 joining us. We celebrate with you the 2020 Artist in Residence, you know, as final presentations for tonight. As you know, this is part of our Great Change program. And the Great Change, you know, is the LFIS flagship artist development program that includes fellowship and Artist in Residencies. And the goal of the program is, you know, in a nutshell, is to provide a learning community of artists with the support, you know, to think, share, embody critical perspectives, you know, to community-centered artistic practices, while the Residencies are producing projects with community in community. And as you know, at the LFIS project, we believe in artists as change agents in their own communities. And tonight's event is a great, you know, example to show you from the artist's perspective that, you know, testimony in that work. It is a great honor to share, to be able to share the space with this amazing artist, Ariana Faye, Alden Swarth, Jacqueline Reyes, Sydney Baloo and Xenia Diente. Throughout this year, each of them have, you know, shaped in rigorous ways, collaborated with dynamic ways, community, you know, Eastern Community Attune and Social Justice bodies of work. And as you know, you know, it's been a very challenging year to say the least. And it's this, you know, and it's the way that these artists have shown up for their communities that have kept us going. And when things, you know, have gotten difficult and hard, so we are so grateful to be able to support you. And I also want to congratulate you. You know, it's been, you know, a long year. It seems like it's been 20 years since we started 2020. So I'm really, really grateful for all of you. So and with that, you know, we're so inspired also by their vision and their passion and their dedication to creating positive change in the world through their work. And it's been an incredible journey. So you'll learn more about their work shortly. And with all that in mind, I want to hand it over to Kamiya Leshemi, our Executive Director at LP. So thank you and welcome. Thank you, Atwe. And for those words to open us, echoing Atwe and speaking for our entire team and community, just a huge thank you to everyone for being here tonight, for joining us, adding another Zoom to your schedule. And we hope that we will more than make that worth it. And I know that our artists certainly will. To Atwe's words, of course, this has been about 111 years stuffed into one. And we weren't sure eight months ago exactly how things would unfold and whether our artists would are for artists and residents who you'll be learning about very soon, how they'd want to show up in this moment. And we wanted to make room for any answer to be the right answer. However, they flexed and imagined and tried new things and leaned so deeply into their themselves and their sense of life and their sense of creativity in the ways and the pace that made sense for them. And you're going to hear a range of ways that they did that. But I wanted to start or just share a quote by one of my favorite filmmakers and provocative tours and artist Camille Billips. And she has a quote that I sometimes return to. It is important that we write our own histories. Otherwise, they will say we were never here. And I am always so motivated by that because we were here. We are here. And you will hear about projects and ways of being in community that Jacqueline and Xenia and Sydney and Ariana lived through their projects and through their beings and who they are. So thank you to the four of you for doing that and for writing histories and for making sure that no one can say that we were not here in the communities that you connected with, whether it's public housing residents in Brooklyn and other parts of the city or amazing Filipino American community in Queens and the nurses and others and people who feed us and Sydney, the ballroom community and that history written through body and through streets and through the world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for making sure that it is clear that we were here and that it mattered and that we are still here, in fact. So I wanted to say that. And before turning it over to you, and I will actually be introducing Novella in just a moment, but another person that moves me and motivates me and pushes me in the world is Audre Lorde. And she reminded us that without community, there is no liberation. So again, we write our own histories towards liberation so that we can all be free in our fullest, most beautiful and whole selves. And artists are such a big part of making that happen and these four artists certainly again helped do that. So huge thank you to you. Can't wait to hear what you'll share with us and what the discussion that you'll have with Novella afterwards. So, Novella Ford is the Associate Director of Public Programs and Exhibitions at the Schoenberg Center for Research in Black Culture, Writing Histories, a Research Division of the New York Public Library. She created the inaugural Schoenberg Center Literary Festival in 2019 and has organized hundreds of public programs at the intersection of scholarship and popular culture. She connects diverse audiences to the archives and engages history through dialogue, performance, literature, and visual arts. Thank you and welcome, Novella. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Kimmy. Thank you, Atwe, for your words at the beginning of the program. Good evening to everyone. Again, many thanks for joining us to hear from our 2020 Create Change artists and residents as they reflect on their practice and commissioned projects. Kimmy quoted two of my favorite people. Camille Billows also said, include your family and include your friends in your art so that people will know that you're there. And so when I think about LP, I think about the ways in which they create community and creating community really is an act of love. And so I can't wait to hear what has happened with these particular projects over this year. So congratulations again to the 2020 Create Change artists, but also everybody who is on this call who has made it thus far, congratulations to you. So give yourselves a virtual round of applause because it has been that kind of year. And I think we should all take a moment to just celebrate that we've made it this far and there's so much further for us to go. But I'm grateful to be in communion with you all this evening. As Kimmy said, my name is Novella Ford, and I'm excited to host this program and guide us through today's artist presentations by Ariana Fey-Allensworth, Sidney Balu, Jacqueline Reyes, Xenia and Xenia Adente. I actually had the pleasure of taking part in the selection panel for this year's artist cohort. So it's wonderful to participate in this culminating session and learn how each of their projects developed and took shape over the year. As you may have read from their project pages, all four artists are deeply in alignment with the Laundry Map Project's approach to community-based art and civic engagement. Their projects truly embody the LP's values of value in place and writing our own histories through dynamic modes of storytelling, data asset mapping, and public art interventions. Today we will hear three presentations each around 10 minutes long, followed by a Q&A conversation with all four artists at the end. Ariana will kick us off this evening, followed by Sidney and ending with Xenia and Jacqueline's collaborative presentation. You can share your questions and comments in the chat box, and I will field them at the end. So first, we're going to turn it over to Ariana. I'm excited to introduce Ariana Fey-Allensworth, who will take us through her project entitled Staying Power, a participatory storytelling project. Staying Power is a collaborative, multidisciplinary art and research project that celebrates the people's history of New York City public housing. The project offers counter narratives to the stereotypes surrounding the New York City Housing Authority, NYCHA. Through the lens of residents raised and living in NYCHA, the LP has supported Staying Power since its launch in 2019 through a two-year residency. You can learn more about Staying Power using the link in the chat. Ariana is an arias and a creative leader whose work bridges education, visual storytelling, and community-based research. She is a longtime member of the Anti-Evicton Mapping Project, AEMP, a data visualization and storytelling collective that reclaims technology as a means to embolden housing justice movement. She co-founded AEMP's New York City Chapter in 2017. She has worked with the Center for Cultural Power, Cultural Engagement Lab, the International Center for Photography, Lower East Side Community Cultural Council, Youth Speaks Urban Arts Partnership, and Pro Arts Gallery. Born and raised in San Francisco, she currently lives and organizes in Brooklyn, New York. You can read more about Ariana and her practice at arianaallensworth.com, also available in the chat box. Without any further ado, please help me to welcome Ariana. Thank you. