Since its inception in 2001, the acclaimed VCS Forum has featured thought leaders from a wide range of creative and scholarly fields. Open to the entire CCA community, these public-facing talks aim to foster dialogues across disciplines on contemporary issues in the visual arena.

This spring, each Forum speaker comes from our own CCA community. Each brings a unique perspective on visual and critical methodologies grounded in their respective discipline(s). Collectively they speak to how visual culture operates as both a tool of critique and transformation. Their work embodies a hybridized, inclusive, and engaged approach to examining the visual and cultural systems that define—and can redefine—how we see ourselves and the world.

This semester’s particular focus is on methods that:

1. Unpack dominant narratives of race, gender, and power.

2. Explore the intersections of representation with personal and collective memory.

3. Reimagine the role of visual culture in building a more inclusive future.

About the Speaker:

tamara suarez porras (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY, and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, working across photography, filmmaking, and writing. tamara examines dynamics of seeing, remembering, forgetting, and how photography attempts to know the unknowable. Often beginning with collected and family archives, their work explores how memory and self-knowledge can be unraveled through layers of a photograph.

tamara has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, School at the International Center of Photography, En Foco Touring Gallery, Filter Photo, Houston Center for Photography, Bedford Gallery, fusedspace, Root Division, California Institute for Integral Studies, Embark Gallery, and the Kala Art Institute. They have published artist books with Sming Sming Books, Deep Time Press, and National Monument Press, and written for The Brooklyn Rail, SFMOMA’s Open Space, 48Hills, Art Practical, and contemptorary.

tamara is a Lecturer in Photography at Stanford University, and adjunct faculty in photography and art history at colleges throughout the Bay Area. They are a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Photography + Imaging and California College of the Arts with an MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual & Critical Studies. tamara is a member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab and the Curatorial Council of Southern Exposure.