SANTA BARBARA —
Sunday, January 27, 2:30 pm
Reflections on a Watery World: Tony de los Reyes and Sameer Pandya
Parallel Stories Lecture Series
Inspired by the site-specific installation by Los Angeles-based artist April Street, The Mariners’ Grand Staircase (Armoured Stars, Flying Clouds), currently installed in the Museum’s Park Lobby, this conversation between artist Tony de los Reyes and writer Sameer Pandya explores the symbolic potential of the sea. As Herman Melville wrote, why did some “…hold the sea holy?” Why, like Narcissus, do we see ourselves in rivers and oceans? Why, with its associations of unpredictability, infinity, the beginnings of life, turbulent passions, unfettered freedom, purification, solitude and rebellion, does water seduce us, console us, and alarm us?
Parallel Stories is a literary and performing arts series that pairs art and artists with award-winning authors and performers of regional, national, and international acclaim. This series functions as a multidisciplinary lens through which to view the Museum’s collection and special exhibitions.
$5 SBMA Members/$10 Non-Members/$6 Senior Non-Members
Purchase tickets at the Museum Visitor Services desk or online at tickets.sbma.net.
Location:
Mary Craig Auditorium
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
1130 State Street, Santa Barbara
More about Sameer Pandya:
Sameer Pandya earned his BA in History from the University of California, Davis and his PhD from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, Sameer began teaching in the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York. After five years, he returned to California, and in 2008, started teaching in the Asian American Studies department at UC Santa Barbara.
Sameer is a fiction writer and a scholar of literature and sport. His fiction has appeared, among other places, in Narrative, Other Voices, and Faultline, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ESPN, Salon, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Daily News. His scholarly essays have appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Amerasia.
His first collection, The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella, follows the lives of first- and second-generation Indian Americans living in contemporary California. The characters share a similar sensibility: a sense that immigration is a distant memory, yet an experience that continues to shape the decisions they make in subtle and surprising ways as they go about the complicated business of everyday living.
He is at work on a novel and a scholarly project on South Asian diasporic sport.
Links:
Epiphany
http://epiphanyzine.com/features/2017/6/19/sameer-pandya-an-interview-a-story
Art Forum
http://www.lorareynolds.com/assets/uploads/docs/DELT_Artforum_Critics_Pick_2012.pdf
Parallel Stories lectures coming soon:
Sunday, February 3, 2:30 pm
Reading and Conversation: Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is a writer forging a new mode of nonfiction. Her writing resists categorization—her books span poetry, criticism, autobiography, theory, and the hybrid spaces in between. In heady visceral language, she invites the reader into her open-ended and empathetic way of thinking. Through the dynamic interplay between personal experience and critical theory, Nelson not only broadens the scope of nonfiction writing, but also offers compelling meditations on social and cultural questions.
Sunday, March 10, 2:30 pm
Dismantling Hierarchies: Alex Espinoza
Alex Espinoza’s writing is filled with a sense of place and longing, and an idiosyncratic search for love, meaning, and unflinching truth. In an afternoon of reading and conversation, the author shares his thoughts on Southern California, masks, identity, cultural displacement, faith, the world of lucha libre, belonging, and why what should exclude us, empowers us.