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. And I just want to open with immense gratitude to the Laundromat Project for supporting me on this journey for these past two years and also to everyone in the extended LP family who has also been such a, played such an instrumental role in shaping my thinking around this project. So I'm quickly going to share my screen and we'll use some slides to talk through my project today. So as you just heard, Staying Power is a collaborative and multidisciplinary art and research project that celebrates the people's history of NYCHA. And the project really aims to offer counter narratives to stereotypes surrounding NYCHA through the lens of residents themselves. And the project was really sparked through my work with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which as Novella shared is a data visualization and storytelling collective that aims to reclaim technology as a means to embolden housing justice movements. And through my involvement with local housing justice fights through AEMP, I really came to understand the dominant narrative surrounding public housing state and the quote unquote narrative surrounding public housing's failure as a tool that was being instrumentalized and weaponized by developers and policymakers to dismantle and privatize public housing sites throughout the United States. And New York City is somewhat of an anomaly within that landscape because as many and most cities in the Northeast have taken really serious steps to dismantle their public housing stocks, New York City is still home to the largest public housing landscape in the United States. It's home to over 400,000 New Yorkers and who live across 325 NYCHA developments. And so the project really aims to use photography and ephemeral and personal collection of objects and interviews with residents and exploring the ways in which those modalities can be effective tools in retelling the public housing story. And over the course of the residency, I've been collaborating with residents and community partners to unearth the ways in which residents create, care for and build their own archives. Currently, the project is coming to life through three kind of distinct but interdependent storytelling platforms. So the first is which the first is a digital home. So the project will feature a website called stayingpower.zone, which is an interactive website that I'll be launching in December of this year, which will house all of the project content. And that will comprise of an assemblage of interviews with residents, photographs, archival source material, and deep dives on varied themes and topics. The content on the website will also serve as source material for printed matter, which will be limited edition books, postcards and posters, which will be distributed to residents and other stakeholders via the United States Postal Service. And then there also will be a third component, which is events and programming, which will be function as invitations to explore, activate, and gain feedback on the content of the digital home and allow folks to convene and gather around the content and stories. I also wanted to take this opportunity to also zoom in a bit on some of the dominant narratives playing out at the local level about public housing in New York City. And by dominant narratives, I really mean the story being fed to us by mainstream media and power holders about public housing in New York City. If you Google any recent NYCHA coverage, all of these stories on the left are likely what will rise to the surface. And the stories being magnified in the media present a really monolithic narrative of nitrous failure. And this project really seeks to respond to the representational gaps in the public narrative that really with urgency and also offer counter narratives that don't intend to necessarily negate or erase these urgent issues, but also hold complexity and space for multiple truths about the public housing experience by uplifting stories that are often buried, forgotten, marginalized, repressed, or that are just under the surface of the dominant discourse. And what that looks like is really content that pushes up against the tendency to view public housing as broken or narratives that blame residents for the conditions that they're navigating. And ask the question really, what becomes possible when residents can champion their own representation? A really big part of my process has been conducting interviews, long form interviews with residents about their lived experiences in public housing. And I've been doing that work in deep collaboration with Changing the Narrative, which is an incredible project that was founded by a former NYCHA resident named Pamela Phillips that aims to center resident voices in the public housing conversation through public workshops and community-engaged research. And I've been working with them on producing storytelling workshops and conducting oral histories with residents. And I wanted to lift up two quotes that I think really speak to the ways in which narrative creation really matters. And this first quote is by a friend and collaborator, Asamia, who's a former resident of Webster Houses in the Bronx. She states, all of my family members live in NYCHA. Us living in low-income, affordable housing shouldn't be shameful. It's the fact that our city and state are neglecting the needs of hundreds of thousands of families. That's the shameful aspect of it all. And then second, lifting up a resident story from a friend and collaborator, Michael, who's a lifelong resident of LaGuardia Houses in the Lower East Side, he states, my building has always had a sense of community. I feel like it's important for people to know that I'm a NYCHA resident. If you're from public housing, there's often the stigma that you're unimportant to society and that whatever you've gotten going on is less important from the people that live above Houston Street. It's important for people to know where I come from. And I wanted to lift up these quotes to ground us, because both Michael and Asamia are really engaged in narrative shifting work in their own ways. And the interview process really held space for them to name many of the dominant narratives that I lifted up earlier, and also reclaim one that honored and allowed them to speak truth to their own set of experiences and shift narratives. In approaching this project, I really wanted to consider approaches that can best help create a fuller picture of NYCHA and make room for new narratives to emerge. And I brought that question in lens to considerations of the mediums I was engaging in, the context in which the work was being presented, and the ways in which the content was circulated. And so some of the mediums I'm engaging with through this project are that will live on the website and printed materials will use photography, ephemeral and personal collections of objects and interviews with residents as tools for retelling the public housing story. And as it relates to context, the website itself will allude to a book or publication in the way that it's organized, not only because a book makes lend itself really well to the virtual format, but also the format of chapters will really allow content to be elaborated over many chapters and also be organized thematically and also allow the content to be released in phases. Also the citational function of a publication will also allow the publication, the website to also point to other sources of information and use citation as a device to activate and animate other projects and storytelling work. Another contextual consideration that also was a part of the project's dissemination strategy was also making sure that the project had both IRL and URL functions. It felt really important that the content from the website also took up space in real space and also allowed people to not only engage with the content in a digital context, but also for the project to have ephemeral and community building function through mail. And then for distribution, I drew a lot of inspiration from community archives and their ability to be repositories for collective memory and allow folks represented in the archives the ability to play a role in their growth and a way for the content in the mail to also be mailed back to me as a way for the mailed context to also be a tool for data collection and further building and prompting content for the project over time. Currently the project is being imagined as a nine chapter series with three volumes and this year my energy has really been focused on building the infrastructure for the project and also fleshing out content for volume one, which will be themed around collective histories. There'll be an introductory chapter and then chapter one will be a postcard project. So I'm working on finalizing five postcards that will function as tools for data collection and project participation. There also will be posters that aim to activate community power and pride with slogans and function as art objects themselves that can be activated by folks. Next year I'll focus on volume two which will be the fight for NYCHA and will