 And the artistic director at AS220 an internationally renowned art center in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work at AS220 focuses on the role of art and culture as a catalyst for social change through community engagement, cross sector partnerships and herbal renewal. She's an active member of the National Association of Latin Arts and Cultures and the Alliance of Artist Communities. She is also a co-founder of Festival de la Palabra 2010, the largest literature festival in Puerto Rico, and committed to positive community development. The Festival de la Palabra founding team, we opened the museum house Concha Melinda San Juan and activated it with public programming as a hub for literary arts. Rivera completed AVA with double major in psychology and sociology in the University of Puerto Rico and coursework in the graduate program of contemporary media and culture in the University of the Sacred Heart San Juan Puerto Rico. She has been a guest speaker at Tulane University, University of Puerto Rico, the RISD Art Museum, New Bedford Museum of Art, Philadelphia Mural Art, Nalax Regional Convenience and Detroit and Providence and the Alliance of Artist Communities Annual Conferences. Rivera Rios is an alumna of the Nalax Leadership Institute 2010. Well, please join me with a big WEPA to welcome Shea. Well Adriana was reading my bio, I was like, this is so long, but I want to just jump up and down. So I'm really happy to be here with everybody. Thanks for being part of it, of this. It was really transformational when I first became a Nalaquera in 2012. There are a few of my cohort and peers over here, Fabiola, I already saw you, Yahaira. So it's really awesome to be back in San Antonio. This is a piece by Melanie Cervantes from Dignidad Rebelde, wife of also another of our peers from Nalax and I thought that it was very timely with the conversation that we're having about oppression and exclusion of voices. So I want to shake things up a little bit about that and I want to also, if you guys have questions at any point during my talk, feel free to jump in. I think that in the past, in the previous panel, something that came up that really stuck to me was the concept of anger. I think that that's really timely right now. We're in a really, we're in an age where there's a lot of fire, there's a lot of confrontation around identity. We're looking at what we're putting into the table and looking at who's accepting it and who's not. So I think that this conversation is very timely, especially with what Guadalupe Center for the Arts has been facing in San Antonio. Unfortunately, as we all know, that's not a unique situation. In San Antonio, 50% Latino still struggles with representation, the same way that Providence, also another city that's basically half Latino, struggles with that too. So one of the ideas, I'm going to share with you a few of the ideas and a few initiatives that I've been doing in my own community to hopefully add to the mix of the larger struggle and push this forward. In terms of anger, this reminds me of, so when I grew up in Puerto Rico, 100% Boricua, I moved to Rhode Island in a crazy spur of the moment decision six years ago to pursue this as my actual career in arts management because I wanted to help support people. I wanted to support the work of people whose voices were not heard. So this little bird is called Epidire, it's a really, really, really tiny little bird, but it's very ferocious. So whenever anybody is near its nest, it just completely starts attacking that person and is very much known to attack hawks as well. So it's incredible how a small little bird can be so ferocious and protect what's theirs and still remain and have their identity be solid. This bird is so important to Puerto Rico that it's become associated with Puerto Rican culture and of course I identify with it and I think that's an interesting symbol for today's battle. So I recently got appointed as a new artistic director of AS220. To connect the dots with how we deal with oppression and struggle, AS220 is an artist center in downtown Providence. It basically started with artists against censorship. They wanted to have a home for the arts where nobody was telling them what was valuable, what their aesthetic was like. They just wanted to create and open a space for other people to create as well. So it started in 1985 at a moment where Providence was just barren. There was nothing happening, there were abandoned city buildings. It was not a very vital environment. So it really was up to the artist to start creating work. They convened together, they collaborated together and they opened up the space. This is our vision statement so we envision a just world where all people can realize their creative potential. That speaks completely to all the work that everybody here is doing, myself included. I think that it's really about access and opportunity and that's how we battle oppression and that's how we put voices forward. Just to show the power of that collaboration, this is what Providence looked like back in the 80s and this is our first building, Empire Street. Maybe you can see a little bit of how desolate any landscape was. These artists were using different spaces and got continuously pushed out. But later they decided, no, we're not going to be kicked out. We're not going to be kicked out because of the content that we produced because people don't accept