Arts & Ideas

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2025-2026 Arts & Ideas Series: Building Bridges, Not Walls

Welcome to "Arts & Ideas," one of the cornerstones of Framingham State University's commitment to fostering a vibrant cultural and intellectual community. This annual series of public lectures, performances, and events celebrates the intersection of creativity, scholarship, and civic engagement.

Arts & Ideas offers a unique platform for students, faculty, and the broader community to explore diverse perspectives and engage in meaningful dialogue. Our lineup features renowned speakers, talented artists, and thought-provoking performances that span a wide range of disciplines within the arts, humanities and sciences. Each event is designed to challenge, inspire, and spark curiosity.

The theme of the 2025-2026 series is Building Bridges, Not Walls. Our society has always been pluralistic, comprising many different peoples and cultures. Yet we have often emphasized the divisions. Variety often meets with scorn; we shrink from engagement with those who are different. Today many refer to the nation as polarized, with the fear that what separates us may prove irreconcilable. Through our theme, we highlight those who are reaching out to effect change or sustain and create connections. These bonds are all the more important as the United States prepares to mark its 250th anniversary in July 2026. The metaphor of the bridge invites us to think of this moment as a time to reflect on where we have been, where we are today, and where we may be heading in the coming years.

2025-2026 Building Bridges, Not Walls Event Schedule

Gilded Age Secrets and the Closing of American Frontiers
Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at 2:30 p.m.
Alumni Room, McCarthy Center (hybrid)
Hybrid Link: https://zoom.us/j/98908795801

A conversation with Maura Jane Farrelly about her new book, Compliments of Hamilton & Sargent. Farrelly examines the loss of our “right to be forgotten” by exploring three East Coast elites who fled to nineteenth-century Wyoming. Despite escaping, their past humiliations followed them—much as the internet preserves our mistakes today.

More Than Glitter and a Good Time: Dr. Tuffy Love, Drag, and Community Building
Wednesday, October 8, 2025 at 12:30 p.m.
Alumni Room, McCarthy Center (hybrid)
Hybrid Link: https://zoom.us/j/93666629250 

Dr. Tuffy Love Andrews (Marc Settembrino, Ph.D.) explores the transformative power of drag to foster solidarity, celebrate diversity, and strengthen bonds. Discover how drag, far beyond just entertainment, serves as a dynamic tool for social change and community resilience. Don’t miss this enlightening discussion on the impact of drag in creating spaces of inclusion and joy amidst intensifying adversity.

s-yéwyáw / AWAKEN
healing people, heals the land
healing the land, heals people
Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 6:00 p.m.
Heineman Ecumenical Center

This award-winning documentary connects the transformative stories of three Indigenous multimedia changemakers and their four Elders. Infused by Indigenous ceremony, s-yéwyáw / AWAKEN walks alongside the process of intergenerational healing. Director Liz Marshall and Ecko Aleck of the Nlaka’pamux Nation (Lytton, BC) will introduce the film and answer questions after the screening.

What Links Us Together?
This is a collaborative, year-long art project designed to encourage connections between friends and strangers. 

Event 1: November 3, 2025, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Danforth Art School, Studio 307

Event 2: February 4, 2026, 11:30 a.m.- 2:30 p.m.
Dining Commons Annex, McCarthy Center (snow date February 11)

Event 3: March 8, 2026, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Danforth Museum and Art School

Event 4: April 25, 2026, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Pedestrian Bridge and Danforth Art School

Community members across Framingham will write, draw, or stitch words on cloth to represent their identities. Then, using an actual bridge as a canvas, the cloth will be knotted and woven together. A digital artistic catalog will be presented at the final event.

Swiacki Children’s Literature Festival 
Thursday, November 6, 2025, from 3:30 to 8:30 p.m. 
McCarthy Center (hybrid)

This day-long, annual celebration of children’s books featuring renowned authors and illustrators includes book signings, a gallery exhibit, lectures and workshops. This year, we welcome to campus author Lesa Cline-Ransome and author/illustrator James E. Ransome. Free admission for FSU students (registration required). For full festival details, including schedule and admission fees, visit www.framingham.edu/sclf. This event is supported by the Framingham Cultural Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

The Arthur Nolletti, Jr. Film Series: The Teachers’ Lounge
Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 4:30 p.m.
Heineman Ecumenical Center

Described by Variety as “a gripping classroom-ethics thriller,” The Teachers’ Lounge follows Carla Nowak, a novice teacher whose effort to protect a student sparks escalating conflict. As suspicion and tension spread, Carla finds herself entangled in a moral crisis that challenges her values—and threatens to undo her. Nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards.

The Arthur Nolletti, Jr. Film Series: Nickel Boys
Wednesday, February 18, 2026 at 6:00 p.m.
Heineman Ecumenical Center

Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Nickel Boys follows the harrowing experiences of Black youths trapped in a reform school’s violent, racist system. By confronting buried histories of abuse, the film urges viewers to reckon with the structures of inequality that continue to shape American life today. Winner of the National Society of Film Critics for Best Picture and Nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2025 Academy Awards.

Linda Vaden-Goad Authors & Artists Series
Tuesday, March 3, 2026, at 4:30 p.m.
Heineman Ecumenical Center (hybrid)
Hybrid Link: https://zoom.us/j/94101353565

Stevie Leigh Andrascik is a fashion artist and educator specializing in sustainable fashion design and upcycling. She will show examples of her work while discussing her unique approach to garment creation using materials others overlook and how that has helped her stand out. Joey Gould, a CASA tutor whose poetry explores faith, grief, longing, birds, & human connection, has published poems, reviews, and two books. They will discuss their ex­perience serving as writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts Firefly Farms in 2024.

The Miriam Levine Reading: Well, Here We Are...The Poems, Stories and Brain-Droppings of Literary Performer Regie Gibson-- (and maybe a few other folks you probably never heard of)
Wednesday, April 1, 2026 at 4:30 p.m.
Heineman Ecumenical Center (hybrid)
Hybrid Link: https://zoom.us/j/97900382566

Come join Regie Gibson for an evening of story, spoken word poetry, song and other almost-relevant musings about what it means to be here (wherever that is). This will be a faux-intelligent, semi-thoughtful, bluesey, jazzy, almost-waste-of-time exploration into what it means to live, laugh, lie, and love as a short-lived hominid.

Higher Education in the Storm of the Future
Monday, April 13, 2026 at 4:30 p.m.
Heineman Ecumenical Center (hybrid)
Hybrid Link: https://zoom.us/j/98889799395

How can colleges and universities best navigate the unfolding challenges of the twenty-first century? Join Dr. Bryan Alexander to explore major forces reshaping higher education, including enrollment and financing, global developments such as climate change, and technological transformations, notably those driven by artificial intelligence and extended reality. Throughout, this futures presentation will offer options for strategy and collective action.

Inclusion and Deprivation: Art and the Deaf Experience
Saturday, April 25, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. 
Logan Gymnasium (hybrid)
Hybrid Link: https://zoom.us/j/96166073965

Deaf people live in a hearing world that often excludes them without consideration and leads to language deprivation. Deaf artists Amanda Hilleque and Isabella Bucci will present work that challenges the assumptions of communication, identity, and privilege, and raises awareness about the everyday reality of being Deaf.

Professor Joseph M. Adelman is Coordinator of the Arts & Ideas Committee.

Joseph M. Adelman

Joseph M. Adelman

Professor, History Department
508-626-4914
jadelman@framingham.edu
May Hall

Patricia Connors

Administrative Assistant, Arts & Ideas
(508) 215-5881
pconnors1@framingham.edu
Crocker Hall
View Arts & Ideas Committee