 What wonderful sight to see to look at all of you this morning. I'm Marbella Opus. I'm the director of the Beyonce. I'm still using Marbella's name as well. I'm Marbella Opus and I'm the chair. I have a pleasure being the chair of the board of the NKM brand. And it's my pleasure to welcome you here by Austin. Now, for me it's actually coming home in many ways. I grew up in South Texas not too far south from here, near Fort East Christie. But it feels like I'm coming home because I get to see all of you, which is really one of the particularly challenging times that we've all been through, that it's good to get together with people who are artists, who are colleagues, who are peers, who are partners, who care about this country and the people who live in our relationship to the world. So thank you for what you do in your communities and thank you for being here. Before we begin our panel meeting of NPN Band, I want to acknowledge the land of our own, the land of the Champo, the Comanches and Lippon, the Aches. We enter this space with respect and gratitude for the first peoples. The work of NPN Band is really dependent on group of people like yourselves who care about this organization and care about the artists and the community we live in. The board of directors of NPN Band are here and I want to acknowledge them and ask them if they will just look across the room if they'll just wait for us to come. The teacher of Jugo, Jevon Collins, Shannon Dow, Abukadai English, Stephanie McKee, Joe Nassado, K. M. A. Bribeck, Michelle Steinwald, Harold Stewart, Samuel Valdez, Shane Waver, John White, Will Wilkins, and Rosie Gordon-Walls who is not able to join us, but is here in spirit and in heart. There's one individual again I do want to acknowledge, and that's K. Bribeck, who's the leader past chair of the board of directors. He's a member of the board of executive leadership in the point of care of this organization. So I'm here today to provide an opportunity to continue to work with the community. And now it's my pleasure to introduce our president and CEO, Caitlin Strokesh-Strokesh, sorry. Maybe he didn't tell me to do that. NPN Band in July after serving as executive director of the Alliance for Artist Meetings, an international association of artist residency programs. While at the alliance she organized international residencies for the emerging pair of artists and international level research on sustainability of artist residency programs and signatures, and implemented several funding programs with national funders. Prior to joining the Alliance however, she managed several non-profit musical examples in Chicago. She is a pre-put public speaker and is her main analyst of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Joyce Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Rasmussen Foundation and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves in the board of directors of brand makers in the arts and the performing arts alliance. It's now my pleasure to introduce to you our very thoughtful, insightful, strong, fearless, visionary partner and leader, the new president CEO, Caitlin Strokesh-Strokesh. Challenge me to just chop an f-bone right away so I can get that. Thank you Abel for that really wonderful introduction and for your partnership and to all of the board for your partnership and their energy leading to this work. I'm so excited to be standing here in front of you this morning. I have lots of thank-yous, so I'll probably talk too fast a little over-cathinated, but I want to make sure that we acknowledge all the folks that we need to acknowledge here this week. And I'm just going to ask the staff if you guys want to start and come your way this way so that we can introduce you guys in as well. First up I just want to say thank you in particular to our local folks, Frank Harland and Bob Berry from Pew Talks. This has been a long planning process and we're so grateful for all that you've done, particularly for being our guides, our eyes and ears here in Austin, connecting us to so many local artists and so many of the issues that matter, particularly to this place. Thank you for that. I also want to acknowledge our funders, many of you who are in this room with us, and I know in particular it is just really a joy and a pleasure to have you folks among us, to have us all enter this space together as peers. And so I want to say a special thank you to the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, the Japan and U.S. Friendship Commission. Sorry, it's a long miss. Not sorry, it's not since long. My name is Dave County, the Urban and Cultural Affairs, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Landon Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the Kehody Foundation, CERNA, West App, City of Austin Economic Development, Department of Cultural Affairs Division, on its title ever. The Austin Convention Research Bureau and the Texas Commission on the Arts. Thank you all so much. And now, for all the people who make my job way easier and more glamorous and attractive and sparkly and awesome, who have poured themselves into this meeting, y'all want to come on up here. Thank you so much to the staff, the veteran and the man, the international colleagues who have come from far to be here with us this week. Our folks from our U.S. Japan Connection Program and our colleagues with La Red and our Latin American Program, I think in particular at this time, it is a wonderful opportunity to reaffirm the necessity to see good connections beyond our own borders so that we can talk about this shape of life. And my last thank you is, of course, to MK Wegman for making this transition with me as a true colleague and sharing all the moments over the last six months, some of them awkward, some of them graceful, all of them really in a spirit of respect and openness and I am so grateful, MK, for this transition and for you being with us here this week. So, as we begin these few days here together, we reaffirm our