The B-Word Project: ‘Defiant Gardens’ in Wartime

Banned, Blacklisted and Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It (The B-Word Project) is the first campus-wide initiative at CSULB, led by the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, to focus attention on one broad topic through innovative collaborations with professors, departments, organizations, and off-campus entities. It will stimulate wide-ranging discussions and activities that examine what happens when a voice—whether in artistic endeavors, journalism, scientific research or other areas—is stifled through governmental, commercial, or social restraints.

The B-Word Project activities include significant participation by the performing artists known as the NEA 4 (Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Karen Finley); a talk by former NEA chair Bill Ivey; many new course offerings; a reconstructed dance piece by Bill T. Jones performed by CSULB students; creation of new digital music by students under the guidance of Negativland and Girl Talk; a major visual art exhibit on the Peace Press; a substantial look at newly-restored censored murals by David Alfaro Siqueiros; a film series on the effects of the Hollywood Blacklist and FCC Decency/Obscenity Rules; a visiting artist series focusing on visual artists with informal meetings and lectures; a residency by Sweet Honey in the Rock with performances and workshops on the music of American slaves; a project on Japanese internment camps of WWII and the inmates’ creation of gardens as a response; among other events.

The CLASsiC Blog will cover all future events as part of the B-List Series. The first event held as part of the B-Word Project will be held on February 25 by the CSULB Japanese Garden.

The idea of self-empowerment and resistance by way of garden cultivation intrigues landscape historian and architect Kenneth I. Helphand, who explores the universal capacity of humans to endure extreme situations and their powerful responses via the constructed landscape in his book, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.

During the Winter Lecture presented by the Friends of the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden at CSULB, Helphand will discuss his historical study on gardens produced under the conditions of war, cultural oppression and economic hardship. The program takes place at 7 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 25, in CSULB's Daniel Recital Hall.

Date: Friday, February 25, 2011
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: CSULB Daniel Recital Hall (next to the Pyramid)
Cost: Free for CSULB students, Friends of the Japanese Garden, and their guests. General public admission is $5.
RSVP: required by calling (562) 985-2169.

Helphand is the Knight Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon and chair of the Senior Fellows of Garden and Landscape Studies at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library.  He will present examples from World War I, Nazi Europe, and the Japanese-American internment camps in the United States, including Merritt Park, a Japanese garden built in 1943 by the internees at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, recently excavated by the National Parks Service.

The lecture is the inaugural program of Cal State Long Beach’s “The B-Word Project: Banned, Blacklisted & Boycotted,” a campus-wide initiative on censorship and the response to it, coordinated by CSULB’s Carpenter Performing Arts Center. Helphand’s presentation is made possible in part by a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; and the Friends of the Japanese Garden.

For more information, please visit www.csulb.edu/~jgarden.