California Studies: A Conversation

Ilene Susan Fort is Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She co-organized the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, and served as co-editor
of the catalogue and anthology
Reading California (both University of California Press, 2000) that accompanied the exhibition. Her writings on a wide range of subjects in the fields of American and European art demonstrate a strong interest in gender issues, colonial discourse and imperialism, immigration and its effect on culture, and most recently modernism and spirituality.

Richard Candida Smith is Professor of History at the University of California,Berkeley, where he also serves as Director of the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library. He is the author of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (University of California Press, 1995) and Mallarme´’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (University of California Press, 1999), and the editor of the forthcoming Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection. He is past executive secretary and president of the Oral History Association (USA), and one of the principal editors of the Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative series. He is currently writing a biography of California painter Jay DeFeo.

Jed Riffe is an independent filmmaker and interactive media producer. His nationally broadcast PBS films include Ishi, The Last Yahi and Who Owns the Past? He is currently producing a film on medical marijuana, and developing a four-hour series on California entitled Beyond the Dream: California and the Rediscovery of America. Riffe also produced a touch-screen interactive history of California for the Oakland Museum, and an enhanced TV prototype entitled California and the American Dream for the Corporation for Public Broadcast-ing’s “digital TV of tomorrow” initiative.

Karen Mary Davalos is Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at the Loyola Marymount University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist with specialization in feminist studies, her work is on Mexican American religion, popular culture, Chicano/a art, and critical race theory. Her publications include “La Quinceañera: Making Gender and Ethnic Identities” (Frontiers 16, no. 2/3) and “Chicana/o Studies and Anthropology: The Dialogue That Never Was” (Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Fall
1998). Her presentation is drawn from her book, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (University of New Mexico Press, 2001). She argues that reading cultural production through the lens of radical lesbian Chicana feminism allows for a poetics of ambiguity and contradiction..

Lila Staples is the initiator and coordinator of the California Regional Art History Project at California State University, Monterey Bay. This ongoing research project is taught as an upper-level seminar entitled “A Central Coast Vision,” integrating student research into the body of scholarship. An art historian, Ms. Staples teaches a variety of courses in the Visual and Public Art Department at CSUMB, and is a frequent lecturer at museums and universities in Central and Northern California.

Kerwin Lee Klein is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he focuses on the history of California and the U.S. West, as well as on issues of memory, writing, and narrative. His publications include Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990 (University of California Press, 1997) and, most recently, “West-ward, Utopia: Robert V. Hine, Aldous Huxley, and the Future of California History” (Pacific Historical Review, 70 August 2001). He serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Representations.

Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies,the Institute for Humanities Research, and the UC Humanities Research Institute, with co-sponsorship
from the Chicano/Latino Research Center.