commitment to the freedom of expression to anti-censorship, to a discourse that is centered on curiosity and challenging ourselves and each other, recognizing the sometimes clumsy and imperfect process of learning and growing together. We also declare ourselves an anti-oppression organization committed to examining and dismantling systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, or creed. NPNVAN is by no means a perfect model for this work and we invite you into this process with us as we grow and learn ourselves. At this annual meeting, we hope that you will explore how this commitment to anti-oppression may be applied to your own work and we hope you will engage with each other bravely and respectfully and we hope if you encounter oppressive messages or actions during the annual meeting that you are encouraged to shine a light on those moments so that we may grow together. We also invite you to share these moments with NPNVAN so that we may learn how to respond better as an organization and for this purpose we have established at this annual meeting our very own Justice Lee. Thank you guys. Not Kate's, right? You said Tiara, maybe better than Kate's. This is a group of individuals who are nominated by staff and board members particularly for the job of ensuring that NPNVAN is informed and responsive to any incidents that may arise at the annual meeting. I just want to acknowledge Mina, Abe, Stephanie, Pumitz and Steve Bailey as our Justice Lee members. Abe is definitely working on the superhero outfits I think as we speak. We invite you to seek them out if there's anything that you want to share with us during this annual meeting and of course also seek out any board members or staff members so that we may respond and grow together in this moment. Lastly I just wanted to say I'm so excited to be here in this new role. I was at my very first annual meeting a year ago in Portland and just applied to this job very secretively and sat in the room and looked out at all of you and watched the level of discourse that was happening the level of energy and excitement in the room an organization that I had crushed on already for a dozen years blossomed into this full of love affair and I thought I'm so glad I just applied for this job and regardless of what happened I look forward to being in this space again with everybody next year in Austin. It's hard to imagine that I would actually be standing here at this podium so grateful for this journey for those of you who have put your faith in me and in this organization to weather this transition together to enter this new chapter for the organization together I cannot wait for all of the wonder and joy and inspiration and luckness that we are going to bring together this week. Thank you very much. I want to bring up the folks who are going to be doing our group intros and icebreakers today it's a little bit different than when you've had it before so I want to welcome Adam Garrett and Stephanie McKee Adam's making his way up here how y'all doing this morning? So there were complaints before so we're going to shake it up a little bit Hello Welcome to the first MPNV Meet Market Let's go, let's mess it up We'll ignore that Before we begin we have about 5 minutes What we'd like y'all to do is to get up, mingle around and get at a table of a group of 5 to 6 or 7 of people that you do not know or do not know very well So that doesn't tell you what the purpose of this is So the purpose of this is for you guys to get to know each other a little bit better We're going to lead you through the process as soon as the phone goes off I'm just kidding I thought I would pick on you So we're going to get to know each other a little bit better and this is a process that is not going to stop here it's going to continue through this annual meeting There's something that we want you to know before you get started when you get to those tables is that practice right now your active listening skills So you know a good conversation is always a conversation where somebody else can get in on it, right? It doesn't look like, let's try it So, hi, how are you? My name is Stephanie P I'm from Jimbo Productions New Orleans What's your name? You're actually a little? You're actually a little Okay, so you know like I was saying you don't want that to know Let's move Oh, I'm so hot You're documenting all of this? You've got some great footage Boom We're going to be performing an opera piece from Hunger, which is formal work that is actually going to be on court here in Austin at More Text next week and also she'll be doing a new piece for us that's going to be a commentary on So join me in welcoming Emily Stewart Think about what I wanted to leave you with This Hunger is one moment show that goes up next week, December 8th through the 11th I wanted to like make sure that I give you a little bit of what? A forgiving The child gets it wrong I only keep our motto if we keep our mouth full Now, privileged your life must be You could be tired of hearing poems about race or rape or we the poets write about and violating bodies that keep being raped It's not hard to believe you're tired But can you imagine how exhausted we the poets must be So Emily Stewart, thank you so much Namely that that's the chart paper, so I, of course, being an Amazon addict in Barotic, where it's some of the old days ago just in case We do have the chart paper This is Caitlin's first conference as an executive director but I want to tell you that you guys have a hell of a leader That was five months prior to that I was doing policy work on homelessness child welfare, that sort of stuff So I really applaud those Caitlin and I met once and the time I emailed her being like, hey, you're talking to me in one session of my conference, and I'm like, well, that's cool And I understand it was the first conference that's really ballsy to shake up your conference like two weeks before because you feel a topic is so timely and so urgent and so thank you Caitlin for your