The 2024 Art Education Speaker Series is pleased to welcome Dave Eassa and Dr. Carissa DiCindio.
Rethinking Art Museums and Their Communities through Exploration
Using a framework of museum ecology, DiCindio will discuss how exploration inside and around art museums can help us to interrogate the relationships between art museums and their communities. She will share strategies for bridging art museums with their communities from both the perspectives of art museum educators and collaborators, including PK-12 and community art educators.
Mise-en-place
Can art center care? Can artists? For yourself? For others? Can we all move forward together?
Eassa will discuss his studio practice over the last decade centering community while moving through mediums of painting, sculpture, people. From the studio, to the prison system, the museum world, and in the Middle East, art and skateboarding have been tools to build, nourish, and strengthen relationships between real people. Eassa’s practice encourages individual and collective empowerment through participation in arts experiences.
Carissa DiCindio is an Associate Professor in Art and Visual Culture Education in the School of Art, University of Arizona. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the graduate interdisciplinary program, Applied Intercultural Arts Research, and co-director of the Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies. Her teaching and research center on art museum education, with a specific focus on museum-community partnerships, university art museums as spaces for collaboration and innovation, and creating opportunities for dialogue and connection in art museum programming. She collaborates on projects and programs with museums and community organizations in Tucson to develop experiential learning opportunities with university students. Prior to her position at the University of Arizona, DiCindio was the Curator of Education at the Georgia Museum of Art where she worked for 14 years. She holds an MA in art history and a PhD in art education from the University of Georgia.
Dave Eassa is a visual artist and cultural worker living and working San Diego, CA. He has exhibited nationally in solo exhibitions including Cody Gallery, Arlington, VA, The Shed Space in Baltimore, MD, SPACE Gallery Portland, ME, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA, and in group presentations at Good Mother Gallery, Oakland, CA, Signal, Brooklyn, NY, LVL3 Chicago, IL, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY, and Reh Kunst, Berlin, Germany among others. His work has been published in New American Paintings and The Pinch Journal. He was most recently commissioned for a large scale collaboratively designed sculpture for the Harwood Community Garden, in Baltimore, MD. He has been an artist in residence at Space Gallery in Portland, ME, ACRE in Steuben, WI and most recently at 7Hills in Amman, Jordan during the summer of 2021.
He was an Open Society Institute Baltimore Community Fellow from 2015 through 2017 where he founded Free Space, a program which brings the arts to the Maryland Prison system, teaching art to men and women’s correctional facilities. He spent the last six years as the Director of Public Engagement at the Baltimore Museum of Art working on a range of initiatives that challenge and question what it means to be a museum in present day Baltimore. Through this he established the BMA Lexington Market, a branch of the Baltimore Museum of Art in Lexington Market, the nation’s oldest continuously operating public market. In addition to the BMA Lexington Market, he oversaw the Joshua Johnson Council, the nation’s oldest African American Museum Support groups and co-curated Histories Collide: Jackie Milad x Fred Wilson x Nekisha Durrett, commissioning two artists to contend with and be in conversation with the provocation What images and thoughts occur when myth and history collide? the question that Wilson’s historical work from 1992 Artemis/Bast.
In 2018, he was selected as one of 50 Young Cultural Innovators from across the globe for the YCI Fellowship at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Salzburg, Austria. Over the last two years, he has been serving as a Salzburg Global Fellow as part of the recently launched Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety, and Justice cross-national collaboration. Currently he is the Managing Director at the Dea Hurston Arts Center in Carlsbad, CA, the first cultural center outside of NYC to be named after a Black woman.