be developing data visualizations about renter protections, current and past struggles to protect the rights of residents and really thinking about ways to put data about NYCHA into the hands of the people and using creative ways to explore printed materials and the ways in which printed materials can animate and activate the data. I'm currently working with a really wonderful graphic artist to help develop some graphic identity for the website. So here are some first stages of the graphic identity for the printed materials and postcards. I also here's a first glimpse at what the website will look like and it will as you can see in kind of the black section the chapters will be opportunities to navigate and organize the materials on the website and then you can click on each chapter and it'll offer images and text and references to citations. Here are some of the design inspirations for the printed materials. So I'm going to use prong fasteners to bind the printed materials allowing the volumes to be connected, assembled and reassembled over time. Sorry about that. Okay, allow content to be assembled and reassembled over time and engage in a variety of paper stocks and sizes and so as the content is released and disseminated in chapter chunks the volumes can be connected and interconnected over time. And I'll just close with some of the kind of questions that have really shaped my process and some of the thinking that's really shaped that I hope to kind of carry with me as I think about the next iteration of the project. So thinking about what genres, skills and capacities will help the project come to life. What does being a photographer look like when you can't be in physical proximity and how can folks be in community without risking their health? I think this residency experience within the limitations that that we were working within with COVID, thinking about really what it means to go slow and really lean on my skills and experience as an administrator and organizer to think about ways to really build a thoughtful and intentional infrastructure around the project. And also thinking about what the limits of our photography, limit of our photography as a medium and ways to really think about what happens before and after a photo is taken and thinking about the ways this project can support that process. In terms of what's next, so as I share the project, saying power.zone is going to launch in December of 2020. In winter of this year I'm going to be starting a technology residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and we'll be really leveraging that opportunity to realize some of the fight for NYCHA phase of volume two of the project and also be working on a FAB NYC commissioned project that will focus on specifically storytelling work with NYCHA residents in the lower east side. So thank you so much again and looking forward to the Q&A portion of the program to share more and be in conversation with everyone else. Amazing Ariana. Let's give it up for Ariana in the chat. I so appreciate this project, one because of the counter narratives that you're going to be able to present. But also this idea of community archives and even the individuals who participate understanding and tapping into what they already know which is that their lives are important that what they have is important and you know when people think about formal institutions and archives they may think of more prominent people being located inside those archives but the truth is that it is often people whose names we may not necessarily know in the collective but people know in the community whose stories help to piece together the histories and the moments in time that we're trying to understand. It's usually everyday people who help us sort of bridge the gas between celebrity and more prominent people that we may know of. So I'm grateful for this project. I have a ton of questions so I want to make sure I remind everybody that if you do have questions for this artist and other artists please use the Q&A function. If there's not a Q&A function then just drop them in the chat and we'll make sure we'll get to as many of them as possible. Our next artist is Sydney Ballou who will take us through his project which is also steeped in methods of storytelling and community documentation. Sydney's project, icons, legends, statements and stars in oral history series of New York City's ballroom community stems from a larger body of work around the ballroom history and culture. As ballroom performer and storyteller himself Sydney kicked off this year with the plan to collaborate with intergenerational members of the New York City ballroom community with the aim of creating a series of community building events and living oral history archive of its origins. Through the year the project expanded to include a series of writing pieces that I am sure we will hear more about shortly. One I would like to highlight is an article published over the summer by The New York Times entitled Voting for Our Lives. Again it's Voting for Our Lives again that spotlighted performance culture as resistance and ritual. The piece included a phenomenal video exploring the ballroom community's response to the health pandemic racialized violence and transphobia that all converged into massive protests. You can read more via the link that was just dropped into the chat box. Sydney is a storyteller performer and archivist who uses multiple mediums written word film and audio to share histories and her stories to connect people across continents cultures and time. An Ivy League graduate with Roots and Trinidad and Tobago and Chicago Illinois. Sydney's current work sentence on creating an extensive oral history archive of New York City's ballroom community. Sydney writes about ballroom for mainstream news outlets like Vice and The New York Times. He also worked as a writer and producer on HBO Max news series about ballroom scene called Legendary. Sydney is currently working on a book based on based on his oral history research that chronicles the history and evolution of ballroom scene in New York City. He's an active member and participant in the ballroom community who began bogeying whilst on a German academic exchange service fellowship in Berlin Germany. As a member of the ballroom scene in Europe, Sydney joined a house and got deeper into the scene in Paris, London and Amsterdam before moving to New York. You are an international legendary Sydney. I hear you that. Sydney made history as the first transgender man to win a performance category at the latex ball in 2019 as he vows old way performance, the original style of bogeying. If you're looking for more information on Sydney, visit his website at Sydney blue which is spelled B-A-L-O-U-E dot com. Please help me welcome Sydney blue to our virtual stage. Hello. Hello. Oh my gosh. Wow. That was quite a mouthful. A lot of things. So many feelings. Thank you so much, Novella, for that beautiful, beautiful intro. And thank you so much, the LP to everybody on staff, to all my fellow artists. It's been one heck of a year. I mean, where can you even begin? From the beginning to the end, to the middle, all the things. Yeah. So let's get into it. Here, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Do that. So hopefully I do the right thing. Let's see. Hopefully this works. There we go. Can everybody see? Hopefully that's the right one. All right. So yeah, we had that intro. I'm a writer, performer, storyteller, ballroom. I do all the things. I am a writer, producer. I've worked in the scene for eight years. I've been doing oral histories of the ballroom community for quite some time. I'm very, very interested in making sure that the community has its voice heard, that we're not only seen because obviously, boging ballroom is such a huge spectacle. But for me, what's very important is that we're also heard, that you can hear our voices. And for me, that's been work that I've been doing for some time. I do oral histories with icons, legends, pioneers in the scene. And what I usually do with my work is I take folks to a part of New York City. I'll say to an icon, a legend in the community, take me to a part of New York City and tell me about the history of this space and your history within it. And previously, I met with several different people, like the folks you see here, Deja Mizrahi, grandfather Hector Extravaganza, and father Jose Extravaganza. And we have walked through New York City and I got to hear so much of their story of how they see things, what shaped them, and kind of how the community has shaped New York City as well. So as Novella said, my artist residency at the LP, my intention was to do a series of oral history events. I wanted to do some that were like semi-public, semi-private, some that were really, really open to the public and some that might have been more for the ballroom scene itself. And, you know, the purpose is to build on this existing body of work that I have because for ballroom and for many LGBTQ people, a lot of our history is not written down. So it's important that we narrate that and we