passion and your dedication Hopefully we'll be able to lock this down for you guys to get this off to a good start and make some relations with our chat list But in five months, Art's five months still figuring this thing out and I'm excited to be here My purpose in being here has been pretty organic having this conversation with you guys about the urgency of this moment because this is an urgent time The blog post I wrote really was about how artists have always been at the forefront of rapid change because of that, because I do believe that we have a serious threat both to free speech we've seen with Hamilton we have a president who really does not have any respect for his office I think that we have to be prepared and we have to be thinking about it now so that we're not being reactionary because having a conference for most of my life I know that policies are only what we choose to accept and so we have to accept things at every possible point and so that's my element First of all this is actually a workshop so you all can be working in editing so don't put too long so you all can move in too so don't be comfortable You're all required to what's the commitments because I think we have to commit to things today and then find folks who are accountable for them throughout the next four years as you are in your own work every day and so one of the things I'm interested in personally is really about capital how do we help communities in color how do we help artists with a lot of the same way that folks who have bought continue to make their wealth work for them like 12 dollars how do we leverage technology to build capital so that's what we're going to do we're going to talk about stuff like that we're going to really toss some things up there and see what comes down but hopefully we have fun and everything works out okay so like that I'm Sixto Wagon I am the director for the Center for Art and Social Engagement and I'm here because I was out there with you for so many years almost every program that I can ever did I was part of and I'm here because this is home this is where I needed to be because I know that if anything's going to happen it needs to start here you all need to be the people to work with me and inspire me in order to change this emotion into action and make sure that these next four years are things that we can be proud of and know that we've done shit so part of my job at the university is to reframe questions so that more people can be part of that conversation that the dialogue is expanded and that more people are empowered in order to feel that they can do something and that's what I'm hoping we all are going to be here doing today I think the other things are we need to also recognize that where we are as individuals might not be the same place as where our institutions are at a university I recognize I can only do so much but as an individual I know I can do a lot more or a lot different I need to understand what the power is and I need to hopefully work with you all in order to understand when those things can come together and when things need to be suffered all of you all that sometimes the organization won't be able to move as fast as you but that's fine at this point what are we doing in order to be able to move that organization and what are we doing as individuals in order to make sure that when we come back together again next year that we can look at each other in the eye and actually be held accountable for the shit that we said today so that's the other part is that I want everybody to be able to find a partner and a collaborator for your organization and I want you to be able to find somebody to hold yourself individually accountable for what you are planning and committing to do it today so my name is Madison Cario and I am and have been many things currently I am the director of the Office of the Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and I'm really honored to be the leader of any program there that allows me to support and encourage creative collisions at the intersection of science, engineering, art, and design and so I want to take a moment to tell you that I'm incredibly grateful to Caitlin I see her for the invitation to be here but I have to tell you a story because I have to tell you that I'm only standing here on this stage because I got lucky I got really lucky so in lieu of a regular intro I'm going to tell you a little story because that's what I like to do girls are poor the daughter of a recent immigrant and a woman with severe mental illness I was told numerous times to settle down to pick one thing a gender a job a place to live I was told to stop daydreaming and to grow up I was told to keep my mouth shut my legs crossed I was told to not get dirty to suck it up and just accept my position in life I was told that I wasn't college material but my own guidance counselor in 11th grade I sent him my diplomas reaching every one of them and you know I was told that art was not for us it was for someone else thankfully I didn't believe most of what I was told but for some reason I did believe that art was not something for me for a long time until October 1994 so on October 7th 1994 I got dragged to the theater to see some local dance at this point I had finished a bachelor's in rhetoric and communication and a sting in the Marine Corps as electrical engineer and I had a good job good life I did copyright law for a major medical publishing company so it was happening so there I was sitting in an M3 in the Mandel Theater in Philadelphia I think there's some Philly folk in here we'll know so you can tell by the fact that I remember what's seen I was in that this was an emotionally charged moment so there I was sitting there dreading with the upright watch pretending I had a watch over so we all been there dreading this evening of local dance shorts and then some magic happen right we all had this moment so this woman gets on stage and she danced a solo with a narrative that was just