Ed Ruscha, Deirdre Cooper Owens, and Tom Nichols lead the discourse at Oxy this semester
From art to history to politics, the Oxy calendar has been top-heavy with visitors who had plenty to say this semester. Oxy Live! welcomed visual artist Ed Ruscha to Thorne Hall on February 4. On February 18 and 19, historian and reproductive justice advocate Deirdre Cooper Owens visited Occidental as the 2025 Stafford Ellison Wright Scholar-in-Residence. On April 8, Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols delivered the 2025 Jack Kemp ’57 Distinguished Lecture in Choi Auditorium.
Ruscha, whose urban landscapes and multimedia work were featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art last year, packed Thorne for his talk with Paul Holdengräber. “His creative vision challenges us to see the world through new perspectives and his contributions to our arts ecology is nothing short of extraordinary,” said trustee Lisa Coscino ’85, who presented Ruscha with an honorary doctorate from Oxy last May. “In so many ways, Ed Ruscha is L.A.”
The Omaha, Neb., native, who came to L.A. to study commercial art in 1956, first made a splash in the 1960s, when he began to publish artist’s books under his own imprint. His initial book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), was warmly received by many, but intellectuals were put off by the content, Ruscha recalled: “They felt like I was messing with their minds.”
An associate professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut, Cooper Owens spoke in Choi Auditorium on “Slavery, Gynecology, and Black Placental Resistance: Why Black Mothers Matter.” She also led a healing circle with her cousin, Dr. Joy Cooper, co-founder and CEO of Culture Care, a telemedicine startup for Black women, and disability rights advocate Lisa Holloway.
Black studies and American studies double major Mikayla Woods ’25, who interned with Cooper Owens at the Library Company of Philadelphia in summer 2023, calls the professor “a true trailblazer. Her devotion to the intersections of scholarship and advocacy work is inspiring.”
An admitted “small-c conservative,” Kemp Lecturer Nichols expanded on the themes of his most recent books, The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy, discussing the weaponization of expertise in popular culture and the anti-democratic movement in the middle class.
“Can any republic survive on ignorance?” he asked in closing. “The answer is no. Our founders in the United States argued that only an informed electorate could sustain this democracy. Even before many of them had died, Adams, Washington, Madison, and others believed that they were already seeing the end and that we weren’t going to make it.” So, what he’s saying is there’s a chance.
