Professor Michael Stevenson Jr. [studio art] and Professor Kate Ming T‘ien Duffly [theatre] plan to use the grant to encourage efforts to imagine a just future for communities, alongside Gregory MacNaughton ’89.
By Faolan Cadiz ’25
March 13, 2025
Kate Ming T’ien Duffly, theatre professor, and Master Artist Michael Stevenson Jr., professor of studio art, received a Collaboratory grant from Imagining America in February that will fund a project seeking to engage artistic practices and the voicing of community ideals, both within the Reed community and in the larger Portland area.
With the help of the grant, Duffly and Stevenson's project, “Dreaming ‘America,’ Enacting Community Joy” will encourage intentional efforts to imagine a just future for communities, big and small.
They're joined in their work by Cooley Gallery Education Outreach Coordinator Gregory MacNaughton ’89. The trio will lead a series of conversations with Reed community members about the contentious idea of “America.” They plan to use ideas from the conversations to create large-scale, paper mache puppets, transforming collective imaginations into objects.
Stevenson and Duffly are long-time collaborators; their last project was Cosmic Sandwich, an event that used food to approach forward thinking and creativity within the Reed student body.
The project draws on Duffly’s experience with community-based performance. This includes producing plays and leading classes that spotlight diversity and inclusion within community performance. She has a long history working with puppets and teaches a class at Reed called Puppetry and the Performing Object. Duffly says she values how paper mache can aid in the creation of “beauty through accessible materials.” For “Dreaming ‘America,’ Enacting Community Joy,” Stevenson will use their knowledge of socially-engaged art and their recent work with monuments in the city of Portland to help bring the puppets to life.
MacNaughton will also participate in the project, bringing his long-time commitment to community and appreciation for artistic expression displayed in his work with the Calligraphy Initiative and volunteer program “The Sun School” at Grout Elementary.
The project will culminate this summer with the Everything Under the Sun Parade, a public procession to foster community joy and display the puppets. This will be the second annual implementation of the parade, and the programming will also include collaboration with local community groups such as Hygiene4All and the Portland Puppet Museum.
Imagining America is a consortium that promotes equity through public scholarship and community organizing. By uniting humanists, artists, and scholars, the cross-disciplinary work inspires collective imagining and action through local events and opportunities for social practice in promoting a more equitable America.