Milestones
Art from the Heart celebrates 40 years
The University Art Gallery’s Art from the Heart benefit auction celebrated its 40th anniversary in February 2023, attracting 450 guests and raising $19,500 for arts programs.
Among more than 100 artists included in this year’s auction were works by the late Jack Stuppin, LA-based artist Mineko Grimmer, legendary printmaker and SSU Emeritus Studio Art Professor Shane Weare, renowned Bay Area painter and SSU Emeritus Studio Art Professor Mark Perlman, and two artists recently exhibited in the deYoung Open Exhibition: Patrice Wachs and Eileen Parent, SSU Studio Art lecturer and BFA alumna.
The first AFTH fundraising event was organized around Valentine’s Day, according to its founder and then gallery director, SSU Emeritus Art Professor Bob Nugent, a world-renowned artist.
“I asked my artist friends to send me a valentine. Something small, like a postcard or a work on paper, that would fit into a normal-sized envelope. For their contribution, I sent each artist a T-shirt with a small heart on it.” That tradition has continued.
SSU Holocaust & Genocide Lecture Series turn 40
“Can we make ‘never again’ more than a slogan? Can we make it a lived reality?” said Genocide scholar and author James Waller, addressing 200-plus attendees at the 40th anniversary of the SSU Holocaust and Genocide Lecture Series.
Considered “a unique and essential program” by the genocide studies community, the lecture series is both a semester-long credit course for students and a free public forum. Over four decades, it has brought Holocaust and genocide survivors, liberators, and world-renowned scholars to Sonoma State. At a reception where posters of all the speakers lined the walls, current and past speakers, family members, organizers, and participants greeted and embraced each other in an emotional reunion. Event speakers included emcee Dean of Social Sciences Troi Carleton, Holocaust survivor Rena Victor, President Mike Lee, past series coordinator Professor Diane Parness, Petaluma Vice Mayor Janice Cader Thompson, and members of both the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and the Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide.