it. We're not going to be kicked out because rents are increasing. So we're going to own. There was a large-scale advocacy work done in the city at that time where the artists worked with the city and said, hey, we really want a space. Please give us a space to collaborate and make work. Fortunately, it was an interesting time in Providence where the city was in dire need. So there was this one building that was falling into itself and the mayor said, sure, you can have this building. The artists got a loan, they did a large capital campaign. Tons of volunteers came into that building to take out tons of debris and fix it. Live there illegally for a while until they got the building up to code. 30 years later, this is what these buildings look like. And this was all artists founded, artists run. The city collaborating with artists and the artists being involved in cross-sector conversations about the quality of life and how to transform the city. This was in Providence in the 80s in a desolate state and now in 2016 it's considered a very rich cultural center. In fact, it's now called the creative capital. But it's not called the creative capital because of the business sector. It's called the creative capital because of the power of creativity, innovation and because of the people. One of the things that I wanted to share that I'm putting into practice every day with the work that we do is how do we nurture people? How do we nurture creative communities? So what we do, we provide four things. We provide access to space, access to tools, access to knowledge and access to people. And we believe that if we give those to the community, the community will just rise up to power and their voices will be heard and collaboration will happen and it'll become a vibrant city. That's our formula. So I wanted to share that with you as another way that we do advocacy and we see it as activism. One of the things that we get confronted with often and we deal with this in the Latino art sphere as well is the issue of quality. So when we're in a juried and uncensored space, our job is not to judge people's work. It's to provide access and opportunity. So then our funders are always asking, well, how do you ensure quality in that realm? Our answer is that we ensure quality by providing opportunity. So it's a very horizontal take. It's a little bit anarchist or socialist or whatever you'd like to tag it with, but it's about empowering the community so it grows together. It holds itself accountable and then pathways emerge that people are organically building and it's not up to us to tell people what to do. This is Benda Pumps, one of our artists and residents at AS220, another, Nalaquero. The reason why I put this here is because I want to talk about our powerful cultural currents and this is what I wanted to bring into the table today. I was in a conversation with Roberta Uno from the Ford Foundation. She gave a talk to these groups that she's incubating and it was the first time ever that I heard somebody speak of this, which is very true. She brought the idea that Romeo Santos from Aventura, a bachata group that started in New York, sold out the Yankee Stadium twice and the white mainstream does not know who Romeo Santos is. And I think that speaks clearly to the power that we have internationally and all the products that we're creating, the intergenerational and international conversations that we're a part of every day that are not seen in the white mainstream. Another conversation is whether that's necessary to be seen, whether it's not. I don't want to put that in the table but I want to talk about the strengths that we have right now. Our voices are really important and they're reaching very different corners and the people that are in this room are very important. We're all doing really incredible work that are inspiring other people to create more. So we are part of a movement together and that's very exciting to me in this day and age. One of the people that I have to say changed my life in Puerto Rico when I started to do cultural work for real was Maida Santos Febrez. She is one of the most important writers for the Puerto Rican community. She launched the Festival de la Palabra in 2010. It was a crazy vision, same crazy vision that artists in Providence had. She wanted a five-day festival with five pavilions in a fortress in San Juan, the three fortress floors full of literature programming plus two weeks of programming in them all. So she really wanted to shape things up. She wanted to turn Puerto Rico into an international hub where all these writers would come in and that writers in Puerto Rico could be connected to this international circle. We've got around 120 writers from all around the world that are also journalists but the cool thing about that is that all those writers were advocates for their communities, advocates for their countries and this was sparking international dialogue happening in our city. It's also like what's happening right now Puerto Rico is a different issue that I don't want to get into but we should at some point. But she was a really inspirational person. That was an incredible task done by writers, people who wanted to see Puerto Rico's identity was tied to arts and culture and we had an international voice. That changed my perspective. That's when I decided this is what I want to do for my career and I have to leave Puerto Rico to see what's out