RefleXions Tertulia, Honors College and Multicultural Center Present RefleXive Conversations: a Community and Audience Engagement Exercise on Creative Justice

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Dr. Lia Uribe (picture by Kalyn Cavalier) and Dr. Lisa Corrigan (picture by Russell Cothren)

The U of A's RefleXions Music Series is back this fall with RefleXions Music Tertulia, a series of events featuring regional, national and international citizen-artists presenting their music and their advocacy and action for creative justice. The RefleXions Tertulia events will be centered around "Las Cuatro Estaciones del Latin Jazz," or "The Four Seasons of Latin Jazz," a piece written by internationally acclaimed Cuban composer and pianist Pepe Rivero. 

As part of RefleXions Tertulia's community and audience engagement efforts, U of A's Lisa Corrigan and Lia Uribe will be hosting RefleXive Conversations, covering topics related to the core of the Tertulia: gender equity in music, creative justice, placemaking and belonging. 

"These conversations will not only prime our future audience for the Tertulia musical events, but also will provide them opportunities to contextualize the upcoming music events before they happen, while reflecting on social realities that affect who has access to art and in what capacities," Uribe said. 

This first RefleXive Conversation, a partnership with the U of A's Center for Multicultural and Diversity Education, will be held from 12-1:15 p.m. today, Monday, Oct. 3, in the Honors College Lounge, room 130 of Gearhart Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

"These conversations will offer opportunities to improve the justice literacies of the campus community by connecting them with music and feedback that sharpen their skills at producing equitable and just outcomes. Public universities are public goods, and this kind of event helps community members practice artistic and democratic deliberation," said Corrigan, an award-winning author, director of the U of A's Gender Studies Program and professor in the Department of Communication.  

Visit reflexionsmusic.org for more information. 

About the RefleXions Music Series: The RefleXions Music Series is a celebration of music, musicians, advocates and audiences, a space to foster creative justice and diversity through opportunities to reflect, learn, grow, change and teach. RefleXions Music Series propagates sound and messages; expresses the highest standards of music and artistic interpretation; reverses the dynamics of Eurocentric standards; carefully considers contexts, intersectionality, relationships and crossroads with other disciplines; and celebrates, represents and includes diverse identities.

The RefleXions team is a collective of Northwest Arkansas individuals from different backgrounds who bring unique perspectives and commitment to the highest standards of scholarship, research and aesthetic diversity in the arts: Erika Almenara, Rogelio Garcia-Contreras, Ronda Mains, Catalina Ortega, Miroslava Panayotova, Lia Uribe, Jessica Vansteenburg and Leigh Wood.

RefleXions is supported by the U of A's Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Music, Honors College, Women's Giving Circle, Arkansas Global Changemakers, the Center for Multicultural and Diversity Education and KUAF 91.3 Pubic Radio, and has collaborated with art leaders from the Walton Arts Center, CACHE, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, IDEALS Institute, Northwest Arkansas Council and Might-T-By-Design. This year RefleXions is adding the Walton Arts Center and the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra as new community partners, and RefleXions Music Tertulia events are partially supported by an Artists 360 Community Activator Grant, the U of A Chancellor's Grant for the Humanities and Performing Arts Initiative, and the Women's Giving Circle Grant. 

Corrigan is the award-winning author of Prison Power: How Prison Politics Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation and Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties and the editor of the book #MeToo: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist (Routledge, 2022). She was a 2021-2022 Residential Research Fellow at the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas. She is currently the inaugural 21st Century Democracy Fellow at INTERFORM. 

Colombian/USA artist Lia Uribe is associate chair and associate professor of music at the U of A's Music Department. She maintains an active national and international career as a chamber musician, orchestral player and artist-teacher. An advocate for diversity, inclusion, representation and balance in the arts, her research is centered on music by and for the historically excluded and underrepresented. She directs the RefleXions Music Series.