VASE LECTURES

Photo courtesy of Joe Brusky

Dr. Kim Cosier

Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023, 5:30 p.m. | Center for Creative Photography

This lecture is in collaboration with the Racial Justice Studio.

‘Art Builds Power’

Kim Cosier will discuss her participation in the Art Build Workers, a creative collective action in which artists and designers partner with community organizations to create artwork that makes visible messages of social transformation. The goals are twofold: to support movements by amplifying their messages through visual art, media, and archiving, and to build community through creative collective action.

About Dr. Cosier

She is a professor of Art Education in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she has been happily teaching since 2001. In addition to being a member of the Art Build Workers, she is founder and director of the Milwaukee Visionaries Project, an award-winning media production/literacy program for urban youth. With her wife, Josie Osborne, she is also a founder of ArtsECO, a program that develops teachers as change-makers backed by a strong and sustainable community of arts organizations, non-profits and K-16 school partnerships. She believes in the power of art and the human imagination to create a more just and joyful world.

Her research and teaching interests focus on art and education for social justice, particularly related to intersecting cultural and social factors including gender, race, sexuality and class. Cosier has published two books and numerous articles on these subjects, including: “Transforming City Schools Through Art”; “Rethinking Sexism, Gender and Sexuality,” which won several awards, including an American Library Association Stonewall Award; “This is What Democracy Looks Like”; “On Whiteness and Becoming Warm Demanders”; and “What Can Art and Art Education Do in the Perilous Present?” She is also a member of a performance troupe called Big Gay Church, which has been joyfully stirring up trouble at the National Art Education Association annual conference for the past decade. Cosier lives in Milwaukee with her wife, Josie, and dog, Joey.