This October, we are celebrating Black History Month, within which the Black History Month Art Exhibition has opened at Bower Ashton, pop along and see it before 31 October!
For Black History Month at City Campus, we really wanted to do something that had a long term impact and really embedded The Students’ Union and UWE’s values of diversity, inclusion and community. With this in mind, Jayne Saul Paterson and Steve Norton brought some exciting new books for students into the Library at Bower, by writers such as Salena Godden, Vanessa Kisuule, Upile Chisala, Yrsa Daley ward and Lemn Sissay.
Together with UWE Library we decided to run an evening of poetry by local poets and UWE students offering a chance for students to see established local poets such as Bristol's first poet laureate, Miles Chambers, perform. We were also lucky to have along established poet, Lawrence Hoo, and writer in residence at the Bristol Old Vic, Liz Myttton. We were also delighted to welcome back three performers, Pearl, Valerie and Antonette from the St Pauls based theatre company Breathing Fire. The Urban Collective also shared with us a couple poems from their book, Lyrically Justified. Our City Campus Officer, Joe Marshall Evans, commented: "It was an amazing night, listening to poetry by people from all different walks of life. Also, it was great to see people come up and want to share their poetry as part of the event."
In order to have an interplay with other disciplines we asked our art students to create artistic responses to these poems. To see the student responses please come long and have a looked around the Bower Ashton library on the 1st Floor where an exhibition will be on display from Monday 22 October until the end of the month.
In November we will be holding an auction of this artwork to raise money for a local community project and we will be sending out more details through our social media channels later this month, so watch this space!
2023 Welcome wristbands are out now! We've got a very exciting calendar of events in store...