 Hello, it's hard to come after you. I think I want to thank to everyone who is still here. I think you are heroes in one way or another, that you resisted all this very powerful battle so long day. Maybe we should each of us introduce ourselves, shall we? How about you introduce yourself, do your talk, because we have so little time, and then... Okay. Perfect. So I'm Andriyela Kattush, I'm from Romania. I'm a CEC ArtsLink resident. I was in Los Angeles as LAPD, not at the police, but at the Poverty Department. For the people who don't know about it, this is an organization that was built in 1985 by John Malpedi, who is a theater director, and they work in Skid Row. I guess everybody knows about Skid Row. So there were five intense weeks, but I'm not here to speak about this. I'm mainly a film director. I also do cultural production and educational programs. And I'm here today to tell you something about how we can create spaces for narratives that are maybe sometimes unheard, or we need to make them heard in a way or another. And I want to start the story from the first project I made in a community. It was a small village in Romania. And we did a three-month cultural activation of a community space there. And we worked with children. We ended up working with children, and it got communicated in many, many channels, and people with very good intentions had these children seen, some children who don't have access to many, many stuff. So they are portrayed in this way, that this is these children who don't have that much, and we came there and we showed them so many artists and art pieces and so on. And I had this feeling that this is not the story of these children. And I had this feeling that we should do more than giving them something, and then having this context in which they could be portrayed as some, I don't know, people who don't really have access to anything and they don't see much and so on. So in the next year we did a project. We wanted to make a theater show with them and to make them speak about themselves and their perspectives, but without exposing them on a personal level. So we proposed this thing of, we said like this, okay, you are all some aliens on a planet. What kind of planet would it be? How would that planet look? How would people live in that planet? So they decided that the people would live in a hotel. Most of them didn't see a hotel. So then they imagined a hotel. Like in real life they weren't in a hotel ever before. Then we said, okay, the only thing we have to keep in mind is that these aliens from this planet and so on, they have this mission to go to planet earth, to this village that was their village, to understand these strange things that humans have and this is emotions. And how do they see emotions? What experiences do they have and things like this? So in preparation for this, there was a writing process. So the children were writing everything in small different exercises and they did some dance and some songs and they also did them by themselves through small exercises that didn't seem complicated. So one of them, they decided that on this planet each child has their own room, which they didn't really have most of them, and their mothers were virtual and they would meet their mothers once a day in something that recalls a Zoom call because most of their mothers were abroad working. And yeah, they had to do some interviews in the village and then we had some critical thinking workshops to see how they see what they discovered about the other people. And in the end, we had this show that depicted mostly the community issues, but it was not about that. So there was no personal story there. There was nothing about, I don't know, struggles or showing or exposing something extremely vulnerable that would maybe sometimes re-traumatize some people. Or if not to re-traumatize, then I don't know, expose them to things that are out of our control. And the interesting part about it was that it was played in front of the community and then in the city. And the adults and police makers and teachers and so on they were completely surprised because they understood what the children were speaking about. And also the children because they participated at the community center revival project that we had. We also got their artists all the time. And we had Q&As. So we were so surprised because at the end of the show they went to the public and said, okay, what's your opinion? What do you think about what we did? So it was this kind of empowerment and later on we were told by the teachers in school that they got better and better at school. And now these children like from this village not all the children go to high school but all of these children are now in high school in the city and I'm really proud of them. So for me this was at the core of my practice later on because now my focus is in filmmaking because I'm a field director. And through these projects and these kind of explorations I came with another view towards cinema production which is a harsh medium some of the times because you have to produce, it's about money, it's about strict deadlines. And I think that we can also do this with a kind of care and having a stronger connection with the communities and vulnerable topics that we are speaking about through fiction film. So this would provoke a lot this idea of cinema auteur but I think there comes a time in which you have to find other ways so to see