Artist and activist Patrisse Khan Cullors inspires audiences to action with her passionate views on the racial, gender, and sexual-orientation discriminations; issues that are also explored in the temporary exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Already an established community organizer and performance artist, Cullors and her co-founders ignited a national conversation about social injustices when they created the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013, which quickly evolved into a powerful global movement. Resolute in her vision of a world where the lives and contributions of all individuals are recognized equally, Cullors adeptly communicates the adversities inflicted by social injustice as she educates and inspires others to work together to promote inclusiveness and equality. Cullors will unveil her new book, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, followed by a book signing.

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Renowned American artist Deborah Butterfield has been captivated by horses all her life. She combined this captivation with her interest in art and material while studying art at the University of California, Davis. Constructed in wood and cast in bronze, her life-size sculptures have been exhibited in museums worldwide, including her work Redstick, on view as part of Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection. She has become a master of three-dimensional horse images, building her sculptures with no sketches or maquettes, working directly with wood pieces or found metal scraps. Horses remain at the core of her life and artwork today. In this lecture, Butterfield will speak about her work, career, philosophy, creative process, and more.

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Toni Tipton-Martin is a culinary journalist, author, and community activist who has dedicated her career to building a healthier community. She is the author of The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, celebrating the important legacy of African American cooks and their cookbooks. A renowned author, she is the winner of a 2016 James Beard Book Award, the 2016 Art of Eating Prize, and the recipient of a 2015 Certificate of Outstanding Contribution to Publishing from the Black Caucus of the Library Association. Tipton-Martin was invited twice by First Lady Michelle Obama to the White House and was the first African American Food Editor of a major daily newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer. She was the nutrition writer for The Los Angeles Times and a contributing editor to Heart and Soul Magazine. A signing of The Jemima Code will follow the lecture.

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Jeffrey Seller is the lead producer of the Broadway hit musical, Hamilton! Spanning the divide between art, commerce, and digital media, Seller’s popular theater productions of Hamilton, Rent, Avenue Q, and In the Heights have reinvigorated Broadway into the mainstream. The producer will weigh in on what makes a hit, the role of live theater in the digital age, and his work to make American musicals more accessible. With increasingly expensive Broadway prices, Seller and his co-producer invented Broadway's groundbreaking rush ticket policy to give young audiences more affordable options for Broadway shows. In June 2016, Hamilton received 11 Tony awards from a record-breaking 16 nominations, including a Best Musical win for Sellers, his fourth Tony Award overall.

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Known for her monumental works, Julie Mehretu is a renowned painter based in New York. The artist’s work, Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation is the largest canvas in Crystal Bridges’ collection—measuring 17 feet long and just over 8 feet tall. The artist completed the diptych painting HOWL, eon (I, II), a large-scale commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Haas Atrium. Mehretu uses rich layers of paint and drawings, inspired by elements of  geography and architecture, and describes her canvases as “story maps of no location." In 2015, Mehretu won the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the US Department of State Medal of Arts, presented by Secretary of State John Kerry.  Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and has also participated in the Sydney Biennale,the Bienal de São Paulo, and Whitney Biennial.

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