write down our own stories. But of course, you know, so many things happened this year. And, you know, what was so wild was at the start of my artist residency, this kind of like unexpected thing happened, and I got a phone call. And sure enough, it was the showrunners of a new competition reality show called Legendary. It was going to be the first of its kind. It was going to transpose the world of ballroom for television. And the thing was these showrunners, they had found my op-ed piece that I wrote at the New York Times last year about the category of realness in the ballroom scene. And so I remember they explained to me they're like, you know, it's a lot easier for us to train a writer from the ballroom community about how to write for unscripted television rather than the other way around because, you know, the culture is so complex and so rich. And so, you know, for me, I was like, you know, this is interesting. Why not? I know I want to work in television and film anyway as a writer. So here is my way in. So at the beginning of this year, January till March and literally March 13th, I kind of had a new job and that was working as a writer and producer on this show. Sydney, can I just jump in one quick second because I don't want you to go through your slides and we miss anything, but we are not seeing your screen. Oh, shoot. Okay. Hold on. Let me go back. Figure out what's going on. Hold on. Let's see here. All right. Let me try this one more time. Oh, here we go. I think I got it now. Okay. Are we good now? We're good now. Wonderful. Okay. Well, it's okay. You guys didn't miss too much. So, you know, sure enough, I started working on this show Legendary and I was working as a producer and a writer on the show. It was quite a change for me. You know, all of a sudden I'm trekking all the way out to Stanford, Connecticut to, you know, just like an hour and a half to meet from Brooklyn to work on this incredible piece, which was basically adapting Ballroom, which is a competition world, right? Multiple different categories for the world of television, which, you know, we have so many competition shows, whether it's The Voice or Dancing with the Stars, etc. And so the kind of juggernaut was how do you adapt this world for TV for this particular format? So it was a very interesting experience and something that taught me a lot. And I was so happy to be part of it and happy to shape that narrative. And then of course, our last episode was March 13th, right when the world was shutting down, when everything, you know, was kind of closing down all the live audiences in New York City, had all of those shows had also stopped having live audience because of COVID-19. And so at that point, I remember it was the last day Time Warner calls us, we can't have an audience, everything is done. And that was our last episode. And sure enough, after that we wrapped up and the world was in shutdown mode. And so for me, I remember kind of thinking like, okay, we have to pivot and what happens next. So I know for me, I had a lot of qualms about how to continue my project. It was completely based on doing in-person interviews, in-person events. And I really wanted to kind of keep that energy. I feel like there, you know, there was something kind of lost the Zoom that you just don't get in person, but it also wasn't safe to kind of to continue in the way that we were doing that. So I remember I did a lot of soul searching and, you know, we had our LP meetings and I was just like, okay, what happens next? And I remember it was actually Jackie, my fellow artists and residents this year, who in one of our meetings or breakout sessions, I remember she was like, well, Sid, you know, instead of you trying to think about foreign history in this big, big way, why don't you focus on what's going on now? Because that this is a historical moment and actually you're part of that history and that's equally as important. So I remember, you know, thinking, oh, you know, this is interesting. This is a way for me to kind of describe myself and my work, which I'm usually not used to doing. And I thought, you know what, but Jackie has a point because all the things that were kind of keeping me going during COVID in the beginning were all the cool stuff people were doing in ballroom. It was, you know, people making Instagram videos or TikTok video, you know, bogey on there or there were balls being done via Zoom, et cetera, et cetera. And so at that point, I thought, you know what, let me pitch this article to the New York Times because I think this could be interesting of how the ballroom scene is adapting to this moment. My editor there, Joanna Nicas, she loved it. And, you know, we were talking in April, May, and I think it's push, push, push. And then finally, I remember I did these beautiful interviews with people, Jack Borges Gucci, who is my writing partner on Legendary, is an icon of the scene, Luna Louise Ortiz, who's a visual aid artist and ballroom icon, Precious, who's a ballroom commentator in the scene who brought virtual balls to the community and Tim Tobias, who is a health worker and a ballroom community icon, as well as Giselle extravaganza, who's my mother, who's an activist and icon and model. And, you know, I pitched this article that it was May and then June hit, and that's when the world just kind of exploded. And, you know, we had all these protests happening, obviously, around the country, and especially in New York City. And I remember seeing a lot of folks from the ballroom, from the ballroom scene out in the streets, really raising our voices, because we've always been part of this movement. And I remember one of the big things that folks talked about, one was, you know, hearing the parallels between the AIDS crisis in the 80s and this crisis with coronavirus, just, there were just so many layers to this moment. And also so many ways in which ballroom is kind of prepared for crisis. And it's because we've had to deal with so many of them in the past. And I think in so many ways, the fact that the community has already been this sort of foundation of support meant that it was also a place of support and haven for folks going forward. And it was just beautiful to be a part of. You can check out the links to this article and also the beautiful video, our video editor, Shane. Shane O'Neill created where, you know, me and several members of my house, we went out to protest and joined in raising our voices in this moment. So for me, kind of going forward, that was kind of like the, I would say, one of the big moments of this project. But, you know, things have kind of started to move again. You know, we have great news that Legendary was picked up for a season two, which is super exciting. For me, that meant moving to Los Angeles since we're going to be shooting here in January and February, all with the COVID precautions, which is like a whole other discussion, which should be very interesting. But, you know, as I started to wrap up my project for the year, I came, you know, I came across a lot of unexpected takeaways, because there was so much that I wanted to do. And I felt, you know, COVID and just kind of like emotionally dealing with things, just kind of, you know, slow things down a bit. But one of the things I think the biggest thing the LP has taught me is about what it means to show up ethically when engaging with community in doing this work. And that was something I can't say a year ago I would have predicted. But because I think I was so heavily focused on, okay, I want to get these interviews done, I want to write this book. But for me, you know, last season I was a producer, this season I'm a co-executive producer. And my work in this lane of working in Hollywood and industry is continuing. And I see that a lot of these principles about how to engage from the space of being working with a corporate entity like HBO Max, you know, I see that I see a pathway of how to do work that's POC-centered, how to allow communities to create their own self-determined narratives as an essential basis for building lasting community power. And I think one of the biggest things that I love is this idea of love as a radical and essential act of power and protest. And how that can be applied to larger questions of community engagement, equity, and sharing our stories in ballroom. And I remember when I talked to Ebony, our amazing consultant, who's I think also here, I was like, you know, I really want to produce like a white paper or something, you know, because I think, you know, I see a lot of executives want to know how to do the right thing. They just don't have the tools for many of them. They're not in these kind of conversations. And I remember Ebony was like, you know, I said, I think it's a lot for you to try and do all of this right now. And actually your best bet might just be to take notes and really just document your process and the way you're going about doing these things because therein lies another book. So that to me says, okay, I see, you know, there's continuing this work of oral histories, which I will be doing. I'm finishing