Peer Academic Leaders (PALs) for 2020-2021

By , March 13, 2020 9:36 am

The Peer Academic Leadership (PAL) Program is seeking engaged undergraduate students to serve as Peer Academic Leaders (PALs) for the 2020-2021 Academic Year. This is a great opportunity for students interested in helping others while developing their leadership skills.

Want to learn more?

  • Stop by the Peer Connection (ASSC 2nd Floor) during our walk-in hours: Wednesdays 2-3pm and Thursdays 11am-Noon
  • Email umkcpalprogram@umkc.edu or call 816-235-6709

Apply here: https://tinyurl.com/UMKCPAL2020

Priority application deadline is March 20, 2020

Your Vote Counts!

By , March 10, 2020 10:51 am

Voting begins on March 16, 2020 at 7:00am and ends on March 19, 2020 at 11:59pm.  

All voting will take place via the Roo Groups system at:  https://roogroups.umkc.edu/

Student Art Exhibition opens March 19

By , March 5, 2020 3:05 pm
Images courtesy of the artist

Prescribed Assimilation a HARD pill to swallow

MA Exhibition by Luke Blevins at the UMKC Gallery of Art

March 19th– April 18th, 2020

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 5-7 pm

Prescribed Assimilation explores the tangential relationships between boyhood, social expectations, queer culture, heteronormative assimilationism, and nostalgia. Blevins uses nostalgia as a sense of self-identity to reference and recontextualize the past through his personal lens. Nostalgia lends itself to fantasy as our memories are unreliable; we create gilded moments to revisit as escapism.

Looking back on his childhood, Blevins see the gaps between nostalgic memories and the events that shaped him. It is in these moments that fantasy, and reality intersect. Blevins views these intersections as representing what we perceive and strive for as children and the shifting relationships we have with social structures as adults.

For Blevins, the life he has led is a queer experience that is questioned by himself and society at large. His work explores the question of how he fits into the queer community and the heteronormative state. Blevins states, “as my work grows, my ability to relate to the prescribed notion of the homosexual is stretched thinner and thinner.”

Through digital manipulation and processes, Blevins creates images that propose narratives without conclusions that are snap shots of the in-between. This is achieved via layers of information combined in photoshop; color, shadow, and object work to obscure reality and paint his experience of the world in all its falsity.

Photos become paintings which become photos again. Through shifting and reiterating concepts across mediums, Blevins states, “I make art to better understand how society has shaped me. My work is a question of acceptance, alternatives to assimilation, and how I relate to the world.”             

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