Deborah Kennedy (born 1953) is an American author, educator and artist whose work has focused primarily on environmental advocacy and ecological concerns. She has also lectured on art and art history at Santa Clara University and San Jose City College. She has received attention in media for her art projects, most notably along the Berlin Wall before its fall in November 1989. [1] [2]
Deborah Kennedy was born in Connecticut in 1953. [3] [4] She received her BA in the Practice of Art in 1983 from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA in Plastic Arts in 1987 from the San Jose State University. [1] [4] She lives in San Jose, California. [5]
Kennedy's project at the Berlin Wall was installed in April 1989. It consisted of over 100 copper and brass plaques with inscriptions sharing hopes and fears of Americans and people from East and West German. Kennedy's project was featured in a 1989 article for the San Jose Mercury News about its impact on the local community and how it allowed communication between East and West Berliners. [6] Kennedy was assisted by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum along with political activist Ranier Hildebrant in mounting her work on the wall under the scrutiny of East German patrol guards. [5] With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Kennedy's art was also taken down and collected at least in part as souvenirs by locals. [5]
During the mid-1990s, Kennedy received a California Arts Council grant for a project working with young people at a continuation high school to produce graffiti murals. [7] In 1997 she was awarded an Artist's Fellowship for Installation Arts from the Arts Council Silicon Valley. [3] [8] In that same year she completed work on the public sculpture entitled EcoTech featured at the Champion Light Rail Station in San Jose. [4] From September 1999 to March 2000, Kennedy's artworks were featured at the De Saisset Museum of the Santa Clara University for her exhibition titled Nature Speaks. [9] Kennedy has also taught art and art history at Santa Clara University and also taught art history, drawing and design courses at San Jose City College. [5] [10]
Kennedy was commissioned by the San Jose Public Art Program to work alongside sculptor Diana Pumpelly Bates in 2004 on completion of a community project for the Coyote Creek Trail recreational area of San Jose and Santa Clara County, California. Their public artworks, including Kennedy's 'Ripple Effect', are used to promote public awareness of a concrete landing pad and ramp leading to a levee where strollers, wheelchairs, and bicyclists have greater accessibility to the site. [8]
Kennedy was included in the 2021 edition of The Billboard Creative, presenting a portrait from her 1989 Berlin Wall installation on a high-traffic commercial billboard in Los Angeles. [11]
In 2024, Kennedy was named a Creative Ambassador by the City of San Jose's Office of Cultural Affairs, producing a creative project that invites active participation from residents and celebrates the diversity of San Jose's cultural communities. [12] Her project, The Broadside Art and Poetry Project, offers public workshops where San Jose residents produce customized broadsides, giving voice to a wide variety of creative people in the San Jose community.
In 2016 Kennedy published Nature Speaks: Art and Poetry for the Earth (White Cloud Press). It won the 2017 Eric Hoffer and Silver Nautilus poetry book awards for its use of combined visual art and poetry highlighting natural and ecological themes. [13] [14] Nature Speaks was also reviewed by Helen Dumont for the August 2017 edition of the Midwest Book Review . [15] As featured in Gravel Magazine, her work includes projects such as "Plankton Follies", a cento, or a poem created from lines of existing writing. These poems and ink illustrations emphasize the impact of climate change on plankton while incorporating passages from Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly as well as works by Richard R. Kirby and Christian Sardet. [14]
Kennedy has also served as a contributor to other publications. Her satirical poem, Habeas Corpus, was featured in Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, a 2019 anthology of poetry and fictional writing. [16] "Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis," published her poems, First Words and Unseen in 2018. [17] Another two of her poems, Another Day and Seven Springs were published in, "The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought," published by Pittsburg State University in the Fall of 2020. Her poem, "Close as Blood," was published in Caesura, a journal of art and poetry printed by the Poetry Center San Jose. [Caesura, Poetry Center San Jose, Spring 2023, San Jose, CA.]
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.
Santa Clara University is a private Jesuit university in Santa Clara, California. Established in 1851, Santa Clara University is the oldest operating institution of higher learning in California. The university's campus surrounds the historic Mission Santa Clara de Asís which traces its founding to 1777. The campus mirrors the Mission's architectural style and is one of the finest groupings of Mission Revival architecture and other Spanish Colonial Revival styles. The university is classified as a "Doctoral/Professional" university.
Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.
Fruitdale station is a light rail station in the Fruitdale neighborhood of San Jose, California, operated by Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). The station has a center platform situated between two trackways. Fruitdale station is served by the Green Line of the VTA light rail system.
Champion station is an at-grade light rail station on the Green Line and the Orange Line of the VTA light rail system. The station is located in the center median of Tasman Drive just east of its intersection with Champion Court, after which the station is named. This station is the furthest east on the section of track shared by the Green and Orange lines.
