FREE | Every Friday: May 9 - September 19 | 5 PM - 6 PM
Join us throughout the residency season for our free public series of short and informal artist talks, readings, and presentations. We’ll learn about works-in-progress from our artists and scholars-in-residence with informative and inspiring presentations in all disciplines. This is a wonderful way to kick off your weekend! Bring a friend, all are welcome.
Location: Main Campus. Look for Craigardan Event sign at the end of Main Campus driveway (two “doors” west of the farm store, towards Keene). Google Maps Link
Adam Vander Tuig
Adam Vander Tuig is Craigardan’s 2025 John Brown Lives fellow. Adam is a theologian, educator, and John Brown enthusiast, born and raised in rural Nebraska. He currently works as the Faith-Based Educator and Researcher at the Highlander Center, a folk and movement school founded in 1932 in the mountains of East Tennessee, and is a recent recipient of a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship (2023). Adam is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (PhD), Harvard Divinity School (MDiv), Jesus College in the University of Cambridge (MPhil), and Nebraska Wesleyan University (BA). He organizes with Christians for a Free Palestine, facilitates base societies with the Institute for Christian Socialism, and is an ordinand in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He adores and delights in his spouse and three children (one of whom was named after John Brown).
Yvette White
Yvette White is Craigardan’s 2025 Frist Peoples Fellow. She is an Abstract Mixed Media Artist from the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory. As a wife and mother of two, Yvette has carved a distinctive place for herself within the local art community, transforming the challenges and triumphs of her life into vibrant, thought-provoking art. Her educational journey, culminating in degrees from St. Lawrence College via Iohahi:io in 2011 and SUNY Potsdam in 2017, set the stage for her persistent and passionate engagement with the Akwesasne Art World.
Her portfolio delves into themes of profound social and personal significance—addressing intergenerational trauma, confronting sexual assault, advocating for breast cancer awareness, and illuminating the tragedy of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women with her award-winning piece, “Lost and Followed.” This artwork, in particular, has been recognized with a Juror’s Choice award at the 2023 Akwesasne Art Market and Juried Show, marking a significant achievement in her career and in the fight for justice and visibility.
Yvette's art is a celebration of color, emotion, and movement, grounded in the principles of abstract impressionism, with a distinctive blend of geometric and organic abstraction. She describes her creative process as beginning with an emotion, a color, and moving the paint around. This intuitive approach allows her to explore the balance between form and fluidity and features elements of nature, spirituality, and femininity.
Her journey is about "painting for personal discovery, for the love of art, and for all who find solace in it." Through her Indigenous abstract lens, which melds the raw expressiveness of abstract impressionism with the structured beauty of geometric shapes and the natural flow of organic forms, Yvette invites us into a world where art is not only a form of expression but a bridge to understanding deeper truths about ourselves and the world we share.
Jumi Bello
Jumi Bello is a disabled black woman writer from Washington DC who writes about madness and the future. After spending the majority of her twenties living overseas in Asia as a high school teacher, Jumi received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and is now an English + Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Nevada-Las Vega. Her doctoral research focuses on contemporary American literature, speculative fiction, disability studies, mad studies, and carceral studies.
As a writer, Jumi is focused on producing work that radically reimagines how the world understands carceral ableism and care within the context of supporting people of color who live with psychiatric disability. For her doctoral dissertation, she is completing a draft of a literary speculative novel about radical mental healthcare, disability justice, and Black Panther Party activism in twentieth-century Chicago. Her work has been supported by various literary institutions including StoryStudio Chicago, the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, Corporeal Writing, Tin House, Roots Wounds Words, Writing x Writers, Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Black Mountain Institute, and Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. Jumi lives in the Midwest with her husband and stepson.
It is her hope that her works of literature radically reimagine a future where people like Jordan Neely and Sonya Massey, people like herself can not only live but thrive. The dark and disabled have dreams, too. Our stories matter. This world is ours too.