 The art of change is collective action inspired by visionary ideas. The art of change is about embracing uncertainty. The art of change is understanding cultural differences. Art allows people to ask questions and to engage in thinking about the questions about what kind of society we want to live in, in a way that no other medium can. For the process of creating art, we really do begin to understand who we are as people, who we are as a culture, who we are as a nation. Art allows us to have an imagination of what we can be. Art allows us to see it, to feel it. It allows us to think beyond the limits of systems that we might be living in. And so I think that art is not only important, it's crucial to social change. We need artists to help us tell, to help us imagine a future that's better and more just. It's important for us to recognize our interdependence. If we're really going to bring about permanent change in society, because change that lasts is change that is embedded in the heart and in the spirit and in the culture of a people. The art of change is about imagining a better future together. Everybody, good morning. I would have thought to make us all do our down dogs together. It's really beautiful looking out at you, all of you. Yes, but we do have the sunshine. I'm Elizabeth Alexander, director of creativity and free expression here at Ford. And I am really happy to be the one who gets to welcome you here today. Thank you for coming. For the artists of change, a day of celebration of the Ford Fellows where they will share the amazing work that they've been doing with their fellowships over the past year. On behalf of all of my colleagues here at Ford, I would like to thank all of the Fellows for doing your work in the world and for coming today to share it with us. We hope that today will not only be a day to learn from these people about their work but also to build connections to each other. This room is just buzzing and vibrating and humming with all of who you are contributing in one way or another to advancing social justice through the arts. I want to give you a little bit of context for this event. The art of change is Ford's year-long, multifaceted exploration of the interplay of art and social justice around the world. Three components, the fellowship program, which honored these 13 distinguished artists and cultural leaders around the globe, whose work exemplifies the fusion of art and social justice. The fellowship has allowed each person to pursue a project or research that helps advance their and therefore our work and thinking. The art of change has also included a variety of gatherings and convenings. In June, there was a gathering, many of you were here for this, on the theme of art, identity, and movements for change, which brought together about 80 artists, activists, journalists, cultural leaders, educators, and others to look at the intersections of art and movement building. In September, we hosted close to 200 people for a convening entitled Beyond the Hashtag Using Art and Technology to combat the criminalization of our communities, and that was organized by Toshi Reagan, in partnership with the Estrella Foundation, as part of the word Rock and Sword Festival. Last month, we invited 25 diverse innovators, artists, sociologists, economists, psychologists, and others to think with us about the essential value of beauty in everyday life and society overall, and its role in advancing justice. And then in the last few weeks, Thelma Golden brought together a group to discuss career pathways for young curators of color, and Carrie May Weems hosted an intergenerational group of artists to discuss socially engaged art practices. There's also a quite amazing website with all sorts of stuff for you to look at, and so I hope that you will. So this art of change programming has set the stage for the next phase of Ford's work in creativity, arts, and expression, all of the work and thinking that you've been doing over the course of the year. The foundation, as you know, is a social justice funder with a central focus on inequality, and all of Ford's programs address inequality, our work in creativity and free expression continues that work thinking about how the arts, culture, and expression disrupt inequality here in the United States and around the world, and that's actually a much more gigantic umbrella than you might imagine, and I think that that's part of the work that we'll be doing together is understanding how that umbrella leaves many, many, many ways, ways not yet imagined, thinking about how art and social justice go together. My colleagues here at Ford will no doubt soon be sick of reading my favorite poem. There are many favorite poems, but my favorite, favorite poem is from Robert Hayden, and it's called Frederick Douglass. When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth. When it belongs at last to all, when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, reflex action, when it is finally one. When it is more than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians. This man, this Douglass, this former slave, this negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues, rhetoric, not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing. So that is Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden, a poem that he wrote in 1946, a poem that is a sonnet. Sonnets address the topic of love. Hayden revolutionized that form by talking about love of community writ large. So that's something I give us to take forward today. And to ask in the context of the social justice work in arts and culture that we do, how do we do what Hayden distills in this poem? Visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, none alien. What can we together do? What are our tools? We can make partners of artists, partners with each other as thought leaders. Artists, as you know, as we know, as we are, are alchemists who make something from nothing or something from everything. Bricolors who make gallimotos. You know those amazing handmade toys, gallimotos made from discarded things. You see a lot of them in Africa. Things made of wire and twine, tin