public programming

Dozens of writers, artists, and Angelenos crowded into The Forum at Otis College of Art and Design to hear Roxane Gay, celebrated writer of both fiction and non-fiction, give a lecture that would kick off the Anaphora Writing Residency at Otis College. She answered questions from the audience about how to sustain a writing life, how to navigate spaces such as academia and publishing as a person of color, and about her own personal writing process, which has turned out several bestsellers and book deals for more upcoming titles.

What roles does a work of art play in society today? Is the purpose of art to provide pleasure, access the subjectivity of the artist, change society, or to provide a new mode of proposing ideas? Rather than seeing art as a subjective practice—one unassailable by the demands of culture or society—Charles Gaines’s lecture at Otis College of Art and Design for the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art proposed that art needs to be reimagined as a cultural practice in order to be fully relevant for today’s political and social climate.

How do you develop a theory of living in the world if you can never escape the confines of your own mind? How can you develop a relationship to the world if your philosophy of the world places humans at the center, and everything else in a separate category? These were just the beginnings of some of the questions touched on in Graham Harman’s discussion with Andrew Culp that kicked off the inaugural summer Los Angeles residency for the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.