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Joe Rohde — Floating Mountains: The Art of Imagining the Impossible - With Bethanee Bemis — at Conn Ave
Past event
Featured Book
Floating mountains: the art of imagining the impossible
Disney Legend and Imagineer Joe Rohde unlocks the secrets of creativity in this powerful exploration of imagination, innovation, and life lessons for turning vision into reality.
In this inspiring narrative, Imagineer, explorer, and Disney Legend Joe Rohde offers a master class in creativity on a world-spanning journey to discover the origins of personal creativity, the power and potential of enterprising groups, and the remarkable parallels between collaboration and exploring the real world.
With lessons drawn from his celebrated career and life experiences—leading projects such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom, ventures into space tourism, field expeditions to far-flung corners of the world, managing design teams, and working with corporate executives—Rohde dives deep into the nature, nurture, and practice of collaboration. He explains how to keep ideas to true to their origins while allowing for improvisation and accident to enhance, not derail, creative endeavors. And anecdotes from his storied career are accompanied by more than 50 behind-the-scenes photographs, sketches, and original artwork.
These are stories of inspiration and invention, challenge and transgression, success and failure, laced with humor, contemplation, poignancy, and even life-threatening danger. Whether your interest in creativity is personal, professional, or you just want to peek behind the curtain of a renowned creative mind, Rohde’s lessons provide a guide for connecting your creative pursuits with others and the larger world.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Disney Legend and Imagineer Joe Rohde unlocks the secrets of creativity in this powerful exploration of imagination, innovation, and life lessons for turning vision into reality.In this inspiring narrative, Imagineer, explorer, and Disney Legend Joe Rohde offers a master class in creativity on a world-spanning journey to discover the origins of personal creativity, the power and potential of enterprising groups, and the remarkable parallels between collaboration and exploring the real world.With lessons drawn from his celebrated career and life experiences—leading projects such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom, ventures into space tourism, field expeditions to far-flung corners of the world, managing design teams, and working with corporate executives—Rohde dives deep into the nature, nurture, and practice of collaboration. He explains how to keep ideas to true to their origins while allowing for improvisation and accident to enhance, not derail, creative endeavors.These are stories of inspiration and invention, challenge and transgression, success and failure, laced with humor, contemplation, poignancy, and even life-threatening danger. Whether your interest in creativity is personal, professional, or you just want to peek behind the curtain of a renowned creative mind, Rohde’s lessons provide a guide for connecting your creative pursuits with others and the larger world.Joe Rohde is a Disney Legend, creative consultant, former Disney Imagineer, artist, traveler, storyteller, and conservationist. An Experience Architect for Virgin Atlantic, he was previously the Executive Designer and Vice President, Creative, of the Walt Disney Imagineering division, where he was the lead designer of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park and Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa, among other projects. A graduate of Occidental College, he is well known for his trademark earring, made up of souvenirs from decades traveling to remote corners of the world. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife.Rohde will be in conversation with Bethanee Bemis, a museum specialist with the Division of Political and Military History at the National Museum of American History, where she works to ensure the intellectual and physical care of the division's 150,000+ political history objects. She has been part of the exhibit team for several exhibits at NMAH, including most recently the forthcoming Mirror, Mirror for Us All: Disney Theme Parks and the American Experience. Her fields of interest include the development of national symbols and the evolution of the national narrative. Her current research focuses on the Disney them parks as locations of the formation and negotiation of the American identity.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Featured Author
Rohde, Joe
Joe Rohde is a Disney Legend, creative consultant, former Disney Imagineer, artist, traveler, storyteller, and conservationist. An Experience Architect for Virgin Atlantic, he was previously the Executive Designer and Vice President, Creative, of the Walt Disney Imagineering division, where he was the lead designer of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park and Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa, among other projects. A graduate of Occidental College, he is well known for his trademark earring, made up of souvenirs from decades traveling to remote corners of the world. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife.
In Conversation With
Bethanee Bemis
Bethanee Bemis, a museum specialist with the Division of Political and Military History at the National Museum of American History, where she works to ensure the intellectual and physical care of the division's 150,000+ political history objects. She has been part of the exhibit team for several exhibits at NMAH, including most recently the forthcoming Mirror, Mirror for Us All: Disney Theme Parks and the American Experience. Her fields of interest include the development of national symbols and the evolution of the national narrative. Her current research focuses on the Disney them parks as locations of the formation and negotiation of the American identity.
