NOTE: This is an intermittent feature highlighting CSUSB faculty who are mentioned in the news. Faculty, if you are interviewed and quoted by news media, or if your work has been cited, and you have an online link to the article or video, please let us know. Contact us at news@csusb.edu.
Palm Springs Life published a profile of Sant Khalsa, CSUSB professor emerita of art, whose work, the article said, “exists as political actions for environmental and social justice, as well as personal, spiritual artifacts. No single project more ideally, engagingly, and magically embodies the many facets of her practice as does Growing Air (an interdisciplinary hybrid of residency, performance, meditation, photography, and video). …
“Khalsa’s work exists as political actions for environmental and social justice, as well as personal, spiritual artifacts. No single project more ideally, engagingly, and magically embodies the many facets of her practice as does Growing Air.
“‘Sant Khalsa has immersed herself in the desert landscape as much as any fictional gold miner,’ says the artist’s longtime Los Angeles gallerist, Paul Kopeikin. ‘With a camera instead of a burro, she sleeps, eats, and breathes the desert as if her life depended on it.’ Whether working in black-and-white or color photography, interdisciplinary research projects, or sculptural and installation art, Kopeikin says, Khalsa’s ideas grow from a ‘passionate inquiry into the nature of place.’”
The article was published Dec. 1, 2016, and may be read at “Images Into Action: Water and social justice permeate 30 years of Sant Khalsa’s art and activism.”
Many events in the community marked the anniversary of the Dec. 2, 2015, tragedy at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, in which 14 people —including five CSUSB alumni — lost their lives and 22 more wounded. One of them, a musical presentation titled ““Trauma, Loss, and Transcendence,” dedicated to the victims and survivors, enlisted the talents soprano and CSUSB music professor Stacey Fraser, The Sun and The Press Enterprise reported. The work was performed Dec. 1 and 2 at the Culver Center of the Arts in Riverside.
That article, published Dec. 2, 2015, may be read in The Sun at “Dedicated to victims, music-video experience aims to transcend horror of San Bernardino terror attack.”
Criminal justice professor Brian Levin, often a go-to expert for the news media on topics of terrorism and hate crime because of his work as director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, was sought by several news outlets on topics related to the Dec. 2, 2015, tragedy.
In a KPCC interview, he spoke about the community’s treatment of its Muslim residents since the incident. While an increase in anti-Muslim incidents were recorded in the last year, San Bernardino did not have the same experience. Levin attributes it to the way community and faith organizations came together to mourn those who died and to heal. “I think that speaks quite a bit to the fact that when we are trying to recover and move forward, everybody has to show up and roll their sleeves up and work together as a community,' he said.
That article was published Dec. 2, 2016, and may be read at “Muslims still living with fallout from San Bernardino shooting.”
In a KCBS news report about the investigation into the Dec. 2, 2015, attack, Levin of Cal State San Bernardino told KNX 1070 that additional information that the wife of the shooter didn’t think a Muslim should have to participate in an office Christmas party could be just one piece of the motive given that the shooters had sought to carry out an attack in 2012. Both the article and online video report, posted Dec. 2, 2016, can be viewed at “Police: Christmas party may have triggered San Bernardino terror attack.”
And Levin will have the last word. The Huffington Post on Dec. 2, 2016, published his column, “One year later: We have the last word, not the terrorists.” He wrote: “While the terrorists message was loud, its not the last one. Ours is. And while you’ll never meet any of those lost, you’ll get to hear their words, if you try to listen.
“The poetry and prose of those lost, live on in the hearts, hands and lips of those so painfully left behind, who remain our community’s shining stars and I’d like to bring a few of them to you today, on the first anniversary of this terrible event, which has left us bowed, but not broken.”