Events

The Poetics of Resistance in Gainesville and the States

with Alejandro Aguirre

Friday, April 14th

7pm – Free with Registration

We are hosting a poetry workshop with Alejandro Aguirre in partnership with ARTSPEAKSgnv’s Bard and Broadside: North Central Florida Poetry Festival. The festival runs from April 13-16 and this year’s theme is “Unity in the Community Through Text and Image.” https://www.artspeaksgnv.org/north-central-florida-poetry-festival

This workshop explores the place of poetry in response to a history of segregation. Following a discussion of examples from Natasha Trethewey, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Jericho Brown, visitors will compose a collaborative poem via the “exquisite corpse,” a technique invented by the surrealists. A paper will be passed around the room. Each visitor will add two lines to its poem and fold away the first so that the following contributor may only draw inspiration from the last line. (Those less inclined to writing original lines may write an erasure poem instead, transforming transcripts of oral histories from the exhibition into poems.) Responding to the exhibits at the Matheson, particularly We’re Tired of Asking: Black Thursday and Civil Rights at the University of Florida, guests will leave the workshop with a new poem of resistance to recite and share.

Free Registration – https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-poetics-of-resistance-in-gainesville-and-the-states-tickets-592394095687

Zoom Registration – https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mkUNwMsfT0WXVynkR6oOLg

The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream

with Jason Vuic, Ph.D.

Thursday, April 20

7pm – Free with Registration

In partnership with the University of Florida Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience, and the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine we are excited to welcome historian and author Dr. Jason Vuic to share about his latest book The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream.

In his lecture, Vuic will dive into the history of the “installment land sales industry,” which seemingly appeared out of nowhere to sell billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result was Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others–sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots. These communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

This program is sponsored by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Humanities Fund, the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number 2000013562, and the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER).

Free Registration – https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-swamp-peddlers-tickets-591515176817

Zoom Registration – https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ln2S4V1JQnSCiFNPjV4cAg