Near the beginning of her first year at USC as an engineering major, Farrah Diogene attended the musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie at the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown Los Angeles to decompress from her academic workload.

The musical was part of USC Visions and Voices, a series of arts and humanities events held throughout each academic year. The musical dazzled Diogene, inspiring her to change her major from engineering to film and television production — and to become a USC Visions and Voices student coordinator.

“Visions and Voices opens your eyes to what the world is,” said Diogene, a rising senior at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. “All the people who [participate in] Visions and Voices for conversations, workshops or performances are amazing at what they do. It’s an incredible experience, and everyone should [go] at least once.”

Started in 2006, USC Visions and Voices is a universitywide arts and humanities initiative featuring performances and presentations. Many of the events are organized by USC faculty and feature acclaimed artists and distinguished speakers. The initiative aims to provide a transformative, provocative experience for all USC students, challenging them to expand their perspectives and become engaged citizens.

“I’m really proud of the new season of Visions and Voices,” said Daria Yudacufski, executive director of USC Visions and Voices. “We’ve worked with faculty and the USC arts schools to curate a dynamic and wide-ranging series you can’t experience anywhere else. The events are interdisciplinary and highlight the arts and humanities’ power to unite communities and inspire dialogue and understanding.”

The events, free to all students, are often also free to the public, connecting the university to the greater Los Angeles area as part of USC’s commitment to arts and humanities.

“I love the community and all the great conversations I get to have with the V&V team,” Diogene said. “This season, there are a lot of culturally diverse performances and events.”

Visions and Voices 2024-25 highlights

To learn more and stay up to date with all the events, visit the USC Visions and Voices homepage. This year’s preliminary lineup will have more events added in the coming months; some notable upcoming experiences include:

L.A. premiere of Ghostly Labor by the La Mezcla dance and music ensemble

• When: Thursday, Sept. 19, at 7 p.m.
• Where: Bovard Auditorium

First performed at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco last December, Ghostly Labor is the latest work by San Francisco–based dance and music ensemble La Mezcla. It explores the history of labor in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through polyrhythmic movement and a live original score.

Founded by Dance/USA fellow Vanessa Sanchez in 2015, La Mezcla has roots in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous traditions and social justice. Using everything from tap dance to Mexican zapateado, son jarochoand Afro-Caribbean rhythms, La Mezcla brings the often-unseen histories and experiences of communities of color to stages, streets and fields.

Quincy Jones: Beyond Category

• When: Kicks off Friday, Sept. 20, at 7:30 p.m. with Duke Ellington… We Love You Madly Screening and Conversation; series continues through March
• Where: Norris Cinema Theatre

The USC Thornton School of Music’s yearlong tribute to Quincy Jones features Jones’s collaborators sharing and discussing their experiences working with the iconic musician, instrumentalist, composer, conductor, arranger, songwriter, music producer, film and television producer, entrepreneur, investor, social activist and philanthropist.

The yearlong series kicks off with a screening of Duke Ellington… We Love You Madly followed by a panel discussion with collaborators of Jones.

At 91 years old, Jones has worked across styles and media through his seven decades of performing, including classical, jazz, pop, R&B and film scoring. While breaking ground for African American achievement in the entertainment industry, Jones has garnered the highest critical and commercial acclaim. This series of panels, screenings, masterclasses, and live music explores, elevates and celebrates Quincy Jones’ life and legacy.

Bereishit Dance Company: Balance & Imbalance / Judo

• When: Sunday, Feb. 23, at 6 p.m.
• Where: Bovard Auditorium

In the latest piece from Seoul-based [or Korea-based] Bereishit Dance Company, Balance & Imbalance, five dancers — accompanied by an ensemble of Korean traditional drummers —partner and hurtle through space to illustrate the constantly turning wheel of opposition and harmony at the heart of all relationships.

The accompanying piece, Judo, explores the idea of sports as a way to control, traverse and transcend humanity’s violent urges.

Known for its fantastic sense of space and rhythms, kinesthetic clarity and power, and approach to Korean traditional culture from a contemporary point of view, the Bereishit Dance Company was founded by director Soon-ho Park in 2011. The company attempts to connect the forms and themes of specific sports and traditional art genres through choreographic works, and this performance marks Bereishit’s Los Angeles debut.

USC recently hosted its first Music, Health, and Policy workshop as part of Los Angeles County Arts and Health Week, filling Joyce J. Cammilleri Hall on the University Park Campus.

Event organizer Assal Habibi, an associate professor at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who explores the intersection between music and the human brain, brought together a wide range of experts on the importance of art and its effect on human development and well-being.

• Listen to the Lightbulb Moments by USC podcast interview with Assal Habibi.

“The workshop aims to bring people together to foster collaboration and combine our efforts to advance the field of music science,” Habibi said. “Our goal is to go beyond generating scientific results and research and to drive meaningful changes in both education and health policy.”

Speakers included LA Opera soprano Renée Fleming, Dean Jason King of the USC Thornton School of Music, and Shrikanth “Shri” Narayanan, University Professor and vice president for presidential initiatives at USC.

Music’s impact on the brain

Research has shown music’s impact on childhood development and ability to address elderly cognitive decline. One USC study showed that music education can boost cognitive development and emotional well-being among K-12 students. Among older people, the use of music can help patients suffering from dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease recall memories.