cans, bird feathers, and seashells. I was married to an artist, the late Fikri Gebreyesus, and had the privilege of watching him invent things all day long. In his studio, I would see bottle caps, bags and bags filled with miscellania. He'd buy paints, yes, but he also mixed pigment from anything. He was a chef as well, so he'd make paste and paint out of turmeric, out of Eritrean berbere, sun-dried red peppers ground to dust. Ochre curry powder could be paint. Green from backyard leaves found in the Elm City that he'd pulverize and titrate to varied depths of tone. What happened when you rubbed coffee grounds on canvas? What happened if those coffee grounds were sanctified from East African coffee ceremony brought across continents through time and space and global conflict? What happened when you remembered the colors of a childhood that wore attempt to destroy but that existed in reconstructed memory that was not mere nostalgia, but rather the seeds of a vision? In his studio, there were bags and bags of coconut shells from which he was going to build a replica in coconut of a Russian-issue helicopter, like the ones that were provided by the Russians to the Ethiopians that they used against the Eritreans in that long, long war. He had to first figure out how to make it fly and then crash. That reminds me of Pedro Reyes' powerful work that I heard about last night, melting down confiscated weapons that have no earthly purpose than other to take life and refashioning them in shovels to plant trees, something that performs a life-giving function. Fikre grew up in East Africa during the long Eritrean independent struggle and somehow in the midst of war and death squads and soldiers in his home and disappeared classmates, he made beauty in books on paper and canvas on the plate, visioned from within the walls of his family's home, sustained and refigured in his creations. And I want to say to you that in the midst of our present multifaceted global refugee crisis that has so many ties to other crises of forced displacement that when he had to leave his home at 16, he came to Sudan and then to Italy and then to Germany and then to the United States. His vision, his resistance, his solution, his social justice practice was art. Art that he made and art that he taught children in New Haven, Connecticut and when he returned to Eritrea to teach in a makeshift mountain school in an air raid zone, what does freedom look like? What is the interior space of joy, profound joy seized in the midst of struggle? How do the sounds of various diasporas make their way into the visual landscape and how do these sounds represent the connection of people around the globe to each other and to their traditions, cultural continuity, the indelible which survives slave trades and refugee crises and all of the other crises that strafe our people. Robin Kelly talks about freedom dreams and that is what Fikre visioned and that is what you all vision all day long in the space of your heads in the work that you do. So this is what artists do. This is, if I say one sentence to you, it is this, we make radical solutions all day long. That's what we do. We create, we see and we try and we discard and we see again. We vision, we discard, we start again. We invent from nothing. Artists at the center as thought partners and co-creators in a dangerous world that is nonetheless overflowing with beauty and power. That is what we together do and that is what we're going to talk about today. So I welcome you and I'm very excited to be with you and now I welcome Alexis Fraz. Thank you. Thank you guys for being here. This is so exciting. So I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping and then we'll kick off with our first panel. So for those of you who don't know, there are many bathrooms. There's a whole bunch by the elevators and then there's a few here to here. So feel free to get up whenever you need to. Please turn the sounds of your phones off if you want to use them to tweet or email about questions. We'll tell you how to do that, but please turn the sounds off. We will have a couple of breaks. We'll have a break in the morning. We have a rather long lunch break, which really will be a break. So if you need to do things outside of the room, feel free, but we hope that you'll use the time to really connect with one another as is already happening here today. And if you need to get up at other times, obviously feel free to do that. But we are not going to be... We're doing something a little different with questions. We're actually not going to be having questions after each session. So please batch your questions. Think about them. We're hoping that people will kind of cross-pollinate throughout the day. So write your questions down and you can ask it directly or you can email it to questions at HeliconCollab.net, which is also written in that pamphlet that you should have received when you came in. So... And we'll ask it for you if you don't feel like raising your hands in the room. So we are actually being live-streamed also. So people are watching this from around the world, checking in and we'll be looking and seeing what we're doing here. And we have several partner sites that are actually hosting kind of watching parties and doing some of their own programming around the day as well, so that's our theme. So you're going to Center for the Arts. Thank you, Deborah Cullinan, who's in the room. Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, the Charles Wright Center in Detroit, the Ashe Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, the Asian Pacific American Center in Washington, D.C., and the Houston Arts Alliance. And we have a couple of people who are actually going to watch this later, too. So it's a bigger day than it feels like here, but it's also very intimate. So we're excited about that. And I just want to say one more thing about streaming this particular session, which is coming up next, is actually not being streamed. You guys have an exclusive on that. So now, without further ado, I want to invite Laura Petrus and Jay Sanders to come up and join me on the stage. Thank you very much.