there and try to understand other communities. So part of the work that I've been doing in Providence as well I have up here, his name is Ray Watson. He's from the native community in Providence. Very invisible community over there and we started to talk what is going on? Why aren't our voices represented even though we have the numbers? Why is it that it's so difficult to convince our communities to step up and empower them? So what are these barriers? And we started to think well maybe we should convene all the people who have been doing this work for 30 years or more in our own city that have not been recognized and really ask them do you consider yourself a cultural practitioner? Do you consider yourself an artist? What are the barriers? What's really happening in our community and how can we connect those dots? Because we can't work in silos even ethnically. It's really important to collaborate the Hispanic community with the native community, the black community the Asian community, all of us as a very diverse group of people to step up and change the game and support for the arts. So that was the conversation that was the spark of the conversation and he launched a new initiative called the Providence Cultural Equity how this was informed was by all these other places where culture was what drove people to go there what drove people to support the communities there. For example he went on a trip to Mexico and it was all cultural tourism he was completely blown away and he said this is what we have to do we have to do cultural assessment of what we have in our own communities in our own place understand what makes us unique and then showcase that because that's the identity of our city it's not the business sector it's not the design sector it's not the technology center it's not whatever tagline everybody else wants to put on top of us it's our voice so it's really up to us to push it forward and make a mess and a ruckus so people can understand the existence of this cultural richness and rubric. So this is basically the premise of what I wanted to speak to you today it's really about how all of us in working in different sectors but still having art as a signifier as the one center hub it's so important that we collaborate NALAC has launched the Intercultural Leadership Institute that was also a very transformational experience because it tells we spoke about how to take this back to our communities how is it that we can create tools so we can hold those funders accountable so we can actually create best practices for when somebody wants to do a cultural festival for example they're not just plugging us in as tokens that we're actually involved in decision making that when the city convenes groups to design new schools or new policies that we're at the table so it's so important that ourselves as arts managers and artists we don't just settle we have to be there we have to also empower our own community to be at the table and also tell the people who are convening these groups the way that they have to do it because often times I've been caught in conversations where people convene them but then their opinion is not really valued and then there's no follow up nobody tells them what your voice contributed to the larger conversation it's like no we have to work together as a team so it's interesting I want to hear more about what you guys have been working on today I feel that personally as a young Latina especially stepping into this leadership role in a new community I'm not a related native I'm a transplant but then the majority of the 50% of our population are transplants as well there are a lot of things that we struggle with I gave a talk not too long ago at the New Bedford Museum of Art to a group of 40 high school girls that wanted to pursue arts as a career and one of them, a young woman of color she had the best question she was like have you ever faced challenges in what you wanted to do and I'm like well do you mean challenges because of my ethnicity and my age like of course but I think it's up to us to step it up I think that at least what I do is informed as possible armed as possible be as eloquent and articulate as possible so we can challenge those stereotypes and prove to the world that the only aesthetic that's valuable are not the western ideas of what art is it's not the western ideas of what beauty is it's what we have to what we are constantly creating in our own communities and the mix that builds up by having all these diverse voices at the table that's so important and I think about we have a youth program and we try to instill this in our youth the majority of our youth are of course Latino we have a high population of African immigrants as well and it's interesting to see them struggle with their identity they live in the US their parents are Colombian, Ecuadorian Puerto Rican but they also have a new identity as young teenagers and it's so awesome to see what they want what are my native roots what is happening in Ecuador how can I help there how does that inform me how is it okay for me to be a metalhead rocker from Colombia and not fall into the stereotypes of what other people tell me I think it's really important in the discussion that Nalek has one of the things that Nalek I feel brings to the table is the intergenerational aspect I hate when people fall into old and new or like when we treat elders as no longer relevant or when we treat