Join us for an evening with writer, educator, and arts leader Carol Becker. She will read from her upcoming book-in-progress: A Time of Radical Imagining: California 1968-1978. In this last of her memoir trilogy, she attempts to capture an explosive period of revolutionary ideas and actions. Part memoir, part history, the book connects Becker’s time as a doctoral student at the University of California San Diego to the politics of that moment. An early organizer and participant of the Women's Liberation Movement in San Diego, an Anti-War activist, and an organizer of the United Farm Workers Union grape and lettuce Boycott in North County, Becker's new writing is an account of that turbulent but hopeful decade that dramatically shaped her life and intellect.

She will read excerpts from her chapters on “Wildness” and the California landscape, as well as an excerpt about farmworkers, labor exploitation, and the historic grape and lettuce boycott.

Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts, Dean Emerita Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender and Anxiety; Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art; and Artist in Society: Rights, Roles, and Responsibilities. Her recent memoir is Losing Helen: An Essay.

Alongside each program on labor, we organize a group discussion around a text selected by our guest speaker. Becker recommends reading the chapter "Labor" in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, especially section 17 that focuses on the distinction between work and labor. There, Arendt suggests that the artist is the only “worker left in a laboring society.”

We'll gather at the Wattis at 5:15 pm to have an intimate discussion facilitated by Becker and the Wattis staff.