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Claudia Castro Luna — The Flowers Along the Way: A Memoir — at Conn Ave
This event will be in partnership with Salvadoran Cultural Institute.Passionately demonstrating the dormant trauma of political violence and the redemption waiting beyond itFrom El Salvador’s lush countryside to the streets of Oakland, California, a young mother wrestles with the intersecting forces of memory, history, and language in order to chart a new path for herself and her growing family. Fleeing political unrest and civil war violence in El Salvador, fourteen-year-old Claudia Castro Luna arrived in the United States with her family in 1981. Two decades later, holding her two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, she survives a public shooting by hiding behind shrubs in front of her house in Oakland. This event unleashes disorienting and traumatic memories, plunging her into a journey of discovery as she grapples with PTSD, recovers family stories, and begins to make sense of all that was torn asunder within her by the experiences of war and emigration. Beauty, longing, fear, and joy entwine in this powerful story of love, self-determination, and the search for home.CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a former Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Green, the World; Cipota Under the Moon; Killing Marías; One River, A Thousand Voices; and This City, a chapbook. Her nonfiction has appeared in anthologies, journals, and newspapers. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives and dreams in English and Spanish.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Roberto Tejada & Christina Wiginton — Art & Water: Volume 2 - with Kaira M. Cabañas — at Conn Ave
Essays, personal meditations, and images that explore water in all its renewing, destructive, corrosive, and connecting powerWater and its transmutations link the contributions in Art & Water, the second volume in the series Art & from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. The series situates the study of art at the intersection of various disciplines—here, they include modernist literature, poetry, film, and both natural and built environments. Essayists use water to address hydrolatry practices in India; ritual objects and practices of enslaved Afro-Surinamers; traces of millstones in the architecture of Seville; and visualizations of sea-level change in the nineteenth-century United States. Their research places art within broader conversations in the humanities considering a water-oriented rather than terrestrial historical framework.The book is enlivened by first-person narratives that examine deeply embedded meanings of water. Continuing the series’ tradition of exciting book design, an enclosed poster from Brazilian multimedia artist Aline Motta addresses ancestry, memory, and belonging across the Black Atlantic while compellingly conjuring water’s capacity to transform, bring together, and renew. Water as a connective theme offers a fitting lens to advance understandings of how art, as both material object and practice, remains entangled with the natural, supernatural, and scientific—and, like water, remains inseparable from our daily lives.Distributed for the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual ArtsRoberto Tejada is an award-winning poet and the author of art histories that include Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América (2026), National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as the poetry collections Carbonate of Copper (2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022) and Exposition Park (2010). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Tejada serves as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches creative writing and art history.Christina Wiginton is an art book publishing specialist focused on color-critical print production for visually ambitious museum publications and nonfiction books. She has worked extensively in illustrated book development, first at the Smithsonian Institution and now at the National Gallery of Art.Tejada and Wiginton will be in conversation with Kaira M. Cabañas, the award-winning author of several volumes, including Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art (2021), which received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award. Her previous work, Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (2018), was recognized as a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Since 2023, she has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Brian Jay Jones — The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building - with David O. Stewart — at Conn Ave
An in-depth exploration of history of the US Capitol building and the incredible personalities who built it, full of dramatic stories, surprising facts, and offering a powerful testament to what the Capitol has meant to generations of Americans, and how it’s endured.The Capitol is a unique biography of a place, encompassing architecture, history, politics, popular culture, and race in a fascinating exploration of our Capitol's secret history; a history rife with political intrigue, assassination attempts, thwarted bombings, and gunmen on the run. Never mind ghostly cat prints, mysteriously bloodstained steps, and charming “fairy doors” that have delighted visitors for hundreds of years. Spanning across three centuries of American history, it focuses on iconic and easily recognizable names and personalities from the past—from George Washington to Davy Crockett to Ronald Reagan—as well as countless colorful characters readers may not have heard of before, with a focus on restoring the stories of enslaved people and recognizing their contributions. The story of the Capitol is the story of America itself, and, for the first time, that story will be told in this sweeping, aspirational biography of the building at the very heart of the American experiment.Brian Jay Jones is the critically acclaimed, bestselling biographer of some of the world’s most iconic creative geniuses. Born in the Midwest and raised in the Southwest, Brian has a degree in English from the University of New Mexico. He spent more than two decades as a public policy analyst and speechwriter for thought leaders and elected officials at all levels of government, including nearly ten years in the US Senate. He presently lives in New Mexico.Jones will be in conversation with David O. Stewart, who has published eleven award-winning and best-selling books of history and historical novels. In 2023, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Washington Independent Review of Books. His most recent fictional series, the Overstreet Saga, is inspired by family stories his mother told. He lives in Maryland with the light of his life, Nancy Floreen; they have three children and six grandchildren.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.