SSW Opening Ceremony 2024
The SSW Anti-Racism Planning Group invites you to the 2024 Opening Ceremony. Join us for an intentional community grounding + intention setting, the honorary renaming of Seelye Hall, guest poet Jason Montgomery, dinner with local food trucks and music from our fantastic SSW DJs Basma and Coco.
All members of the SSW community and their families are welcome to attend.
Opening Ceremony Speaker
Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano of Indigenous Californian/Mexican descent writer, painter, community artist and engagement artist from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, MA.
JRM's work engages the cross-section of Chicano/Indigenous identity, cultural hybridization, post-colonial reconstruction and political agency. His writing and visual art bridges the aesthetics and feel from the early cubist collage movement and the Russian abstract movement of the 1920s with living and historical transborder Indigenous and Chicano art traditions to explore the post-colonial narrative through active synthesis and guided (re)construction.
JRM’s work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Storm Cellar, Ilanot Review, Cosmonauts Avenue and other publications. JRM is one of 2021 Newell Flather Awards for Leadership in Public Art outstanding nominees and 2021-2023 Easthampton Poets Laureate. JRM is also the co-founder of the police abolition group “A Knee is Not Enough” (AKINE) in Easthampton, MA and they are also the founder of the annual Holyoke Community Ofrenda and various public engagement projects.