Best of... Awards for 2023-2024 AEPG Projects

Congratulations to the 2023-2024 AEPG Best of... Awardees! In this second year, we recognized two Artistic Excellence Programming Grant projects that represent community engagement and interdisciplinarity. (Read more here about the initiative.) We also had so many incredible projects that we expanded this year into people's choice, innovation, and visionary awards. 

The Artistic Excellence Programming Grants allow the College to provide funds across our broad disciplines to support a capacious definition of artistic excellence in events, activities, and workshops that honor languages, literatures, performing, and visual arts. In my fifth year of leading this initiative, I am always wonderfully captivated by the generosity, verve, and incredible community created by each AEPG cohort. 

This is the second year that we have presented these two awards from among this year’s AEPG projects: one for the event that best accomplished Community Engagement, and a second for Interdisciplinary Practice.  This year, we are adding three more awards to recognize additional, amazing work by our AEPG faculty. Each award is accompanied by $1000 Professional Development funds for the AEPG faculty or collaborative team.  

Community Engagement

For our Community Engagement award, we are delighted to recognize Midori Ishida from World Languages & Literatures for her highly successful “Experiences and identities of Zainichi Koreans: Re-conceptualizing ethnic identity, nationality, and representations.”  This very well attended event drew in a variety of  community members, with many of them praising the event for providing insight into experiences of Zainichi Koreans in Japan, as well as prompting the audience to reflect on the mistreatment of minoritized groups across the globe.  The events included students who created cultural dancing that connected with the Pachinko actors integrated into the event–thus it was also very interdisciplinary– and it drew in many first time attendees to our H & A events, including students at Keio University and Kagoshima University able to join the panel, along with  members from Department of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, and SJSU’s International Student and Scholar Services. The experience offered an opportunity to explore some of the key elements of both the College and SJSU’s missions. 

Congratulations Midori!

Interdisciplinary Engagement

For our Interdisciplinary Engagement Award, we are delighted to present this to Maite Urcaregui and J. Michael Martinez on "Picturing Freedom Dreams."  Their project offered events and workshops across the year where students integrated the visual & textual across different genres to expand understanding around storytelling & visual creation. Students responded to a variety of topics, including: “What I learned was the importance of community, and how the people around you are always important” and “Communities come from all shapes and sizes. Accepting who you are is what makes a community” and “Dreams are crucial to our lives and poetry is one of the ways to access our dreams.” and Finally, And “Poetry is an impactful and fundamental component of inspiring societal change.”

Maite and J. Michael worked with SJSU’s “MOSAIC, Centro: Chicanx/Latinx Student Success Center, the Black Leadership and Opportunity Center (BLOC), and the PRIDE Center to advertise to their students and invite them to participate in the workshop and help build community.  Maite was also able to support students from the Opportunity Youth Academy by helping them to explore their own identities through comic making 

Congratulations Maite and J. Michael!

And we had so many amazing events produced by our faculty and students that we wanted to acknowledge some other outstanding events.  

Innovation

Our first special award is for Innovation, and goes to Christopher Luna-Mega and Pablo Furman from Music, along with their collaborator, Andrew Blanton from Digital Media Art, for their fantastic event, the San Jose City Hall Concert and Sound Projection.

Held at the City Hall Rotunda, the experience combined their musical compositions based on soundscapes and our public works theme with digital media art projected on the walls of the rotunda and generated by AI. It created a unique opportunity to have the building itself become a transforming architectural site as dusk fell and public art in the plaza illuminated the event.  The music was produced throughout the Rotunda, and audience members were encouraged to move through the space, creating a peripatetic event and reimagining the concert experience while also reimagining the collective making of music. As Gary’s Singh review describes, “Each piece took advantage of the rotunda’s architecture and acoustics, while also exploring the spatial and dynamic distribution of performers throughout the building as an alternative to a stage.”  As Aaron Lington, one of the performers summarized:  “Whenever I start having dark thoughts about the state of music and culture in our society currently, I end up having a night like this where there is sheer unbridled creativity with nearly 200 people in attendance, all enjoying themselves and in awe. Music really is the best.”Congratulations to Christopher and Pablo

People's Choice

Now, I would like to present our People’s Choice Award to Raquel Coelho for her astonishingly successful "Invention in Motion:  A Stop Motion Animation Festival," which drew more than 500 attendees, with enthusiastic reviews by all, including “This is a one of a kind event in the Bay Area, since stop motion doesn't get many dedicated events. I learned SO MUCH and connected with inspiring professionals. The screenings were magical and the Panels were packed with invaluable information” and “​​I am a lover of animation and this event featured the work of stop motion animators. It was a joy to see the work on Hammer Theater's big screen and meet and hear featured animators speak and give their perspectives and discuss their process. I also was able to speak with many members of the audience, a large number of animators themselves and get to hear about their work in industry. This event, though specific to stop motion, is essential to broadening the medium and attendance of this event or others like will inform and inspire anyone who has an interest in the art form of animation.”  And we got a record breaking 82 survey results, all praising the combination of industry members, great films, and hands-on experiences. 

Congratulations Raquel!

Visionary Award

Finally, we are presenting a Visionary Award for Building Belonging to Janet Stemwedel & Carlos Sanchez for their project “Telling your life story philosophically,” which taught students how to engage with their own stories and then perform them for their colleagues in the Hammer Theatre. Janet and Carlos structured programming throughout the year to build students’ skills on how to create a story and how to perform that story.  They also worked with Housing to promote the program and these skills.  Most importantly, they drew students out by getting them to look inward and then expand these reflections to  communicate with others in our post-pandemic world, while developing a sense of belonging, one of the most important things our students need now.

Congrats Janet and Carlos!!

-Author: Katherine D. Harris (Oct. 31, 2024)