The importance of art in schools, especially in relation to the passing of California Proposition 28, was top of mind for many attendees of the event. Approved by voters in 2022, Proposition 28 mandated an increase in funding for arts and music education in K-12 public schools.

Exploring the overlap between music and health

“I’m aiming to bring more conversation on health into the curriculum, and ideally aiming to develop some programs around music, health and sciences,” King said.

“This workshop brought together people who are looking at not only the science of music, but also how it can help in the healing of humans,” Narayanan said. “As a researcher and member of the USC community, I’ve been working at the interface between the mind, body, and music and society. And my work has always been at the nexus of what it means to be human and how it shapes their experiences, especially incorporating computational and engineering methodologies.”

“Visual art, therapy, theater, dance — all of these aspects of who we are as human beings creatively — belong in schools,” Fleming said.

It’s early June and graduate student Jonathan Tam, on an afternoon break, is sitting on a red marble bench outside the USC Fisher Museum of Art. The bench is engraved with a 1947 quote from American novelist, journalist and screenwriter Alvah Bessie: “Either the First Amendment is binding upon Congress and all legislative bodies of our government, or it means nothing at all.”

It is one of 10 benches carved with quotes that are at the heart of Blacklist, an outdoor museum installation by artist Jenny Holzer. It preserves the memory and the words of the Hollywood Ten — a group of producers, directors and screenwriters, including Bessie, who refused to answer questions about possible communist affiliations when called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s. They insisted on exercising their First Amendment rights and as a result, spent time in prison for contempt of Congress and were blacklisted for years by Hollywood studios.

“I just stumbled upon this, but I’ve read all of the messages that were engraved on the benches and the steps,” says Tam, a USC Viterbi School of Engineering student earning a master’s degree in cyber security engineering. “It paints a picture of the fear at the time. You can see all these voices that were silenced right here in the U.S., and mainly in Hollywood.”

An FBI report heightens fears

The U.S. government’s campaign targeting people in the film industry and accusing them of being communist activists further escalated 75 years ago this week. It was on June 8, 1949, that the FBI released a report publicly naming such well-known film stars as Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson as communist activists.

“It led to people losing their careers,” says Steven J. Ross, a Distinguished Professor of History at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “You had someone like Edward G. Robinson, who was never a communist. But he was an ardent anti-fascist, one of the things that got you blacklisted or greylisted. A whole bunch of people who never joined the Communist Party were active in anti-fascist events in which communists participated.”

People who were greylisted, as Robinson was, were no longer hired by Hollywood’s major studios but could find work at minor studios. Ross says a chill was felt throughout Hollywood due to the lists in the 1940s and ’50s, with even the biggest stars realizing they could lose their careers and be unable to support their families.

“If people are faced with losing their livelihoods because they speak out, a lot of people are just going to keep quiet,” says Ross, an author whose books include 2011’s Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics. “People really shut their mouths from 1947 until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Only after his election did Hollywood stars who were center-left start talking politically again.”

Remembering those silenced

In the late 1990s, faculty members of the film writing program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts formed the First Amendment/Blacklist Project committee to address the fact that many future filmmakers knew very little about this dark period in U.S. history that destroyed the careers of so many creative people.

The committee unanimously chose well-known contemporary artist Holzer — known for her presentation of words and ideas in public spaces — to create a work of art in a public setting focused on the government’s blacklisting campaign. The result in 1999 was a secluded garden in front of the Fisher Museum of Art, located in a quiet section of USC’s University Park Campus along Exposition Boulevard.

“[Holzer] made her name with these very bold, visible quotes that are meant to get you to think,“ says Stephanie Kowalick, Fisher Museum of Art’s director of collections, compliance and exhibitions. “Just from an aesthetic perspective, I think she’s done a beautiful job of highlighting the different viewpoints and how important free speech is, period. It also just really honors the people who lost their livelihood to the blacklist.”

Including Bessie, the individuals who made up the Hollywood Ten and are represented in the Blacklist garden are Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo. In addition to the names and quotes on the granite benches, five paths lead to the installation’s central garden made up of red and gray slabs, with quotes from others offering alternative perspectives on freedom of speech and ideas.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas summed up the atmosphere of the blacklist era and its impact on freedom of speech in his engraved 1952 quote: “Fear has mounted — fear of losing one’s job. Fear of being investigated. Fear of being pilloried. This fear has stereotyped our thinking, narrowed the range of free public discussion and driven many thoughtful people to despair.”

Still a timely message

Kowalick hopes that the 75th anniversary of the FBI list’s publication will serve as motivation for people to visit the Blacklist garden, which is open to everyone, anytime, and is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

“We live in turbulent times right now,” she says. “If you are fearful or concerned or think that history doesn’t repeat itself, this is the exact thing that you need to go see and familiarize yourself with. History is cyclical, and we should be learning from it all the time.”

Although the garden is located in a part of campus that is not well-trafficked, it is a quiet, open space for reflection. That’s why Tam, who works as a webmaster at the USC School of Architecture, often finds himself returning to the spot for his afternoon breaks.

“Someone can eat their lunch here and not even really know what’s there,” says Tam, who served six years in the U.S. Navy before returning to school. “This is a pretty quiet but also powerful place.”