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Professors Ximena Gómez and Karen Kurczynski have continued to make plans for the 2022–23 Mellon Sawyer Faculty Seminar on "Race and Visual Culture in the Americas." They invited visiting artists and scholars who will participate in the seminar next year, including Chicana artist Alma López and Native artist Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe) and scholars Kate Morris and Margo Machida. The final conference on May 5, 2023, will include public presentations by curator Kelli Morgan (PhD, Afro-American Studies, UMASS), Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh, and a keynote presentation by Native museum studies scholar Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk). They also hired a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow, Cat Dawson, to lead the parallel seminar for interdisciplinary PhD students at UMASS and teach a seminar on contemporary art and public monuments in Spring 2023.  Dr. Dawson is a scholar of art history and gender and sexuality studies whose work investigates the social construction of subjectivity in postmodern and contemporary American visual culture. Dr. Dawson received their PhD in Visual Studies at the University of Buffalo and their BA in the Study of Women and Gender from Smith College.