how it could work in different ways than this of the auteur who is in control of everything. So yeah, that's it, thank you. Hi everyone, my name is Amani Olu. I am the founder and executive director of Olu & Company. We are a strategic marketing firm based in Detroit and New York and we work with clients at the intersection of art, design and social impact. In 2020 at the height of the movement for Black Lives I think everyone was trying to figure out how they could contribute from their living rooms. And one of the things I started thinking about was as we talk about community narratives was how can Black artists protect their narrative and protect it from the institution and the establishment that is really seeking to just monetize, make money off of the work but isn't interested in doing any kind of deep dive. So I came up with this like 10 step toolkit and I'm going to talk about some of these, not all of them. And one of the things that is important for me to talk about is a big part of what my firm does is communications and brand voice meaning that we want to make sure that our clients are telling their story in the most authentic, integral way as opposed to just trying to connect to funders or collectors or other key stakeholders. Just making sure that they're being really real and they're being honest in that they're not causing any harm with their language, especially some of our more corporate clients who come into Detroit and they want to do stuff. And a lot of times they throw around words like revitalization and we say you can't really use that word here because there are people who live here and they're alive. Like they're real and they're paying taxes and they're doing all the things. So just because you're doing this project here doesn't necessarily mean that you're saving the community. These people live here, they've been here and they're doing the things. So just as a 30,000 foot view understanding of one of the specialties of my firm is that we go deep on the language and we make sure that it's being communicated properly. Okay, all right, so 10 steps. I'm going to just kind of jump around here. Again, this was in the context of black artists. Anyone can use this. Establish your core values. Like what do you believe in? What do you stand on it? That's it, just stand on it, right? Don't change it up or for this opportunity, you believe in what you believe in, those are your values and stand on it. You have to create language around your work. Whatever your work is, it doesn't have to be individual arts. You have to create the proper language around what you're doing. You also want to define what your work is not about. That's really important. These are the five things my work is not about because, again, in the context of visual art, you have someone that is likely not going to be from your community, maybe not have the same shared lived experience, but they know how to collect theirs and they will say anything to sell your work. They don't care. So be clear about that. We always recommend that our clients come up with a list of words that, whether it's an advisor, institution, whomever, like these are words that you can't use when you describe my work. I'm going to skip that. I think it's a good idea to have these top-level talking points about your work. It's kind of crazy, right? It's like who wants to sit down and write talking points, but it's really helpful when you're talking about what you're doing. These are the five things I need to get across quickly about whatever this thing is. And we also suggest that you build a toolkit. Here's my, I don't know, bio artist statement. There's distances that you kind of have it all situated somewhere on your computer in one folder so that it's just readily available if you need to share and you're not scrambling at the last minute to try to talk about what you're doing. I'll go through this quickly. Get feedback from your colleagues and friends. You're already doing that. I'm sure mock interviews, super important. Y'all homies in the same community? Just say, hey, interview me and give me some feedback on how to talk about what I do. Approve all copy. I don't care if it already went out. Nah, we got to go. We got to edit that. We got to change that. Approve all copy. The copy should be pretty much perfect by the time it's going out to anyone because you're already deep in this process. You shouldn't be seeing it for the first time. And be transparent. If you're the type of artist that's going to do this kind of work, you should probably let people know that this is what it means to work with you. These are my parameters. These are my boundaries. If you want to work with me again, whether it's in the visual arts or any other space, I'm talking from that perspective because that's the world I'm in. But this is what it means to work with me. You cool with that? All right, now we can rock. If you're not, I got to go somewhere else because we don't share the same core values, which is the first thing I listed. So from a tactical perspective, my firm, what we would do, we would either be building all of this for you or for our clients, and then we would be pitching journalists with the appropriate narrative, everything in place. And the reason why, taking it back to 2020, as I was thinking about art history, I was thinking about the rapid interest and growth of the contemporary black art market, I was like, wait, if the narratives