this book proposal this year. And just kind of like clamping down on this sample chapter. And then, of course, in the future, there will definitely, definitely be more. But I'm very grateful for this year. Thank you so much to the LP. And thank you all very much for listening to this presentation. Thank you so much, Sidney. Let's give it up for him in the chat box. That was amazing. You are doing so much. And I have made the most of the time and the effort that you had in you to keep moving and keep pushing forward. I'm thinking about recently we had Dean Atta, who is from London, who wrote a young adult book called The Black Flamingo. And he uses the ballroom as a place where this young person learned about community and learned more about themselves. And so I appreciate the work that you're doing on the other side of that. Also, what did you say love as a radical and essential act of progress and something else and something else? I couldn't write it all down as quickly. But yes, to all of that, can I get that on a t-shirt? I'm looking forward to having more conversation with you at the end. Again, I don't see any questions happening. But if you had questions about anything that Sidney just talked about, as well as, oh dear, Ariana. Ariana talked about, please make sure you drop them in the chat and we will include them towards the end. Last but certainly not least, our final presentation of the evening continues along the spread of celebrating one's community. Xenia, Dianthe, and Jacqueline Reyes have collaborated to produce a brilliant body of work that honors the Filipino diaspora, and particularly the Little Manila community in Queens. Their project, Little Manila Queens, Bayone Han, hopefully I said that correctly, Public Art Festival, included a series of community conversations and public art activations celebrating the Filipino diaspora in Woodside Queens, through collaborations between local artists and business owners. When the pandemic hit, they deepened their collaboration with local restaurants by developing a mutual aid project called Meal to Heal that provided meals to frontline healthcare workers across the city. A link to their project site is in the chat so you can learn more. Jacqueline Reyes is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work bridges education, storytelling, and research. She has done work for the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, the Resilient Communities Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Penguin Random House, and Condi NAS. In 2014, she received a Fulbright grant and worked as an educator in Malaysia. As a teaching artist, she has worked in Brooklyn, Phenom Penh, Zaila, and Gamay. Currently she serves on the advisory board for the Arts Connect International and is a member of the Women's Centered Music Ensemble, New Atlantic Chamber, Gamayland. She earned her EDM in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and her BFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University. Xenia Diante is interested in strengthening opportunities for artists and designers to creatively serve New York City. As a Queens-based public art professional, she has worked for 17 years with artists and multiple stakeholders improving civic facilities and infrastructure with public art. Xenia has served on selection panels for New York City Percent for Art Program and Queens Council for the Arts, participated in the NYC Times Design Steering Committee, and co-chaired the Augustus St. Wadden's Award for Professional Achievement in Art. She is a 2014 Choral Leadership New York Alumni, a 2012 Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow, and a 2011 Social Practice Artist in Residence led by Rick Lowe at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In 2018 she was part of the Step Exhibition at Flux Factory and currently serves on the board of Filipino American National History Society, Metro New York Chapter. Xenia earned a BFA from Cooper Union formerly a Tuition-Free Art School in New York City. Please welcome them and take it away. Thank you so much, Novella, for the introduction. Let me share my screen. Wish me luck. Is it working? Yep. Okay, presents. Okay, thank you. And thank you, Ariana and Sydney, for your beautiful presentations. And thank you everybody on the Zoom call for hanging out with us tonight. I'm a little bit nervous. But before we begin, we'll briefly outline our plan for this presentation. First, we'll give some background about Little Manila Community in Queens. Then we'll talk about how Filipino culture has influenced the way we approached our work this year. And after we'll give context, we will highlight five projects we worked on that we helped launch this year. So first slide is about Little Manila Queens. For those who don't know already, Little Manila is situated in Woodside Queens near Jackson Heights and Elmhurst. This map shows the range of businesses in Little Manila. They vary from restaurants to beauty salons, groceries, and remittant shops. Our goal as artisan residents this year was to engage these businesses and co-create art activations throughout the neighborhood. After the beginning of this year, we grounded ourselves in the principles of social justice and creative placemaking. Both fields emphasized the importance of equity, access, participation, local partnership, and the use of art and culture to model and achieve these things. And as a US-born artist of Filipino descent, it was equally important to us to be culturally specific and intersectional in our work this year. So both Zini and I come from families that come from different regions in the Philippines. And even though we're Filipino, we're still very American. We don't, neither of us speak Tagalog or Filipino. But even though we're Filipinos doing Filipino, doing work in the Filipino community this year, we recognize that there were a lot of barriers between us and Filipinos who migrated here. And we also recognize that we're all at very different stages of our immigrant stories and different degrees of citizenship privilege. So being both Filipino and American, our values were kind of mixed. So we recognize that they're both good and bad at both being American and Filipino. And then it was important for us to constantly have dialogue between each other and recognize like which parts of us were Filipino, which parts were American, and what was the best way to activate our work this year in the community. So in this slide, we kind of highlighted some of the values of Filipino community that we were focused on this year, as well as the tensions that we were kind of encountering. So on the top left, it's utang na lo op, my translation is bad. But basically, it's a concept in Filipino culture that there's a debt of gratitude when someone does something nice for you, that you feel like you need to reciprocate. And that's a concept that we wanted to activate this year by triggering some positive work and then hoping that it will kind of manifest into a regenerative cycle of good action in the community. The other concept that we were focused on was also by a knee hunt, which is the spirit of communal unity and cooperation. And in that photo, you'll see that there is a lot of people there carrying a house, moving their neighbor's house to wherever they were going. And this is just basically metaphorically how we were approaching the work this year, especially with COVID happening. On the right hand side of this slide are the tensions and the complexities that we encountered while doing this work. I won't read all of them, but you'll see on the left hand side in the yellow boxes over the tensions. And on the right hand side in the orange boxes are the ways that we cope to put all of this work. Okay. So projects and initiatives. We'll talk about the actual work we did this year. First, we'll talk about Meal to Heal. Second, Mobile High Mural. Third, the Little Manila Street Connaming. Then Weaving Together. And then We Are They. And we are the embodied storytelling video. Sorry for the noise. So when COVID hit, we pivoted our work to co-creating a mutual aid network with local community partners to address the needs of the Little Manila community. Alongside with the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns and the Filipino National Historical Society, we created the Meal to Heal initiative. Collectively, we delivered Filipino food from Little Manila restaurants to the healthcare units with Filipino healthcare workers. And here's an overview of how we operationalize these efforts. I'm not going to talk it there, but you'll see. And through Meal to Heal, we were able to earn the trust from the restaurant owners and workers. And we delivered over 10 meals once a week to different restaurants and healthcare facilities. And take the temperature of Little Manila and build community. Oh, one more slide. Yeah. And including if Noelle Gosani, an LP alum, she connected us to Flushing International High School, where the students wrote thank you postcards to frontline healthcare workers. Touch my heart. And here's a few of the other