This program will be held in-person at the Newberry and livestreamed on Zoom. The online version of this event will be live captioned. Please register below.
Join us for a public program marking the 250th anniversary of American independence. Exploring themes of resilience, agency, and hope, the conversation will amplify temporary exhibitions currently on view at the Newberry Library and the Chicago Botanic Garden.
At the Newberry Library, Conceived in Liberty: Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations in the Wartime US, 1812-1918 showcases how artists living through wartime grappled with questions about the nation's founding principal of liberty, in numerous instances reflecting debates over expansionism and land sovereignty. At the Chicago Botanic Garden, America Grows: 250 Years of Garden Stories, explores the ways in which gardens tell us about the American experience and celebrates the enduring connections people have had, and will always have, with plants.
A roundtable discussion featuring artist and storyteller Camille Billie, researcher and curator Lisa Doi, and landscape architecture professor Kenneth Helphand will be moderated by DePaul University history professor Margaret Storey.
The event includes an opportunity to meet the panelists and enjoy refreshments.
Speakers
Camille "Katahtu'ntha" Billie is a Black Indigenous artist enrolled to the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She is an alum of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in fine arts with an emphasis in designed objects. Based in Chicago, Camille works at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian allowing her to learn more about the functions of a growing museum alongside her position as a visitor services specialist. Billie's preferred mediums hone in on illustration, linoleum block printing, and stitch work. Her special interests grow around themes of critical ecology in addition to stories and philosophies relevant to her culture and upbringing in Oneida, WI.
Lisa Doi is the Project Manager for the Japanese American National Museum’s Core Exhibition. With a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and MA from the University of Chicago, Doi is currently a PhD student at Indiana University with a focus on Japanese American community memory. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic engagement with Japanese American pilgrimages to World War II incarceration sites. Lisa’s work is highly engaged, bridging her academic work with her co-directorship of Tsuru for Solidarity, a collective of progressive Japanese Americans engaged in abolitionist and racial healing work. Together, these interests allow Lisa to both theorize and practice a Japanese American politic that is rooted in history but that is also aspiring towards a more capacious future. She has served as President of Japanese American Citizens League’s Chicago Chapter since 2019 and has spoken extensively on resettlement in Chicago.
Kenneth I. Helphand is Knight Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon where he has taught courses in landscape history, theory and design since 1974. He is a graduate of Brandeis University (1968) and Harvard's Graduate School of Design (MLA 1972). He is the recipient of distinguished teaching awards from the University of Oregon (1993) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (1997). Helphand has guest lectured at dozens of universities and is a frequent visiting professor at the Technion - the Israel Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous of articles and reviews on topics in landscape history and theory with a particular interest in the contemporary American landscape. He is the author of the award winning books: Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape. (1991), Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (with Cynthia Girling1994), Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture & the Making of Modern Israel. (2002), and Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (2006). Helphand served as editor of Landscape Journal (1994 –2002), is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and CELA, Honorary Member of the Israel Association of Landscape Architects, a recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal, a Graham Foundation Grant, and Chair of the Senior Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks.
Margaret Storey is a Professor and Associate Dean at the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Faculty at Depaul University. Margaret Storey is the author of Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), the editor of the memoir of a Tennessee Union cavalryman, Tried Men and True: Or, Union Life in Dixie (University of Alabama Press, 2011), and co-author, with Nicolas Proctor, of Kentucky 1861: Loyalty, State, and Nation (2017), part of the Reacting to the Past Series from W. W. Norton. Her most recent article, “War’s Domestic Corollary: Union Occupation Households in the Civil War South,” appeared in LeeAnn Whites’ and Lisa Tendrich Frank’s edited volume, Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War (University of Georgia Press, 2020).
Cost and Registration
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration required.
Registration opens July 1.
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