Social Art-ivism: Black Panther Culture, From Oakland to the World with Pamela Mays McDonald

Join Pamela Mays McDonald, Arts Advocate, Historian, Activist, and Curator, for a discussion and exploration of a case study on Oakland’s Black Panther culture. The motto that propels her art activism is “Yesterday’s histories unravel today’s mysteries.” Mays McDonald explores Black culture through multiple artistic lenses — language, music, visual and performing arts, literature, poetry, fashion, ritual and spiritual expression.

Mays McDonald is a former fine arts museums director and community organizer from San Francisco and Oakland, California, who currently resides in Philadelphia. A graduate of Pomona College in Claremont, California, she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and completed her Masters and PhD studies in Linguistics in Washington DC as a Georgetown University Graduate Fellow.

Her professional museum career was launched as a Smithsonian Institution Doctoral Fellow. In San Francisco, she had a hand in the envisioning, rebuilding, and opening of five popular museums: the de Young, Legion of Honor, Asian Art Museum, Museum of Performance and Design, and Museum of the African Diaspora.

Presented as part of the Tucson Humanities Festival spring series, the College of Humanities and Department of Africana Studies invite you to join us for several events in February to celebrate Black History Month.