things, but I'll move on to the next slide. Next project. Okay. So while we were doing the Meal to Heal deliveries, we started the Mubuhai mural at the corner of 69th Street in Elizabeth Avenue. It's actually outside Amazing Grace Restaurant, which is one of the restaurants that participated in the Meal to Heal initiative. And for people who don't know what Mubuhai means in Filipino, it means welcome, cheers, may you live. And this is how it looks now. Basically, the idea for this mural was to create a welcome sign to the neighborhood. And so that people when they came in to this neighborhood, they knew that there were Filipinos there. So these are pictures from our unveiling ceremony that we had on June 12th, which is also Philippine Independence Day. So we had a ceremony and invited local community leaders to come and participate, including a council member, Jimmy Van Braemer, who represents that part of Queens. And after he saw the little manila sign that Xenia created and attached to that microphone, he was like, let's just make this permanent once and for all. And with that, we created the Little Manila Street Canadian Initiative. So we launched this campaign to not only have a Little Manila Street sign installed, but to raise awareness about the ways community could be more civically engaged. We created these flyers to help demystify the process of engaging with the local governments. After we printed them, we distributed them throughout the neighborhood and encouraged people to participate in this campaign. We submitted the petition in August, hoping that the sign would be installed soon. But if there's one thing we learned, it's COVID and COVID slows things down. But the good part is the application is in. A next project is, let's see, Cynthia Alberto weaving together. And the goal is to connect an artist with a local business owner and a collaboration will form. So one key, she also volunteered with Street Coneaming, Cynthia Alberto, a weaving artist for the last 20, 30 years. When we're going from business to business, asking them to participate in the Street Coneaming Initiative, we entered Kay Glenn, sorry, sorry store. Glenn, the owner that you could see here, was not interested in the campaign because he didn't feel his business belonged to Little Manila. So from there, Cynthia decided to work with them for her weaving workshop. And here's a video of a weaving workshop that where it was a free outdoor community workshop and that took place across the street from the sorry, sorry store. It's like a bodega. And if there's some things we learned in this process of activating this little mini plaza was gaining permissions from the local church, from the sorry, sorry, sorry store. We also coordinated with the community affairs unit from the NYPD informing them of this event. And it was a hope to model what cultural exchange and healing might look like in the public realm during this COVID time, like how can we learn to activate streets with culture? It's another goal is intergenerational and an art activation during COVID. And one key thing for Cynthia Alberto is recycled materials. So all the materials you see is 100% recycled. And here's some pictures from the event, which was very welcomed in early September on the beautiful day about 30 people attended. And we tried to do our best with the social distancing. Next slide. Sorry if I'm taking too long. I lost my notes. Yes. So here is the one week installation in front of the sorry, sorry store. And at during this unveiling, Cynthia had an evening of memories of your childhood. So she invited people to share images of and memories from their childhood. And it was a part of her practice for this art intervention. Okay. And I am presenting the last the last project that we are working on for this year. And this project is called We Are They. It's a it's an audio visual and body storytelling video. It's not finished yet. But this is a screen capture of one of the scenes. Basically, can you tell next slide please? I collaborated with Joyelle, Kabata, Wilson Ball, and Deanna DeRoy to make this short film. Basically, I asked them to make an artistic video about we'll just dedicate it to the Filipino healthcare workers and use their talents to kind of tell their stories in a way that could be compelling and to also situate it in Little Manila. And then below you see all the pictures of the people who participated in the video. Next slide, please. And basically, I'm sorry, I wish I could share more screen captures. But basically, we pulled from the traditional Filipino music and dance. And in this video, we also included the testimony of Filipino healthcare workers and asked them how they were thinking about the COVID crisis. And generally, they're still processing and we are too. And that's what we wanted to pay tribute to as Filipinos and use our art form in in the actual neighborhood, where we feel most represented. And we're hoping that maybe early next year, we'll get to do screening of it. So yeah, fingers crossed. And wait, there's more. So we didn't get to complete all our projects this year. But we are hoping to work with two more artists, Nadia Nakordia, photographer, Carl Orozco, artists, multimedia, and also myself. And if you keep posted on our website, then you'll, you'll see more about that later. So finally, we will end with our theory of change. It reads, if Philippine artists engage with the local Philippine businesses, then the collective creativity of community will be activated. If creativity is activated, then our collective histories, dreams and realities will be visualized. If our experiences are visible, visibilized, then our communities can work towards catalyzing healing and growth. We have so many people to thank. All the staff at the Lawnermat project, all their partners and leaked meal to heal, all the local businesses, the Mabuhi mural volunteers, everybody who attended and supported the mural unveiling, everybody who supported the street co-naming, the few hundred who wrote the petition locally in the neighborhood, and the few thousand who participated in the petition globally. Weaving together every, Cynthia's whole team herself and Glenn's case, sorry, sorry, everybody and we are they, and they think they're with us tonight. The journalists and the bloggers who helped share and amplify this work. Our mentors, Jennifer Hughes and Carrie Delena. So with that, thank you very much. This loud clap is for everybody who is clapping online. Thank you so much, Vynia and Jacqueline. I mean, that was a feat in what somebody called cultural organizing. It was amazing to see all of the partnerships that you were able to create. And also what I love the thread between all three projects was this focus on intergenerational participation, because oftentimes we can forget all kinds of groups of people when we're doing this kind of work. And so it's important to have all of the voices represented. So thank you very much. I'm going to get into these questions. So I hope if you have any questions that you have been sharing them, I am going to start with Arianna. So please welcome back Arianna, Sydney, again, Zanya and Jacqueline. And I will start with Arianna. Can you elaborate on the use of photography to document these narratives around public housing and the ethical issues involved? Yeah. Well, I think a lot of the ways in which the photography or in which the project engaged photography have definitely like shifted over time. When last year when I did the project, I was co-creating images in through workshops with the residents in person. And then pre-COVID when I imagined that I was going to be able to do the second round of this project in person, I was imagining that I was going to photograph folks in the interiors of their homes and photograph their personal archives and collections of objects in person. And I think some of the ways I navigated some of the ethical considerations around photography's role in the pandemic, especially where feeling like a lot of photographers were really like rushing to document the moment and rushing to find creative ways to photograph COVID and how folks were navigating COVID. And I kind of tried to think about ways to use this as an opportunity to go slow. And I think that the project engages photography in some tangential ways by activating the ephemeral qualities of photography. So inviting folks to share their own images and personal archives and ways that they could kind of champion their own representation as to me coming in to define that or set the container for the frame before that. So I think I'm still kind of learning what it means to be a photographer in this moment, but I think I'm really leaning into my love for not only like the analog and ephemeral properties of photography, but also ways in which photography can be a way to access the past and reach back into folks' personal storytelling as well. I just want to add to that. I'm curious about we use the word archives and I often say not everybody understand what that means, but they understand that they have something that is going to help tell a