youth in a really patronizing way it needs to be a level playing field because we're all working for the same goal and it's really important to continue the old knowledge with the new knowledge and push it forward in a way that it comes together one last thing I want to leave you guys with is this idea of aesthetic because it keeps coming up and it's easy to get very upset it's easy to let it upset you because other people are telling you what your art is supposed to be it really is about taking risk and encouraging people I think living in the US where it's a capitalist world it tells you that you have to be a prodigy that you already have to you have to have a final product that you have to sell there's no space for process there's no space for failure there's no space for experimentation and I think that one of the things that we're all doing really really well is opening those safe spaces for people to experiment for people to explore their new identities in a different way and not be judged so then later they can emerge with their own voices that they've crafted for themselves versus other people and other systems pushing them down and creating more anger and more oppression so I think this is an era where there's no opportunity for empowerment and I urge all of us to continue to take a positive outlook on challenges because if there's a challenge that means that there's an opportunity we can push things forward in a very different amazing way that's what I'm trying to do in my community that's what I'm seeing all of you guys are doing so I do see that the environment is very positive we have to continue to keep people accountable the same way that a Latino the contemporary art month wanted to have an exhibit here in the Guadalupe Center for the Arts and didn't have any Latino artists that's unacceptable so we need to make sure that our voices are at the table and we need to not be scared to stand up for ourselves so I'm really proud of all of us I think this is an era of positivism and opportunity so I'd like to just have an applause for all of us time for questions anybody want to pop in with a question or have maybe a different way that you're approaching your communities or empower other people okay well maybe we can talk later one on one, thank you so much and Shay another round of applause what we learned about Shay is that not only is she wicked smart but she's really generous with her time too and so a one on one conversation is going to be a good opportunity to continue the conversation, build new collaborations thank you so much for taking the time to come out here and share your thoughts with all of us thank you so much we are going to say gray into concurrent sessions so this is where it's going to be a little bit of a challenge to decide where are you going to go next as Joey put it yesterday during his presentation is what's next, right so we have two phenomenal sessions and they actually very keenly match up to some of the questions that were brought up earlier very specifically talking about public art demystifying the process informing the process intercepting and disrupting the process making a leap from studio art to large fabrication construction opportunities you'll get all of that and more with a conversation with Rebecca Blumrockman from the Phoenix Office of Art and Culture which is one of the premier organizations in the country that have won many awards for their approaches and inclusivity to public art and the quality of public art that it is shown through that program so that's one really interesting and informative session that I think will be really provocative instructional and I encourage all the different disciplines to go because when we think of public art we primarily think of two-dimensional or three-dimensional work but there's actually a lot of new different intersections that can take place and time they start so that session is going to be taking place in the Guadalupe Galleria which is right across the street if you pass the parking lot you leave the center here go left walk across the street we'll have very friendly greeters Michael in the background will leave the parade to the public art workshop in this room we have three incredible speakers who will be having a conversation about building relationships through funding so how do you bridge and build strong relationships between funders of foundations in the corporate world and the public realm where officials are beholden to the community that they're interested with and how do you build reciprocity within those relationships so it's not just a one-way transactional relationship but it is about both parties influencing each other and moving forward towards the evolving goals of each community organizations foundations and corporations and the public sphere also has a lot to benefit from creating those opportunities for individuals and organizations in arts and culture so it's important to think about how those things come together so if you have some interesting questions curiosities or ways you want to explore that theme I invite you to stay here in the theater where Yvonne Gallardo will leave the charge towards a very vibrant dynamic conversation with Gary Gibbs of the Texas Commission on the Arts and Carmen La Castellano of the Castellano Family Foundation so you've got about two seconds to get to your to your sessions we'll give you all about five minutes and see you soon