The Moreno Valley College Art Gallery’s Spring Exhibition will feature the works of Amy Balent, department chair for the School of Visual and Performing Arts.
 
Balent is a cubist/abstract expressionist painter specializing in oil and watercolor painting. The term “abstract” refers to artwork based primarily in the exploration of color, shape and the gestural mark of the artist’s hand rather than artwork that reproduces the exact appearance of people, places or things in the world.
 
She studied studio art, painting, printmaking, and watercolor in Washington, DC, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art at Georgetown University and a master’s degree in Painting from George Washington University. Her work has been commissioned, collected and exhibited widely, including in her former gallery in Santa Fe. She has been teaching classes in a variety of art media at the College since 2001.
 
In her bio, Balent said, “I became a painter when a flat surface offered me a visceral tangibility of spirit via the joyous devastation of unattainable mastery. I found in the rhythm of brushstrokes an alternating validation and deconstruction of self and a mysterious compulsion to chase its metaphors to that aching, irresistible endlessness. I consider my work a study in opposites, the challenging of known structures.

“Formal techniques and design strategies are my instruments in exploring the balance between caution and risk, control and spontaneity, and structure and unravelling. I enjoy destroying content with its absence, then deliberately salvaging its identifiable parts. This ordered chaos of improvisational suspension and subjective rescue is a humbling stream of ‘unknowing’ where I find my greatest confrontation and comfort.”
 
Lauren Johnson, Art Gallery director, said, “Individuals will find hints of recognizable forms, but ordinary objects explode into glorious angles and sinuous lines that invite the eye to dance across the canvas.”
 
The Spring Exhibition is in the Student Academic Services Building, Room 121, and online until April 22. For more details and information, email Johnson.
 

Join the Center for Social Justice & Civil Liberties and Cellar Door Bookstore for conversations about Nikole Hannah-Jones' The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. This in-person event at the Center for Social Justice & Civil Liberties is free to the public. To register, please click here. 

Visitors 12 years of age and older will need to provide proof of vaccination and booster in order to enter the Center for Social Justice & Civil Liberties. Masks are also required.

In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom today signed a higher education budget trailer bill, the California Comeback Plan, that addressed college affordability and access – including expanded student financial aid, education and training grants for workers displaced by the pandemic, transfer pathways for community college students, and college savings accounts for low-income and underrepresented public school students.

The bill also provided $115 million to community colleges to expand the zero textbook cost initiative. The initiative intends to devise an open educational resource for courses. Marty Alvarado, executive vice chancellor for Educational services in the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, told Inside Higher Ed that the “system plans to release application materials to the 116 community colleges by end of this month,” with funding to be released by the end of March.

Open Educational Resource or OER is materials for teaching or learning that are either in the public domain or have been released under a license that allows them to be freely used, changed, and/or shared with others. Such material can substitute for more expensive textbooks. There has been significant increase in the cost of textbooks. Between 1977 and 2015, the cost of textbooks increased by over 1,000 percent. The price of textbooks increases by an average of 12 percent with each new edition. New editions released every three to four years can cost 50 percent more than previous versions.

Community college leaders claim that OER will ensure more students graduate, particularly since 60 percent of California’s 1.8 million community college students are housing insecure and 50 percent are food insecure, based on 2019 data.

Each of the community colleges will be required to collect data and report back to the Chancellor’s Office as well as account for how funds were spent. 

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office released a two-minute video highlighting how the state’s community colleges impact communities and adjusted to learning delivery during the COVID pandemic.

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office is holding a six-part series of webinars addressing Equitable Recovery in Action: Becoming Antiracist, Student Ready Institutions. In the midst of ongoing economic recovery, the pandemic, and pervasive inequities in achievement, the need to accelerate system-wide has become even more urgent.

The webinars will highlight the ongoing efforts to adopt, customize and scale equity-advancing strategies, tools and resources to facilitate systemic change and cultivate a more equitable, inclusive and transformative teaching and learning ecosystem. Informed by the core commitments of the Vision for Success, these webinars will focus on a range of issues required to becoming antiracist, student ready institutions, including, but not limited to:

To register, click here.