story both in the present and the past. And so I'm curious about your engagement with folks, whether or not did they start to increase their understanding of the value of the objects and or photographs and or things that you were asking to photograph and to engage them in the process? Yeah, I mean I think that I think encouraging folks to see themselves as experts and archivists, I think so much like we often see archives as something that has to live in an institution or that the official record can only exist in these institutional spaces and recognizing that the objects that we keep in our home or that we decide to surround ourselves with also can tell a story and also be ways to access the past and that memories can like cohere around the objects that we create in our homes and what we decide to keep and surround ourselves with and encouraging folks to like see those as archival practices just as much as records that might be at a library or held by universities and institutions. And the truth is those are the exact same thing right they're just held held by institutions so the value is not necessarily in the in the place but in the actual material. This question is for all of you all could you share some of the biggest takeaways around creating work during these times and what it means to advance your community engagement projects during this time. We'll start with you while Jacqueline and Xania then we'll go to Sydney and we'll follow up with you Ariana. I guess I can jump in. The biggest takeaway for me I'm just really grateful that I have a partner to be doing this with like Xania and I like I don't think it would have been possible if we didn't have each other to be doing this work together and I think that just between the two of us having our own like individual communities and merging them together made all this work possible. That's the biggest takeaway for me. Sorry I can't really think of a takeaway but yeah what what a what a amazing collaboration it's been with Jacqueline the past year and and because of this the Laundermat helping us give focus to doing this work this year something it's been we've been hoping to do but like the Laundermat project gave us that extra focus it it's it's just been an amazing phenomenal ride so yeah working working collaboratively when and when you have that you know amazing partner like Jacqueline. Before Ariana and Sydney respond I'm curious about did you find that because we were in quarantine because people were sort of limited in what they could engage in that there was even more focus and more interest by the community to participate in these um fleeting frankly you know outdoor activities that you all were creating during this time where you know folks were starting to get a little stir crazy. I can jump in here um so I think the I guess specifically like the for the COVID moment and people looking for community I think the activation that was most successful in addressing that was the leaving workshop because it was uh summer time and it was outside and we were very careful about planning everything that I mean we had everybody pre-register before they came um yeah it like that was fulfilling a need but also it created a very special space when we were doing that well making that community artwork together um but I'm sure Xenia like she was kind of leading that project maybe we should weigh in on that um yeah it was a great exercise um obviously we're nervous because it was you know COVID time um and you know everybody stressing social distancing um but if the restaurants could do it it was like we could do it too you know um so uh but also just practicing what making a site plan of that mini plaza sorry that's my boiler um and making sure there's uh enough space for pedestrian circulation um if there was any uh yeah accessibility issues and just thinking through those different you know different uses of public space uh so it was a great experience to do that together and getting our general liability insurance the little things Sydney uh any biggest takeaways creating during this time yeah I think for me the biggest was um one learning how to adapt you know like the fact that ballroom all of a sudden people were doing balls via zoom you know I feel like for a lot of people zoom became this like oh another zoom meeting you know for work and the fact that people were like working on was like oh okay you could do a lot with this but I I feel like that is ballroom right it's like oh you thought that was a tablecloth I'm gonna make it into a hat that turns into a purse that turns into a dress you know and like that's kind of how I've seen not only the community adapt but then also the way my work had to adapt and like I said it was you know Jackie seriously I'm just so grateful that you brought it to being present because for my work I I am very concerned you know about having the community narrate our history because as I said with ballroom people are so interested in seeing us as spectacles but they're not always interested in hearing us and hearing us tell our own stories and draw out that narrative but to kind of bring it back to this moment and just say well what's happening right now that that I think like shifted a lot of things for me and I think I've kind of like eased up on a certain perfectionism you know I think I want oh I want the highest audio quality and I you know I want this specific thing and it's like no you know just work with what you got and and I think a lot of things have kind of come from that as a result and then as I said I think one of the things I just wasn't expecting was just like looking at the foundation of the work you know because with this artist residency it's not just about what you're producing but it's how you're producing the work and I think that's that's something that like totally you know just blindsided me I was like wow I didn't realize like I need this because even when we first had our meeting back in February it was like our first and only IRL in person meeting I remember I had to take run out to take a call for legendary and it was like night and day the kind of conversations that were going on it was like oh you know meeting Jamila Jamil and this whole like Hollywood thing and like you know getting my bearings around that and then you know people doing this very deep intimate very person-to-person kind of work and and me feeling like wow I'm I have one foot in all of these places and you know I was telling even Lady Sasha and Tiara last week we had our check-in like you know we had our we recently just had like a first meeting for legendary and you know for me I'm like wow I have a seat at the table I'm the only black person in this room I'm the only black trans person in this room and you know there's just millions of dollars on the line and my voice matters and the way that I see how we're going to engage with ballroom and give ballroom a seat at the table is you know matters and I have the ability to change how we do business so for me it's just been like even shifting in a sense of like it's not only what I'm producing and like whether or not I'm producing which obviously like capitalism tells us to constantly be coming up with stuff but like I think this COVID moment has given me a moment to step back and really think Sid how are we lining up the ducks to make sure that we are serving our community in the best possible way thank you for that Narayana yeah um I think that um I think cove like the limitations that COVID created I think provided me a lot of the limitations kind of opened up a lot of new possibilities for me um in unexpected ways um I'm one thing that kind of comes to top of mind is like I'm uh you know I'm a career career along like arts administrator and I've always worked full-time kind of in an administrative capacity in art context but often my art practice was very compartmentalized or separate from that and interestingly like although I went into this project thinking I was going to produce like a photo forward project I really leaned on a lot of my skills like as an administrator and approached this project like leaned on a lot of skills that I had for building infrastructure building community partners um building trust um a lot of the like ways I approached the website development was really was really connected to um and embracing the skills that I that I have um in organizing and developing programs um and that allowed me I think to break down some of those barriers um between my personal and professional practice in a lot of ways so we have time for one more question but I'm going to slide in this other question as part of the last question um someone said all of your CVs are impressive and your projects are so powerful and very detailed how do you manage all other aspects of your life uh and do you work full time on these projects and I'm really interested in them managing the other aspects of your life because we often will see artists do work in other kinds of professionals um and think you know that oh and everything else in life is easily come you know so I'm very much interested in