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When a guest lecturer steps into a classroom, most students take the opportunity to slouch submissively into their desks or surreptitiously creep out of the room.
But when Linda Anfuso is that lecturer, such behavior is difficult to get away with. Racism, sexism and countless other "-isms" are discussed, challenged and debated; apathy is not an option.
"She just shocked me," undeclared sophomore Michael Brandt said. "I've never seen somebody grab a classroom like that and refuse to let go."
Brandt is one of the thousands of students whom Anfuso has spoken to at universities all over the United States and abroad. Anfuso has been an active member of the UNL Artist Diversity in Residence program for five years, spending weeks at a time in Lincoln sharing her experiences with students.
And Anfuso, now in the middle of a six-week residency, will be doing it again tonight at 8 in Avery 217, when she speaks to a mass media class. Race and gender issues will be the order of the evening, and Anfuso promised a frank and eye-opening discussion - but for students who have been lucky enough to have Anfuso visit their classrooms, that is nothing new.
She has spoken to students in nearly every major, and she has done so under a variety of occupational hats - as a writer, as a painter, as a businesswoman, as a poet and as a teacher, just to name a few.
"Ever since I was very young, I've been interested in a variety of things," Anfuso said. "And instead of buying into the idea of specialty, I've spent my life exploring all of them."
A self-made renaissance woman in both theory and practice, Anfuso is not content to keep her talents to herself. She has published her poetry in two books - "Stolen Daughter" and "Red Coat and Other Poems" - and her visual artistry has been published in the form of "Palette of Period Pigments." She is currently working on a book that will teach young jewelry makers how to market their creations.
But art is not her only form of expression. Through residency programs at universities, Anfuso has been able to speak not only of her art, but of her mind.
And her mind is filled with issues that many students refuse to acknowledge. Anfuso takes her confrontational brand of politics and education directly to the students through her lectures and discussions. Most of these discussions center on - for lack of a better term - the politics of inequality.
"You have to talk about these things, because ignoring them obviously hasn't made them go away," she said.
Anfuso knows about such issues firsthand. She was born and spent the first few years of her life on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York. When she was three years old, she was taken from the reservation and her family and placed in a foster home.
"I remember some things about (St. Regis) very clearly," Anfuso said. "I remember my room. I remember my grandmother."
It was soon after leaving the reservation that Anfuso began her scattershot approach to self-education, plunging into the several different fields that shaped her into the multi-talented person she is now. And she also began to learn how unjust America could be, particularly to a Native American woman.
"There are so many practices that people don't think about, things they do and say every day, and they don't realize that they are affecting people negatively," Anfuso said.
"I see these things clearly because I've been on the negative side of them. I try to expose these people and these actions for what they are."
Another way in which she unveils these issues is through her home page on the Internet. Filled with dynamic images, bold poetry and proclamations that challenge the viewer, this page was - as should be no surprise - conceived, designed, written and even scripted by Anfuso. Because of Anfuso's involvement in UNL's artist residency program, the page is now available for viewing at http://www-class.unl.edu/adrp.
Minority issues are prevalent everywhere, but particularly so at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where the vast majority of students and faculty members are of European descent. Many people realize this, Anfuso said, but many people don't recognize another more basic point of contention: the history of the area itself.
UNL, all of Lincoln, Omaha and much of the surrounding area was stolen from the Omaha tribe, and the majority of people who now live here are effectively trespassers, Anfuso said. It is the failure to address basic issues such as this that leads to events such as the controversy surrounding UNL's anthropology department and its disposal of Native American remains.
"Something like that will get a lot of press, and it will stir up a lot of talk, but it's really just the tip," Anfuso said. "It's just one small part of the problem."
Anfuso is content to chip away at the larger problems through her art and the time she spends in the classroom. But even for this obviously dedicated and undeniably talented artist, not everything is politics.
"Sometimes I just paint for the aesthetic, and I don't even think about making a grand statement regarding anything," she said.
"I don't always have to have something to say."
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