summer residencies

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.