10 Things to Do at Pitzer This Spring

An aerial shot of Pitzer’s campus showing the grassy Mounds, green trees, and white and beige academic buildings as students walk along pathways.

Celebrate 60 years of Pitzer College. Learn the history of Black midwifery. Delve into Peru’s political revolution. Listen to a sharecropper-turned-environmental poet. Reunite with old friends and classmates during the first in-person Alumni Weekend since 2019.  

Besides the ultimate rite of spring—Commencement—Pitzer is offering a slate of festivities, artistry, and illuminating scholarship that you won’t want to miss: 

1. Multimedia art, Civil Rights, and plague histories. Now through March 25, Pitzer College Art Galleries exhibits Britt Ransom’s Arise and Seek and Maya Gurantz’s The Plague Archives.  

Ransom utilizes digital fabrication processes such as 3D printing and laser cutting to examine her familial history’s links to the Civil Rights movement. Gurantz incorporates dance, video, performance, text, and installation, which she deploys to examine race, gender, and class. These ideas manifest in video projections and archival material on the social, cultural, and political histories of epidemics and outbreaks.  

Bonus: Pitzer College Art Galleries is also presenting the faculty-driven exhibition Remembering Jaider Esbell. Curated by Daniel Segal, Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History, the exhibition honors Jaider Esbell, who was artist-in-residence at Pitzer in 2013. 

2. A water justice eco-documentary. Join the Redford Conservancy and other Adelanto Water Justice Coalition partners for a film screening and discussion on February 20 at 4:15 p.m. Created by Pitzer students Tessa Van Buren ’23 and Alex Macdonald ’24 and Pomona student Gabriela Camacho PO’24, the eco-documentary Por Un Adelanto Mejor is part of the Redford Conservancy’s Annual John D. Sullivan Lecture series on water in California. Learn how Pitzer and Adelanto community members have organized around water justice. 

3. Pitzer College turns 60. On Founders Day on February 21, students, staff, faculty, alumni, and emeriti faculty can join us for an all-day campus celebration, starting with a community breakfast at 8:45 a.m. Learn about the history of Pitzer, participate in a “Pitzer Then and Now” conversation with members of the founding classes, and partake in games and activities. 

4. Discover your career. Pitzer’s Career Services welcomes alumni for their Career Discovery Series. On February 21 at 6 p.m., Mayte Sanchez ’13 will discuss her role as director of energy at Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. On February 28 at 6 p.m., Jeremy Greer ’18 will explore the field of marketing. On March 6 at 7 p.m., Sandra Gonzalez Gutierrez ’09 will talk about biotech, accounting, and real estate. Career Services will also hand out free padfolios and walk with students to Harvey Mudd’s career fairs for computer science/math on February 23 and the sciences on March 2

5. What’s happening in Peru? Since December 7, 2022, Peru has been gripped by an Andean-based uprising. Despite violent state repression, the people continue to mobilize. On February 22 at 4 p.m., visiting Critical Global Studies Professor George Ygarza, human rights organizers, and community leaders will discuss the historical roots of this rebellion while bringing state violence into focus. 

6. From a sharecropper to a poet. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke visits campus on February 28 at 4:15 p.m. A labor and environmental poet, Hedge Coke was a sharecropper by the time she was in her mid-teens. Hedge Coke teaches at UC Riverside and is the author/editor of 18 books, including Look at This Blue, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Poetry. 

7. Emotional and psychological wellness. Pitzer’s Strive2Thrive produces diverse weekly programs. Take a workshop about interpersonal skills & mindfulness on Mondays. Participate in Wellness Wednesdays or learn distress tolerance & mindfulness. On Fridays, join the GRIT group, emotional regulation & mindfulness, or the ADHD organizing & scheduling support group

8. Contemporary scholarship in Classics. Classicist Sasha-Mae Eccleston will deliver the 2023 Stephen and Sandra Glass Annual Humanities Lecture on April 24 at 4 p.m. Eccleston challenges her field to confront how it has furthered and benefited from racism and demonstrates the value of thinking simultaneously about critical theories of race and texts from Ancient Greek and Latin-speaking worlds. 

9. Welcome home, alumni. On April 28–30, all alumni are invited to celebrate the milestone reunion classes ending in 3s and 8s, and Pitzer’s Trailblazers classes who graduated in 1973 or earlier. We are planning a weekend to reconnect with professors and old classmates and meet new friends. 

10. Black midwifery and public health. On April 28–29, Professor of Sociology Alicia Bonaparte and other organizers will host the Midwifery is Public Health (MIPH) Conference. MIPH speakers are experts in the history of Black midwifery; the critical role of Black midwives in the perinatal health landscape; and public health education, research, and practice. 

About Pitzer College

Pitzer College is a nationally top-ranked undergraduate liberal arts and sciences institution. A member of The Claremont Colleges, Pitzer offers a distinctive approach to a liberal arts education by linking intellectual inquiry with interdisciplinary studies, cultural immersion, social responsibility, and community involvement. For more information, please visit www.pitzer.edu.

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