Celebrate a Decade of Imagining America at UC Davis at National Gathering This Weekend

As Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, or IA, enters its final year at UC Davis, the campus will host IA’s 2026 National Gathering this weekend. Organized in partnership with UC Davis and a regional Steering Committee, the gathering will bring together more than 400 public scholars, artists, organizers and students from the region and IA’s national network for three days of learning, making, and sharing through arts, design and humanities.

This year’s theme, Tides of Transition: Restoring Collective Spirit in Troubled Times, explores transitions, from political crises and climate change to personal identity and organizational transformation. The event will be the last national event hosted at UC Davis before IA moves to Pennsylvania State University in July.

What to expect

Workshops, creative activities, plenary talks and many opportunities to connect will take place across campus and beyond. More than 200 speakers will participate in 70 sessions on themes that include climate action; community resilience; disability justice; the role of art in youth development; and higher education and learning in troubled times. The gathering will also include creative workshops in poetry, ceramics, collage, zine-making and dance. This year’s IA Clearing, a special track during the gathering, is inspired by Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and will offer interactive spaces to imagine a thriving future in 2046.

Award-winning author Alexis Pauline Gumbs will deliver the opening plenary Friday (Oct. 23) with “Every Night”: June Jordan and the Orbit of Freedom. Community-led workshops will feature organizations from across the country, including Alternate ROOTS, Appalshop/Performing Our Future and Fresno-based Pan Valley Institute. Other offerings will explore intergenerational music, community theatre and storytelling.

Looking back at decade of Imagining America

As Imagining America’s decade at UC Davis nears its end, Faculty Director Erica Kohl-Arenas recalls a performance that was interrupted by an electrical short during the first national gathering at UC Davis in 2017, and the “magical” response that followed. 

An electrical short cut the lights off in Main Theater at Wright Hall, just as Lacresha Denise Berry was to perform her one woman show about Harriet Tubman,” Kohl-Arenas said. “Suddenly in the dark, the audience sighed and mumbled as the brand-new IA staff hustled to get the lights back on. From a corner of the dim theater, a participant named Nii Armah Sowah started singing. A Ghanaian-born arts educator, Nii’s lilting Ghanaian lullaby filled the space. Soon, another participant joined in for the chorus. And another, until everyone was singing together in the dark. Little did we know, Nii’s song was about perseverance in the dark and the importance of supporting one another in troubling times. Of course, our singing brought the lights back on, with a little help from the IA staff. And the performance was wonderful.”

Beyond the gathering, IA’s impact on the field of public and community-engaged scholarship has been far-reaching. IA led a multiyear initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation to explore how academic institutions can better support public and community-engaged scholars, including research conducted by UC Davis graduate scholars. It also co-organized a Sawyer Seminar funded by the Mellon Foundation on interdisciplinary approaches to Food Studies and food justice. 

IA also led a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with a community partner in Mississippi on how food and art can help create healthier communities. Its research Collaboratories engaged more than 30 IA member campuses in research, peer learning and creative work.

IA has hosted community and cultural events to bring people together on and off campus to address pressing regional issues and to build connections across institutional, disciplinary and community-university divides. Such events have included a roundtable in Oak Park to discuss the launch of Aggie Square, talks and workshops on the importance of archives in remembering and cultivating Black cultural life and story circles — a practiced used by IA that was developed by late artist John O’Neal of the Free Southern Theater. 

IA also co-sponsors an exhibit currently showing at the Davis Arts Center, Good Fire, Living Water, showcasing the eco-cultural arts of Wintun/Maidu culture-bearer Diana Almendariz, her family and her artist and scientist collaborators in the Yolo bioregion.

As IA wraps up its time at UC Davis and prepares for its move to Penn State, Kohl-Arenas expressed her gratitude for the people creating space for connection, expression and transformation.

“Looking back on a near decade as IA’s faculty director, I am in awe of the IA community,” Kohl-Arenas said. “There is something incredibly special that happens when we get together, especially during the National Gathering. I look forward to welcoming our campus community and artists, scholars, performers and attendees from across the nation as we celebrate creativity, performance and human connection.”