Spurlock Sunday: Circumstances Needing Superheroes

• Event Date: Sunday, March 9, 2025
• Time: 1:00 pm–3:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Hundley Central Core Gallery, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

• Workshop

All ages welcome!

Superheroes enthrall most American kids from a young age: with their extra‐ordinary abilities, their mythical origin stories, and the special challenges each seems to face in society as a kind of outsider due to their physical appearance, and/or a need to hide aspects of themselves others perceive as weird or threatening. Superheroes are not unique to American culture, however across diverse cultures superheroes share many commonalities: type and fit of costumes, body type, gender type, ethnicity, and an apparent disinterest in intervening to address certain social issues (i.e. economic inequality, racial injustice, ecological harm).

Superheroes reflect our ideal selves as harm‐preventing allies willing to act on the behalf of strangers, too. The “too” implies the understanding that while others have social obstacles to their wellbeing that differ uniquely from our own, their effects are also experienced as distress. As March is *Women’s History Month*, let’s consider that outside of biological issues, the biggest threats to women’s health worldwide are domestic abuse and rape: the threat of being forced by someone typically bigger and stronger than you to engage in acts against one’s will. Can you believe that such circumstances can have superheroes with a specific commitment to intervene against threats to any woman’s physical and psychological safety.

Join us to design 2‐D visual drawings of and/or 3‐D costume pieces for superheroes committed to circumstances such as these.

• Spurlock acknowledges inspiration for this program from Alison Finch at www.BippityBricks.com
• Explore La Borinqueña, an original superhero series created by graphic novelist Edgardo Miranda‐Rodriguez and on view in Caribbean Indigenous Resistance / Resistencia indígena del Caribe ¡Taíno Vive! https://www.la-borinquena.com/