too familiar for me to ignore with movement and text that left me speechless my heart pounded kind of like it's pounding right now and my eyes filled with tears and while I can't take exactly what happened that night in that theater between that woman because that piece was for me you know those pieces that are just for you that one was for me I can't tell you that I left the theater on fire and I wanted something new in my life so within a month I did the reasonable thing and I quit my day job thanks for your support I started writing for dance companies and I applied for my first grant to make a performance I'm thrilled to tell you that I get that grant and make that performance applause for me I got that choreographer to help me now that she helped me make that work she has Steve by my side for 23 years as my art and life partner here we go, here we go again okay so I just came a couple decades from 94 and I'm telling you this story because I think you get the point right because there's some magic out there that happens if you let it happen and before we get our head and our heart and our shoulders into the obstacles ahead of us I ask that each of you close your eyes for a moment go ahead, it's okay, Kate and it ensures me this is a safe space so close your eyes, I'll be nice and I want you to go back to that time, or times that your life was transformed by art and artist a creative connection feel that energy kind of flows up through your core and makes you palm sweat and your heart beat in that moment that transformational power, that energy I call it love stay there, I'm going to need that love so as you come back to this world you don't have to open your eyes it's not pretty this 2016 where the potential for violence fear hatred, misogyny and discrimination seem to be all unstoppable I ask you to remember that each and every one of you is here only because you got lucky right? I know we work hard, we work damn hard but we are so lucky, I didn't say it so yes okay, we got to open our eyes now because we have work to do so we're going to pull on our shit-ticket boots we're going to pull ourselves up and remember that as we start to do this work to bring that joy and that laughter and that magic with us my desire for us in this session is that we all take stock of what we have we recognize what we might be missing and we build pathways tunnels, bridges networks, whatever it takes to keep us all connected inspired in love, lucky and strong we are the dream catchers and the storytellers and now more than ever we need to honor that and make sure that every and I mean every dream is caught and every story is told so now we're going to start the work we're going to do is to stay now because I now lost in the story world we're going to find out who's in the room okay, we've all done this exercise before so we're going to give you directors and you're going to need to stand up if you feel that this applies to you now you can stand up as many times as you want or you can not stand up it's up to you I'm going to start this off by saying anybody who identifies as an independent please stand I'm going to make sure you look around the room so we can see the community and the love around this for leadership role, we're going all with the nonprofit organization or institution doing too much so then for people on stand or stand if you are a funder or leader of a service organization or anybody who can actually help in supporting independent artists so those of you who have actually also supported any crowdfunding campaign, online campaign or given to your friend or yourself as an individual artist why are you not standing up you all please you get in this room I'm sure that you've given yourself or your artist friend at least some money we're all here in order to support you so the next thing we're all standing because now we're going to move again and it's out about the call to action we need to know where we are and where we want to be this is going to happen is at the four corners that if you agree with this next statement I strongly agree over there kind of agree kind of disagree and strongly disagree over here now this is also a spectrum and clearly I know that a lot of you all don't really care about my instructions hopefully and part of this is also when please there should be no judgments about this we need to be holding this and know where we are and what's happening and this is also about the question is or the statement I'm actively working toward disruption and change so if you strongly agree kind of agree kind of disagree or strongly disagree and recognize that even if you are doing things as an organization or individual there is nothing about the judgment in this know where you are and where you are right now about disruption and change we are actively just disrupting and changing so slowly if you are so active let's get a little bit more active if we got another question right? I'm also going to say that there are people and there are organizations who might not have been ready for this because they're keeping on keeping on you've been here, you've done this you continue to do this and that's great and that's fine thank you so much for the work now you all are here so I'm going to assume that this is where you are right now where do you want to be at the end of this screening are you ready for active, disrupting and change strongly disagree kind of agree strongly disagree and over there I need you all to separate are you ready and active and ready to do some work are you kind of not sure where you're going to go and what's going to happen are you sure that you don't know where that's happening are you ready to stand and ready to do some work because if that is, I need you here I'm so glad that you are there because now look around to the people next to you and you are now starting to find the people who you are going to be holding accountable at the end of this screening and ask them what is their commitment in order to do that change