broad-reaching series of reading groups, panels, and community-building activities, culminating in the Media Ecologies and Infrastructures Conference, focusing on the relationship between climate, justice, and new approaches to change and adaptation, and aiming to ignite and expand how we perceive and understand the enlivened environmental media arts. Curated by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Chair and Professor, Modern Culture and Media).

The 21st Century Orchestra
October 25-27, 2024
Location The Lindemann Main Hall
Curated by Eric Nathan Associate Professor, Music; Anthony Cheung, Associate Professor, Music; Wang Lu Associate Professor, Music; and Butch Rovan, Professor, Music

A two-day festival featuring performances, talks, and an inaugural recording release highlighting innovative new orchestral music created by Brown composers that celebrate The Lindemann Performing Arts Center as a premiere site for orchestral performance and recording. Curated by Eric Nathan (composer and associate professor, Music), Anthony Cheung (composer and associate professor, Music), Wang Lu (composer and associate professor, Music), and Butch Rovan (composer/media artist and professor, Music) with The Boston Modern Orchestra (BMOP).

Residual Noise Conference
October 30-November 3, 2024
The Lindemann Main Hall, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Curated by Ed Osborn, Professor | Music and Visual Art

Three performance-residencies including local and legendary artists that cross disciplinary boundaries to explore ways in which music forms community, cultivates creative expression, and examines the relationship of humans to their physical and spiritual environments.

Queer Durations Symposium
December 5-7, 2024
Location: Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Curated by the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies

A multidisciplinary scholarly, curatorial, and artistic project and festival of durational performance works, investigating duration as an aesthetic mode in contemporary body-based performance art, and as a powerful framework for recent artistic investigations of queerness of embodiment.

Department of Literary Arts IGNITE Series Event

A series of events highlighting the work of writers, artists, and poets around themes of ecoarts and ecopoetics; writing and improvisational performance;  the intersections of literary art and music; and collaborative literary artists in performance.

The Move on ChinaTown
Curated by Aidan Choi '26

A pop-up exhibition/archival oral research project aimed at documenting and highlighting the history of Providence’s Chinese communities, revealing the city’s active, dehumanizing and exclusionary attitude towards these communities. Curated by Aidan Choi ’26 with mentorship by Jeffrey Yoo Warren (2023 Library of Congress Innovator in Residence).

Creative Ecologies in the Americas
Curated by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Chair and Professor, Modern Culture and Media and Leila Lehnen, Chair and Associate Professor, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies

A series of lectures, film screenings, workshops, performances, and publications that draw upon rich traditions within North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean that emphasize collective modes of producing (knowledge, art, everyday life) that do not separate human histories and experiences from a more-than-human world. Curated by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Chair and Professor, Modern Culture and Media) and Leila Lehnen (Chair and Associate Professor, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies).