Category: Special Events!

Professor Chico Colvard: It’s Alive…It’s Happening…It’s Film

Writes Professor Chico Colvard: 


Student Internship Opportunities


1. Feature film is starting production in Gloucester and the director is looking for student interns. I’ve already sent a handful their way, but more are needed. Those with special skills in sound production are especially encouraged to reach out.
2. There are a number of film festival volunteer and internship opportunities in the New England area. IFFBoston starts volunteer orientation Saturday, April 21 and Monday, April 23.
For more information please contact: Professor, Chico Colvard – cdcolvard@gmail.com

Museum of Fine Arts – Boston
PHANTASMAGORIA This is a piece for which Chico Colvard shot footage of the featured Magic Lantern Collector, Dick Balzer. The New Yorker wrote a piece about the exhibit.
The exhibit runs through June 24th at the MFA

Henry and Lois Foster Gallery


Emerson College – Paramount Theatre
Sponsored by Department of Visual and Media Arts
Thursday, April 19 – 7:00 – 10:00PM
Advance Screening: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU
Chico Colvard will conduct Q&A with director, Boots Riley

Closed to  the public.


The DocYard at the Brattle Theatre
Monday, April 23 – 7:00 -9:00PM
Screening LOVE MEANS ZERO
Chico Colvard will conduct Q&A with director, Jason Kohn, and

students in the Liberal Arts Film Curating Seminar will be in attendance . This event is open to the public.


IFFBoston & C-LineFilms Co-present  Mass. Works-In-Progress
Thursday, April 26 – 4:00 – 7:00PM
Brattle Theatre – Harvard Square

This event is organized by Chico Colvard in partnership with IFFBoston. Liberal Arts Film Curating Seminar students are actively working the event and enjoy full access to IFFBoston. This event is open to the public.


BLACK MEMORABILIA – Boston Premiere at IFFBoston
Sunday, April 29 – 2:15PM followed by in-person Q&A
This is a new Chico Colvard film.

Somerville Theatre – Davis Square

Black Memorabilia Trailer from chico colvard on Vimeo.


See All Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFBoston) programming HERE — including STUDENT SHOWCASE.

Jen Bervin and her Silk Poems: The Hellerstein Lecture

Professor Cheryl Clark Introduces Poet Jen Bervin:

I first encountered Jen Bervin’s work in the book Nets, published in 2004, an erasure of Shakespeare’s sonnets with the original poems faintly visible in gray and her selected phrases, caught there, appearing in black. In this weave of Shakespeare’s words, her selections, as if verbal embroidery, render new poems and readings, new utterances permeating with silence. In Nets, “Sonnet 20: “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted” becomes “master-mistress of my / shifting/ by/ adding nothing / prick’d thee out for pleasure.” In the latter, the poet reminds us of her taking pleasure in selecting these words. Risky and invigorating, the book reorients the mind: we may see Shakespeare’s sonnets as the substrate and her poem as an organism that obtains its nourishment from it.

At the end of Nets, Jen Bervin says, “When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.” It is no surprise then to find that she has also turned to Emily Dickinson, a poet of such precise and staggering language. Bervin, working with Dickinson scholar Marta Werner, in the book The Gorgeous Nothings, focuses on Dickinson’s poems written on envelopes, appearing as full-color facsimiles. They also dutifully transcribed each handwritten mark, and rendered thumbnail sketches of the multiple shapes that each envelope took because of the many ways Dickinson would take it apart. Bervin’s visual artistry makes her particularly attentive to all those shapes and textures in the manuscripts—the literary thus including its materiality.

Silk Poems appears not only in a petite, silky-paged book, but also in a biosensor of liquid silk implantable in the human body. Bervin is interested in the translated, transported, and transformed. In the book, a silk worm speaks to the one who is implanted with this biosensor that is monitoring essential life functions.

To read Silk Poems is to encounter the amplitude of the small and the brief; this insect that lives only six to eight weeks has a whole lot to say: of its body and its act of making, and of its habitat, and of the 5,000 year-old history of sericulture or silk breeding—and not to mention does so in a voice with so much personality and drama, erudite one moment, bawdy the next, sometimes with a swagger any mating ritual may enlist. Think even of the silkworm as rapper when it says, “IEMERGE / INMYFULLGLORY / SILKWORM / OFTHEYEAR.”  You will soon get to see the look of these letters on the page, DNA strand-like, a form slowing us down, setting down grooves in the mind. It is an elastic poem with the coalescing forces of the factual and the imaginative—and the accuracy that is demanded for both ways of knowing.

The poems are slender and brief on the page. The poet Marvin Bell says, and I quote, the “short poem need not be small”—and I add that it is a poem so compact that it must expand in the solvent of the mind or, in the case of this poem, in the landscape of the body. In the short poem, silence is charged, the “drama of the poem” the Objectivist poet George Oppen says. Maybe this silence is needed because the “poem listens to itself as it goes,” one more saying from Marvin Bell.

Literature  and art set flares to guide us in knowing what it is like to be alive in this moment, and what it is to imagine a future and to have a memory. Thank you, Jen Bervin (and your erudite and playful silkworm) for being so alive to us, for asking such expansive questions, and for all your inquiries that can give us new paths for wonder.

Beth Balliro & Elisa Hamilton—Reflections on Mass Art (Celebrating President David P. Nelson’s Inauguration Day)


Beth Balliro, ’99, serves as Associate Professor of Art Education. Elisa Hamilton, ’07, multimedia artist, serves as a Massachusetts College of Art and Design trustee.

(Photos by Natasha Moustache).

Written by Comments Off on Beth Balliro & Elisa Hamilton—Reflections on Mass Art (Celebrating President David P. Nelson’s Inauguration Day) Posted in Special Events!

Boston Chinatown

Writes Professor Lisong Liu:

Chinatowns mean a lot to me as a teacher and researcher specializing in Chinese migration to the US. A Chinatown is often the first place I visit when I travel to a large American city, not just for the wonderful and familiar Chinese food but also for its historical and contemporary significance. Chinatowns show the historical experience of Chinese in America, both racial discrimination and exclusion (thus the formation of Chinatown for mutual protection and support) and the resilience and creativity of the community in the face of adversity.

I am teaching the Chinese diaspora course this semester, and I will bring my students to Boston Chinatown for a field trip this coming week. This panel discussion is another wonderful opportunity for my students to understand Chinese migration in local, national and global contexts. I hope the event can highlight the community’s voice and remind people of the importance of respecting differences and welcoming migrants, whose history is American history, our own history.

All-Community Book Reading Experience: Thi Bui Presents “The Best We Could Do…”


In case you missed them, read Professor Jeanette Eberhardy’s introductory words for Thi Bui and her book The Best We Could Do.

My name is Jeanette Eberhardy. I serve as MassArt Program Coordinator for the 1st year writing where we explore the relationship between thinking, making, and writing that is needed for artists’ growth. I am also the curator for our annual show Why I Write. Why I Create. that offers intimate portrayals on learning to deliver truths through art.

Tonight is a night to celebrate our shared respect for the craft of storytelling—in all the wondrous ways that we explore stories through art, writing, and design.

Last year when I was feeling overwhelmed by the news around us, I found an elegant graphic essay by Thi Bui titled “Precious Time” published after the U.S. presidential elections by PEN, the International Writers Forum. I recognized myself in that essay—feeling small in the large universe, but still remembering that my actions matter. The essay “Precious Time” was my first introduction to tonight’s guest speaker Thi Bui. The moment I encountered that essay, I understood that Thi Bui has important things to teach me about empathy—the gateway into our genuine connection with each other. Continue reading

The Best We Could Do…Thi Bui’s Journey

Writes Professor Jeanette Eberhardy:

At MassArt, we share in common our respect for the art of storytelling. In Liberal Arts courses, we learn to shape and write our stories through poetry, song, and science. History provides the rich context we need to deepen our layers of understanding. Also, we learn from other storytellers. In fact, sharing insights about our creative process is perhaps one of the most generous acts that we share with each other.

Please join us to hear artist Thi Bui describe her journey over ten years to create her graphic memoir The Best We Could Do: Thursday, September 21, 2017, 7:30 p.m., MassArt Auditorium.

Tickets are required due to limited seating, but they are free. Obtain your ticket here.