how people manage the other parts of their life that are equally important as the work that they're doing and the second part to that is um how can this community support your work whether or not it's volunteers monetary resources we are so grateful for your work and we want to support in any way possible and I'll also add that if people have additional questions that they want to ask you or just want to send some praise your way to make sure that they know how to do that as well we'll go in reverse I'll start with Arianna we'll go back with Sydney we'll end with Xania uh and Jacqueline so the first the first question was around how how we met how you do it all right um I mean it's definitely a process I yeah I work um I work full time in the arts and like I feel like as many folks know the arts has like been deeply impacted by the pandemic and navigating layoffs and the loss of co-workers and um I think the ways in which artists have been um and like cultural workers of color have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic um has definitely made this year um really difficult to navigate and balance kind of all of the hats that I wear um and I think it's like an ongoing an ongoing and iterative process and I think in in all of it I think my art practice keeps me rooted and and grounded and it is like a a source of healing for me as well so it's been a helpful way to to balance it all um you know what I'm going to ask yep and what I'm going to ask is everybody answer this second question using the chat function after you respond so the second part was how can people support your work whether or not it's as volunteers monetary um and or just want to send some praise your way and or ask additional questions so answer that question in the chat um and answer this other question about how are you balancing it all thank you so much for that response Arianna Sydney oh my goodness um hi it's a question I ask myself every morning really um I think it's I think Arianna headed on the head with committing to process right committing to the process and not to the ends it's very hard to do that and I say that um I know for me as a writer um so many things I've worked on I mean I wrote a pilot two years ago that's finally now getting traction um and I see that it's about committing to the work and committing to the process and if you are intentional about the community that you serve about who you are and living um and standing in your truth and moving from a place of integrity to me that is you know that's already like the foundation for the work and pushing that forward and I I've noticed and just witnessing myself of how you know how I've been able to move in certain ways because I kind of have that foundation in a sense and I I think I've also been open to allowing you know like I really do see myself as um you know it's like I'm here for a purpose and I think that all of the work all of the things my ancestors have done to brought me bring me to this moment and the work that I'm doing to move things forward this to me is what allows all the things to come through that and I've kind of just been saying yes you know to to all these great opportunities and um and seeing where they where they lead me you know there's no way a year ago you could tell me that I would be in the place that I am now so I kind of see that as um just being intentional continuing to do the work and seeing what happens next process is a is a ongoing theme here thank you so much Sydney make sure you drop in the chat how we can support your work and last but certainly not least uh Jacqueline and then Nazania your response to how are you juggling it all do you want to go first okay I'll just go um so uh on a very practical level um just to be fully transparent I um I was like unemployed for like five months this year so that did give me a lot of time which which I was grateful for because um I have a husband who supports me and um yeah I just I just want to be real about that that I had the luxury to be thinking about this work and I want to emphasize like what what Sydney was saying um about just being grounded in in truth and integrity and that's something that I had the luxury to think about a lot this year with this work and I think that's quite frankly I think that's helped the way the direction of in which we kind of made our work um because there were a lot of um roadblocks for us and a lot of um deep questions that Zina and I would kind of bounce back and forth between each other um but yeah like the biggest thing for me that like sustains my my energy and and why I do this work I think a lot about my mother and um how hard she worked she's the hardest working person I know and I feel like uh she sets the bar for me as like a woman who worked two jobs as a nurse and started her own women's clinic I just I remember that like I need to work as hard as her and and make sure I I I I I I guess like I I don't know how to articulate it but just make sure that my work is worthy of of all of the sacrifice that she's made so um pass it to Zina that's really beautiful um on on the practical level um yeah I also have a full-time day job and um so yeah this has been completely a labor of love but it's also supported me in this past year of this weird COVID time to be in such deep community like who knew that when you're supposed to be isolated but I'd be like expanding my community um but yeah this work happens in my evenings and weekends and um and yeah it's been been incredible it's been a lot and I I I do uh it was helpful to hear from um Noelle earlier um you know it's okay to power down as we get into November and December thank you thank you all for those beautiful responses as well as your presentations and your time today I am going to turn it over to Ahtwe to take us out but again congratulations to this 2020 create change artists and residents uh for these beautiful projects thank you again for sharing Ahtwe so thank you thank you Noelle thank you uh Arianna, Celina, Jaclyn, Sydney uh I'm so like an awk um thank you so much for your work and you know it's been a pleasure and an amazing time and and all the ways right so what I'll just say thank you thank you Noelle for being a great moderator and panelist so also you know doing that um before we go actually there's some slides that we're going to show somewhere I think um but also want to think you know we have this work happens in community right it's just you know the artists are not working on their own with their projects it's a project you know that are projects that come out of the work that we have internally with staff we work with an amazing group of facilitators also that lead our workshops I want to just keep a couple of shout outs to urban bush women evanine oil golden Piper Anderson the 2020 fellows you know who you are you know some of them are here too many to name and of course I want to thank the LP team the programs team in particular Sierra Chico Tenka and especially Tiara Austin and Lady Sasha Jones who have been working so closely with all the artists throughout this year and then being so instrumental in shaping the program and also you know keeping us going and and doing all this work to keep to bring us to today so I really want to give a shout out to them because they've been amazing uh and so so grateful for their work also um there's one quick thing there's uh on the screen hopefully you're able to see well there's a couple of upcoming you know things coming up so next week we have another zoom program as a reality of a future community community forum some moderated conversation public town hall to talk about you know post-election times liberation suffrage and justice so it's going to be incredible you know conversations so hopefully you're able to join us just follow our social media and our mailing list to get all that information and then we'll we'll follow up with you know we're in the midst of selecting an artist for next year so we'll share some of that you know shortly at the beginning of next year and just one last thing before we go I want to thank you all for your time and we're a little over so we really appreciate your patience and your you know your questions and all your amazing comments and all the beautiful comments of support so really I want to say thank you for that and lastly I want to leave with a quote from one of our amazing art ancestors of you know that I really admire and I know that folks appreciate so uh Elizabeth Catelyn an incredible artist um so you know and I think this ties together a lot of the things that were coming you know to from the artist voices so and the quote is I have always wanted my art to service my people to reflect us to relate to us to stimulate us to make us aware of our potential we have to create an art for liberation and for life so Elizabeth Catelyn just an incredible artist I just want to leave it there for all of you to take us an inspiration and thank you all for your work and I will see you soon and have a good night yeah thank you so much thank you Arianna that was amazing thank you amazing congrats team later