Culture Counts: The Arts and Humanities in Our Time

As museums and libraries scramble for funding, and binge-watching supplants reading, ClassACT HR73 has stepped into the void to launch its newest focus group on culture. The classmates who have joined this committee have begun to consider challenges like our society’s emerging anti-humanistic strains, as well as the algorithmization of our personal cultural choices, a trend that threatens to separate us all from each other.

To begin the conversation about what the humanities and arts mean in a time when tech lords and influencers seem to talk over us all, the committee will present the online forum “Culture Counts: The Arts and Humanities in Our Time.”

Culture Counts is honored to include the world-renowned multi-media artist Laurie Anderson as a panelist. Anderson’s musical compositions and performances, her stage presentations, and her drawings, videos and sculptures have expanded the frontiers of the arts. In 2021 she gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, and in 2024 she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

The forum’s panel also includes the award-winning playwright, storyteller and educator Mfoniso Udofia, whose plays have been produced by San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and the Huntington Theater in Boston, and whose screenwriting credits include Pachinko and Lessons in Chemistry. Joining her will be the socially-engaged comedian Hari Kondabolu, who has written for Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell and has appeared regularly as a panelist on NPR’s “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” Visual artist and environmental activist Alexis Rockman, whose paintings and drawings depicting the effects of climate change have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, completes this extraordinary panel.

Moderating the forum and heading the new Culture Counts working group is renowned jazz guitarist/bass guitarist Jerome Harris ’73. Jerome has published scholarly essays, toured on six continents, recorded with klezmer clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer, and worked with three NEA Jazz Masters including the legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.