Levi's Stadium is an American football stadium located in Santa Clara, California, just west of the much larger city of San Jose, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has served as the home venue for the National Football League (NFL)'s San Francisco 49ers since 2014. The stadium is located approximately 40 miles (64 km) south of San Francisco. It is named after Levi Strauss & Co., which purchased naming rights in 2013.
The VTA light rail system serves San Jose and nearby cities in Santa Clara County, California. It is operated by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, or VTA, and consists of 42.2 miles (67.9 km) of network comprising three main lines on standard gauge tracks. Originally opened on December 11, 1987, the light rail system has gradually expanded since then, and currently has 60 stations in operation.
San José City Hall is the seat of the municipal government of San Jose, California. Located in Downtown San Jose, it was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier in a Postmodern style. It consists of an 18-story tower, an iconic glass rotunda, and a city council chamber wing, laid out within a two-block-long public square known as San José Civic Plaza. The tower rises 285 feet (87 m) above the plaza, making it the fourth tallest building in San Jose.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Cheryl Dumesnil is an American author, poet and editor. She is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. Her poems and essays have appeared in Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Calyx, and Literary Mama. She frequently writes about suburbia, parenthood, and lesbian issues.
Berryessa/North San José station is an intermodal transit center located in the Berryessa district of San Jose, California. The station is served by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) buses. The transit center opened for bus service on December 28, 2019, and subsequently for BART service on June 13, 2020. The station is the southern terminus of the Orange and Green lines.
The Silicon Valley BART extension is an ongoing effort to expand the Green and Orange Line service by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) into Santa Clara County via the East Bay from its former terminus at the Fremont station in Alameda County. Planned since at least 1981, the project has seven stations in three sequential phases.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a spoken-word poet, dancer, playwright, and actor who frequently directs stand-alone hip-hop theater plays.
Yosimar Reyes is a Mexican-born poet and activist. He is a queer undocumented immigrant who was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in East San Jose, California. Reyes has been described as "a voice that shines light on the issues affecting queer immigrants in the U.S. and throughout the world."
Todd Ryan Boss is an American poet, installation artist, film producer and inventor/patent holder, formerly based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but who now maintains no permanent base of operations. He has published several collections of poetry and contributed to literary journals. He has also produced a large body of poetry intended for musical setting, most frequently in collaboration with the composer Jake Runestad, including the Earth Symphony for chorus and orchestra, winner of an Emmy in the category musical composition.
The Coyote Creek Trail is a pedestrian and cycling trail along Coyote Creek in San Jose, California, which continues into Coyote Valley and northern Morgan Hill. The Coyote Creek Trail was designated part of the National Recreation Trail system in 2009. It is also part of the Bay Area Ridge Trail system.
Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) is a contemporary arts space focused on the Chicano and Latino experience and history, located in the SoFA district at 510 South First Street in San Jose, California. The museum was founded in 1989, in order to encourage civic dialog and social equity. The current programming includes visual art, performing and literary arts, youth arts education, and a community art program. The space has two performing arts spaces, a gallery and the MACLA Castellano Playhouse and they frequently host poetry readings and film screenings.
Ruth Tunstall Grant (1945–2017) was an African American artist, educator and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area known for her paintings, community activism, and arts advocacy. Her work has been featured in many invitational group exhibitions as well as solo shows at national and international venues such as Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, Texas; Rath Museum, Geneva, Switzerland; Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California; and Los Gatos Museum of Art, Los Gatos, California. She had a strong focus on community service and advocacy of children’s rights and social justice in and beyond Santa Clara County. She established many innovative, ongoing arts programs and inspired creative activists, such as Marita Dingus.
Jan Rindfleisch is an American artist, educator, author, curator, and community builder. Rindfleisch is known for the programming she initiated and oversaw at the Euphrat Museum of Art; for her book on the history of art communities in the South Bay Area, Roots and Offshoots: Silicon Valley's Art Community, and for her role in documenting the careers and legacies of Agnes Pelton and Ruth Tunstall Grant.
Jacqueline Thurston is a California-based visual artist and writer. She is most known for evocative photographs that explore the human psyche, the nature of illusion, life and death, and primal forces of nature. Her work also extends to drawings, performance, prose and poetry. Her black and white photographic series of the 1970s and 1980s were identified as early examples of a movement toward "psychological documentary" and noted for their ambiguity, sense of stillness and silence, and nuanced use of tone, texture and light to convey mood. In the 1990s, she began to work in color, frequently pairing photographs with the written word, in talismanic "photo objects," artist books and her book and series, Sacred Deities of Ancient Egypt (2019). These works explored shamanistic connections to nature, the creative process in relation to memory, dream and autobiography, and the psychoanalytic roots of symbol and metaphor.