I know some of you all over there that radicals that's great make sure that we all are going to be able to move that out so so so so so okay, right before that gotcha but we didn't meet but now we've met yes so amazing radicals of all time oh this is not the first time sorry sorry Angel Davis is a so we've got a 6 minute video here to help us kind of frame the conversation we're going to have afterwards so we often queue that up I appreciate it but it's heroic individualism I'm going to be using individualism for the rest of my talk because it's dangerous it's really really dangerous and we have somebody in Washington who assumes that that is the meaning of freedom like I said I have to wait I'm really anxious okay the second point is that the victories we do win are not always the victories we fought for we should celebrate them nonetheless this is the year in which the Black Panther Party celebrates its 40th anniversary as a matter of fact in the Bay Area this weekend there are a whole number of events as a huge reunion happening studies association is meeting in Oakland and there is an event marking the 40th anniversary of the Black Panther Party which was founded right there in Oakland, California you know the speed of the Black Panther Party you know that it came about because a few people decided they wanted to do something about rapid police violence in the city of Oakland Huey Newton was the CEO Huey Newton's contribution because of his trajectory and his she did an involvement with drugs and the way he died Huggins said at Huey's funeral many years ago she said you know everybody has their demons and Huey had his demons and he could not deal with them but that does not change the fact that he helped to spark a whole new phase in the movement against racism in this country and so when he and Bobby Seale decided that they were going to patrol the streets of Oakland, California and they were going to take guns that time it was legal to take guns I mean you could carry guns and seal them so they weren't making the law and they were going to take a law book and monitor the Oakland police so that when the police stopped somebody and I know racial profiling is still a major major issue especially right here in this area when they saw the police stopping people they would simply go and stand by their rights and so they would have a law book in one hand romanticize guns I really don't I don't want to romanticize violence or representations of violence but what I can say is that that was an amazing feat of imagination that was an amazing feat of the imagination because it demonstrated that the kinds of strategies we have accepted as transformative the civil rights strategies work only up to a certain point and we didn't have to stop there we could go further I mean this was their way I have to stop talking about this in a minute because I'm running out of time but this was also a way of manifest solidarity with people who were struggling in Asia in Vietnam for example with people who were struggling for their liberation in Africa with the people of South Africa for example I mean this is how I interpret the symbolic the symbolic meaning of the weapons but then I would also have to talk about the the masochist, militarist you know I mean all of that's there too problems with the way the Black Panther Party unfolded but that's okay because that was that period besides concepts which allowed us to think about the the masculinism that was so much at the heart of that work and many of the liberation effects as well great talk though keep going I don't know if anyone saw that video was shot it was shot in 2006 and so she was actually going to my George Bush she was anxious about him I don't know really pull off the purposes of our discussion today a couple things that she said she talked about very briefly radical individualism because I think that we've got to a point in this country where we do think sorry she said heroic individualism everybody's got to be a hero I think that is part of why we feel so fractured right now and perhaps we can step back and group together a little bit more together instead of thinking about ourselves as so individual a regime but let's find some commonality I love the phrase that she uses she says amazing feet of the imagination and I think when we begin to talk in small groups it really is about taking yourself out of your day to day life to think about how can you shape things up and disrupt things personally or in your organization to really affect change who's most vulnerable in your communities are you currently acting working with them to help them become less vulnerable and really identifying what the threats are in our community and I know we've got books in rural areas books in urban areas all over the country everyone's conscience is different she also talks about recognizing when a strategy stops working developing new strategies to move forward and really create change in fact change in whatever you're doing and I think it's really important to stay connected both in our communities and across the country and yes at some point around the world because we're seeing actually shift towards right-wing stuff all over the world and so it is the role of the artist to stand in the face of that create new strategies and really innovate the way we work together to do that work and I was shocked when I found her online that she was, that was 2006 so we thought we ought to do something different it is apparent that we do something different because this is where we see our people and with that I'll let my much more relevant, oh no we're doing a turn of the power so if you guys want to assess the table I'm sure some of the sort of reactions you have to the video about four or five minutes from that but just your own personal thoughts about what really triggered for you which we'll just get to your thoughts with me so so are we going to ask two more minutes so I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I