Imagine you have turned the last page in the 2012-13 Campus Community Book Project, and, then, right in front of you, the author appears.

In fact, Isabel Wilkerson will do just that, next week, when she visits the campus to give a talk about her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, referring to the period, 1915 to 1970, when 6 million blacks fled the South, going north and west, and changed the face of the United States.

It had been vastly underreported until Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner with The New York Times, came along with The Warmth of Other Suns, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2010.

The Warmth of Other Suns is the 11th book in the Campus Community Book Project, born out of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way to inspire people to look at the world in different ways, to acknowledge and consider different perspectives, and to engage in respectful discussion. The Office of Campus Community Relations sponsors the project.

Wilkerson’s talk is scheduled for 8 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 12, in Jackson Hall at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets: mondaviarts.org, or (530) 754-2787 or (800) 754-2787.

The organizers said Wilkerson will sign books afterward in the Yocha Dehe Grand Lobby.

Exhibitions at the Nelson and Crocker

The author’s visit brings to an end the book project’s talks and discussions for 2012-13, but there are still a couple of related art events on the schedule.

• Views on Migration: Jacob Lawrence and Elizabeth Catlett — Works by the late African American artists comprise the Nelson Gallery’s spring exhibition, March 28-May 19, Nelson Gallery, Nelson Hall. Opening reception, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 28.

Lawrence was in his 20s when he painted his Migration Series about the Great Migration. The series would earn him a national reputation, and he would become one of the best-known African American painters of the 20th century. He died in 2000 at the age of 82.

Catlett, who died last year at the age of 96, worked in sculpture, woodcut and linocut, and her best-known works depict black women as strong, maternal figures. Her abstract sculptures of the human form “reflected her deep concern with the African American experience and the struggle for civil rights,” The New York Times wrote in her obituary, which noted that Catlett had come of age at a time of widespread desegregation and had felt its sting.

• Rebirth of a Nation: Travis Somerville’s 1963 — Somerville, who was born in 1963 in Atlanta and grew up during the civil rights movement, presents a mixed media installation of some of the era’s most racially charged ideas and images.

He invites his audience to enter a small wooden cabin, where he challenges them to question their surroundings, including images, newspaper clippings and video. The cabin, says associate curator Diana Daniels, is a “point of departure for discussion about the universal right to liberty and happiness.”

March 3-May 5, Crocker Art Museum, 216 O St., Sacramento. Meet the artist, 1-3 p.m. Saturday, April 20. Tickets required to see the exhibition; meet the artist, free with museum admission.

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