Wednesday, January 24, 2024 | 5:30pm to 7:00pm (Doors open at 5:15 p.m.)

The Yale University and Greater New Haven communities are invited to attend this year’s MLK Commemoration that honors the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We are pleased to announce that the commemoration will feature Ruby Bridges.

Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, Lonnie Holley was the seventh of 27 children—and at age four was taken from his mother and traded for a bottle of whiskey (Bloom). He fled abusive foster parents, was hit by a car (and declared brain dead) and was later sent to Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children—a “slave camp” by any other name (Missick). Holley’s work, born out of struggle, hardship—and more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity—manifests itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, filmmaking, and music.

One of the key methodological interventions of Digital Humanities is the capacity to map one’s research data. With the advent of interactive digital maps in the early 2000s, space-oriented humanistic historical research has seen a dramatic growth with multiple visualization tools during the past two decades. As Richard White of now defunct Spatial History emphatically notes in his 2010 working paper, spatial visualization, i.e. mapping, is not a mere illustration to a narrative but “a means of doing research.”

On December 15, YSC presents the AMOC* production of contemporary composer John Adams’s El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered with libretto by Peter Sellars and concept by Julia Bullock, “one of opera’s fastest-rising stars” (Vanity Fair). El Niño is a chamber music arrangement created and conducted by Christian Reif and was first performed at The Met Cloisters in 2018. The New York Times calls it “intimate, affecting and quietly rich with activism.”

Film screening of “Fandango at the Wall,” a documentary on the annual Fandango Fronterizo Festival, which unites people on both sides of the Tijuana-San Diego border. The festival features “jarocho,” a 300-year-old folk music tradition mixture of indigenous, Spanish, and African traditions originated.

It will be followed by a performance of jarocho, featuring Fernando Guadarrama, Gregorio Quiroz, and Perick. Introduced by CLAIS Postdoctoral Associate Maria Aguilar.