about this work, they're incorrect, but they're going in outlets like Art Forum, that's now in the canon incorrectly. So that was the piece where I felt like, as a former curator, arts writer, turn publicist, I kind of understood how all those pieces work together, and I was just thinking about, artists will come to us and say, hey, I'm doing a show at X Gallery, everything is sold out, I don't even have a press release, I'm scared to death about what they're going to say about the work. Then we would come in and we would say, all right, you need to do this and do that. Then when the gallery was like, well, we don't want to say this, then they would bring them to us and then we would talk to them and we'd fix it. So yeah, community narratives. Hi, I'm Lori Waxman. I'm like the third piece of the puzzle. I'm the art critic. I am an art critic. I write for the Chicago Tribune I have for a really long time. I also write for Hyperallergic. So in both of those places, I'm a very conventional art critic, and this is my beat, Chicago, that's what I cover, local artists for international publications and anybody for the local publications. But I'm also an experimental community art critic in this other project that I've been doing for almost 20 years, called the 60-Word a Minute Art Critic, where I travel to places that are a little more off the art map than Chicago, like Portland, Maine, or Knoxville, Tennessee, and I find an art space to host me and for three days I write art reviews for anybody who wants a review. So I flip the usual way that it works and I don't decide who I write about. If somebody wants a review, they get a review. I promise to take everything seriously that is brought to me, and anybody can come. Anybody who makes art, sometimes people bring me the work of dead people, children, professional artists emerging, their teachers, hobbyists, anything. Everybody gets the same serious treatment, and then everything gets published after the fact in any local newspaper, radio, website, whatever I can find locally to partner with. And part of the idea is that I truly believe art criticism is an important part of a healthy art environment or community to stick with the theme. And it doesn't exist everywhere. I mean, it barely even exists in Chicago because the media landscape is so decimated. We don't have to get into it. You all understand. So part of the idea is almost like a traveling doctor back in the day when you didn't have local doctors everywhere. So the doctor came by, helped everybody else, and then went on their way to the next town. But eventually people realize like, oh, it's good to have a doctor. Maybe we should have a local doctor. So maybe I come to town for three days and then I leave and people realize, oh, it's nice to have a local art critic. We should have a local art critic. And maybe it's the people who are participants who realize it, and they have their own ways of generating feedback. Or maybe it's the local publishing partner who suddenly has art reviews that they never have normally, and they realize, oh, there's art being made here, and oh, this is kind of an exciting thing to have in our publication. So maybe they pursue that. There's a lot of different ways it could happen, so I don't check in. I don't have to answer to anybody and produce data about how effective my performance has been, which is good. But yeah, so I do that in addition to doing the normal job of a Chicago art critic. And I didn't even check the time, so that probably was like... No, you're good. I got like two minutes left. Three minutes. Three minutes left? Okay. Thanks, Max. Okay, so one thing that I have heard sometimes after the fact, which has surprised me over the years is learning of the different values that art criticism can have for individual participants. I know what it does for me, and I know what it does in conventional professional art worlds, but it turns out it has other possible values. So some of the the more out there ones in Knoxville, Tennessee, there was a couple who brought me the paintings that their adult son had made while incarcerated. Their son was still incarcerated, and I wrote a review of their son's paintings, and the review was published in the local paper and then brought to the warden at the jail, and this proved to the warden that there was value in what the inmate was doing, and he was given extra privileges for materials in order to practice more of his art making. So that had never occurred to me. I have a number of artists, foreign artists living in the U.S. who want to get this O1B visa. You need reviews to get an O1B visa, so it's become part of their visa packets. And it's as good as any. And that's why it's important that the reviews get published in real places. What else? I did it in Germany once, and there was another set of parents who came in with their son, who had autism, but was a very serious, abstract artist, and I reviewed the work and took it really seriously, and the mother cried while I was writing, and I was so worried that I'd upset her. And so I spoke to her after, and she said, no, it had just been so validating, that her son made this work in the world and someone else could understand it and see its value. So I have also gotten to have those experiences through this, which is kind of incredible. But I've also seen how art feedback can have many different kinds of value way beyond what I imagine it might mean. The end. Okay.