This episode of CAA Conversations, featuring Lilia Cabrera, Gina Gwen, and Christen S. García, considers borderlands-informed art pedagogies as acts of classroom, community, and artist practice, in both formal and informal spaces of art education. These guests make productive liminal spaces of art education by harnessing cultural, navigational, familial, creative, and linguistic capital.
Lilia Cabrera explores multiple environments with her art education students, offering experiences to work alongside hospital patients, asylum seekers in shelters, and resident doctors in Rio Grande Valley, Texas, hospitals. Her students work with communities with a range of age groups, motor skills, and cognitive abilities. She has taught art at various levels ranging from early childhood to university. She creates opportunities that align with the education of regional communities lacking in art experiences and has led art education students to create art workshops to delicate, low-economic, and multicultural youth in a border town. Cabrera is a lecturer for the art education program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and an Associate Dean for Student Succes for the College of Fine Arts.
Gina Gwen Palacios creates work highlighting the underrepresented geographic and cultural narrative of the people and land of South Texas. Rooted in the theory of conocimiento, Palacios invites viewers to embrace a multiplicity of perspectives and honor the rich, marginalized knowledge and history embedded in the US/South Texas borderlands. She is an associate professor and the Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley.
Christen S. García theorizes through lived experiences, sharing autohistoria-teorías as creative capital in nepantla espacios. García is co-founder of the Nationwide Museum Mascot Project and is an associate professor in the Department of Art Education at Florida State University. García is co-author of Art Borderlands in Theory, Practice, and Teaching, with Leslie C. Sotomayor II (Routledge, 2025) and is co-editor of the book BIPOC Alliances: Building Community and Curricula (Information Age Publishing, 2023).
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This episode of CAA Conversations, featuring Lilia Cabrera, Gina Gwen, and Christen S. García, considers borderlands-informed art pedagogies as acts of classroom, community, and artist practice, in both formal and informal spaces of art education. These guests make productive liminal spaces of art education by harnessing cultural, navigational, familial, creative, and linguistic capital.
Lilia Cabrera explores multiple environments with her art education students, offering experiences to work alongside hospital patients, asylum seekers in shelters, and resident doctors in Rio Grande Valley, Texas, hospitals. Her students work with communities with a range of age groups, motor skills, and cognitive abilities. She has taught art at various levels ranging from early childhood to university. She creates opportunities that align with the education of regional communities lacking in art experiences and has led art education students to create art workshops to delicate, low-economic, and multicultural youth in a border town. Cabrera is a lecturer for the art education program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and an Associate Dean for Student Succes for the College of Fine Arts.
Gina Gwen Palacios creates work highlighting the underrepresented geographic and cultural narrative of the people and land of South Texas. Rooted in the theory of conocimiento, Palacios invites viewers to embrace a multiplicity of perspectives and honor the rich, marginalized knowledge and history embedded in the US/South Texas borderlands. She is an associate professor and the Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley.
Christen S. García theorizes through lived experiences, sharing autohistoria-teorías as creative capital in nepantla espacios. García is co-founder of the Nationwide Museum Mascot Project and is an associate professor in the Department of Art Education at Florida State University. García is co-author of Art Borderlands in Theory, Practice, and Teaching, with Leslie C. Sotomayor II (Routledge, 2025) and is co-editor of the book BIPOC Alliances: Building Community and Curricula (Information Age Publishing, 2023).
For Students, By Students: Cultivating Belonging through Curricular Partnerships // Ceglio // Douberley // Paul
CAA Conversations
46 minutes 41 seconds
8 months ago
For Students, By Students: Cultivating Belonging through Curricular Partnerships // Ceglio // Douberley // Paul
In this episode of the CAA Conversations, Amanda Douberley, Clarissa J. Ceglio, and Alison Paul discuss the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut, which brings student perspectives into its galleries and fosters belonging through innovative curricular partnerships. Three recent projects undertaken by classes in UConn’s School of Fine Arts produced student-centered interpretive materials for the Benton’s exhibitions. Each interactive project connected the museum with the campus community in a different way and cultivated a sense of belonging for both students enrolled in partner courses and student visitors to the Benton.
Clarissa J. Ceglio, PhD, is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities, Associate Director of Research, for Greenhouse Studios, and Associate Director of Collaborative Research for UConn’s Humanities Institute. Her research focuses on the ways in which museums, past and present, engage diverse communities in issues relevant to individual and civic thriving. She looks, too, at the affective and rhetorical uses of material, visual, and digital artifacts in constructing national and social imaginaries. Through her teaching and research, Ceglio also collaborates with museums, libraries, and communities on interdisciplinary public-facing and grant-funded projects that engage diverse audiences in topics of contemporary concern.
Amanda Douberley is Curator & Academic Liaison at the William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is responsible for connecting Benton’s collections and exhibitions with teaching in departments across the university. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the museum, often in collaboration with faculty and other campus partners. Douberley holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on 20th-century American sculpture and public art. Before coming to UConn in 2018, she taught in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alison Paul is an Associate Professor of Art and Area Coordinator for the Illustration/Animation concentration in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut. Paul creates illustrations and stop-motion animations using cut paper collage. Her work is fundamentally about storytelling to a variety of audiences. Paul’s animations have been shown in film festivals internationally, and her children’s books have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. She has curated exhibitions at the William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs and the Roots Reading Room in Providence, RI. Professor Paul has taught at UConn since 2011.
CAA Conversations
This episode of CAA Conversations, featuring Lilia Cabrera, Gina Gwen, and Christen S. García, considers borderlands-informed art pedagogies as acts of classroom, community, and artist practice, in both formal and informal spaces of art education. These guests make productive liminal spaces of art education by harnessing cultural, navigational, familial, creative, and linguistic capital.
Lilia Cabrera explores multiple environments with her art education students, offering experiences to work alongside hospital patients, asylum seekers in shelters, and resident doctors in Rio Grande Valley, Texas, hospitals. Her students work with communities with a range of age groups, motor skills, and cognitive abilities. She has taught art at various levels ranging from early childhood to university. She creates opportunities that align with the education of regional communities lacking in art experiences and has led art education students to create art workshops to delicate, low-economic, and multicultural youth in a border town. Cabrera is a lecturer for the art education program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and an Associate Dean for Student Succes for the College of Fine Arts.
Gina Gwen Palacios creates work highlighting the underrepresented geographic and cultural narrative of the people and land of South Texas. Rooted in the theory of conocimiento, Palacios invites viewers to embrace a multiplicity of perspectives and honor the rich, marginalized knowledge and history embedded in the US/South Texas borderlands. She is an associate professor and the Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley.
Christen S. García theorizes through lived experiences, sharing autohistoria-teorías as creative capital in nepantla espacios. García is co-founder of the Nationwide Museum Mascot Project and is an associate professor in the Department of Art Education at Florida State University. García is co-author of Art Borderlands in Theory, Practice, and Teaching, with Leslie C. Sotomayor II (Routledge, 2025) and is co-editor of the book BIPOC Alliances: Building Community and Curricula (Information Age Publishing, 2023).