 make that happen. I thank you for your patience, Ellen. And now we're going to turn our attention to a performance by Mark Bermuthi-Joseph. In the shadow of mourning, a man runs for pleasure. In three weeks time, a virus will shut down his country, but he doesn't know that yet. He's making his hard work, breaking a sweat because the young man is alive. He's 25. He was born on a Sunday. He's wearing all white because his fly is not going to a ceremony, whatever. His gear is bright as fuck. He has nothing to hide. Running for his health. His country is sick. Symptomatic systemic violence is just the biggest and a complicit network of badges and judges and a stunning lack of originality. Really fellas in Georgia, pickup trucks and rifles and lynching the crude instruments, soothing the cancerous hands, bloody racist trigger fingers itching a man running for pleasure. American illness killed him while someone was filming. Three district attorneys reviewed the case. Two whole months went by and the whole world watched the tape before anybody thought to put his killers in prison. You want to talk about a virus? You want to talk about contagion? You want to talk about something you want to stay inside because you just might catch it when you step out your own front door on an arbitrary Tuesday and you alone finding yourself fighting for your life. Here's something explode like a raisin in the sun, heart beating at the pace to meet the blood needs of your run and suddenly realize that you can't breathe. The disease was inevitable, but the fallout is preventable. We cannot eliminate racism, but could we America cure ourselves of racial injustice, justice for a mod are there? I wrote that poem in a moment of anger and despair. The night before Mr. Arbery's murders were charged and jailed. Two weeks later, as I write these notes, George Floyd is dead, killed while an officer of the law literally knelt down on his neck. In between, I had an illuminating conversation with the mental health professional about the nature of race based hate, which I initially characterized as pathology. Pathology. As in, there's got to be some kind of test a person can take before they're admitted to the police force that measures a dangerous level of racism, that officer, those men in Georgia, they're psychopaths, they're sociopaths. She patiently clinically corrected me. She says at a minimum racism is not a psychological disorder because it can be taught. You cannot teach a psychopathy. So if the racist can be a healthy individual, it stands to reason that the society and the social codes they're in are the underlying issue. Racism is a symptom of a sick society. A psychologist diagnosis an individual, the individual does the work to self stabilize or heal. Similarly, an artist diagnosis society, an artist gives society the tools that needs to see itself all the good all the possibility and also all the dis ease from which it might heal. In a short period of time, we're going to go from thinking about public health, from a verological standpoint to thinking about health from an emotional standpoint, health from a post traumatic standpoint. What I want to do right now is spend a little time advocating for the deployment of artists as leaders, as we collectively heal from the trauma of the pandemic, I want to challenge the future functionality of the cultural sector itself. I want to suggest that without inspired cohesive political leadership, it's going to fall on cultural leaders to design and model our post COVID healing apparatus. I want to talk about how we relearn to feel alive in public. For the last decade or so, I've made a lot of art centered work, where I used the words cross sector, or interdisciplinary cross sector fellowship programs that you're going to Center for the Arts in San Francisco, interdisciplinary social practice projects through the Guggenheim Museum, interdisciplinary performance from Carnegie Hall to bam, cross sector culture caucuses at the Kennedy Center. The terms are accurate and useful. But the frame that makes them useful is the context of the fairly transactional spaces that funded the work itself. My work bears the mark of class distance and privilege. There's a healthy share of our arts economy that's teetering on that very specific tension, the public good over here and private or philanthropic wealth over here. But 2020 has collided those two things together in this theater of the absurd called the public health. For the artist and for arts institutions, we've been using this frame of cross sector, but that implies economic categories or vectors. Our current call is to think about the frame of integrated healing instead. Now I've lived in California my whole adult life. So the idea of a therapeutic cocktail that involves Chinese herbs, acupuncture, exercise, poetry readings, Advil and a puppy. It just sounds like right to me. For an individual body, integrated healing is an intentional approach. It involves a reciprocal relationship between patient and practitioner. It definitely combines a wide array of therapies aimed at improving one's total health. So now extrapolate that to social ill. Our post COVID body politic still runs the course of a pre COVID racial timeline, a pre COVID climate response, a pre COVID heteronormative patriarchy. This particular epidemiological sickness is chaotic, it's catastrophic, and it's an opportunity to address the total health of the body politic with art and culture centered as medicine. The Chamber of Commerce is thinking about the economic crisis, the humanitarians, our allies, we have to think about the impending mental health crisis, the psychology of reentry. Here is where I wish we weren't experiencing such a crisis of leadership. It would be awesome for somebody to call out COVID-19 as an integrated opportunity rather than a political problem. Someone to inspire a Manhattan project, but centered on amelioration or a moonshot with culture as the launching pad, someone operating from a moral center and at the edge of culture. But shit is too real for me to wait for that particular cure. I can't act like politics is inherently a force of nature when we're facing actual natural disasters in real time. I'm in the demo of arts workers impacted by COVID-19. I've lost revenue, I've been furloughed, I've canceled premieres. This is the season of loss and adaptation. My entire livelihood is built on bringing people together. And I am personally struggling with fear that it'll be years, not months before I feel comfortable around people again. I am personally implicated in the stakes of what we in the culture sector do next. Before any of those identity markers, I am human. I crave connection, safe, compassionate and expansive human connection. As the country's traffic lights switch from red to yellow, arts institutions should be in the crossroads of American culture, directing us how to walk toward healthy embodied connection. Artists should lead us in the literacy of post COVID social interaction. Rather than producing shows, I advocate for arts institutions to intentionally produce cultural health, funding creatives, mental health professionals, urban planners, economists and sociologists to intentionally design the landscape of our social reintegration. Arts institutions can skilfully, safely, humanely and imaginatively be the civic glue for how our country relearns to feel alive in public space. Real time example. I'm completing an opera libretto in March of 2020, when the performing arts field starts to shut down. Through a mixture of savings and hustle, unemployment and God's grace, I get myself to the end of the year. I complete the libretto by the end of 2020, only to find out that the producing theater is ensure how to manage the social or financial economics of presenting a work of scale in 2021. So what if instead of work for the theater, we spent the next year commissioning artists to help institutionally design how theater is going to work. Like, if a theater commissioned me to design and implement a system to lead a collaborative team of staff and stakeholders to rethink our physical architecture and design creative experiences within them for our post COVID times, rethink theaters as sites of creative wellness. Here's what it boils down to. Large corporations have thus far pledged hundreds of millions of dollars over the last week in the name of curing social ills, curing social ills. These are big investments with vague pronouncements. And they're vague because the specifics of anti racism work leads to the uncomfortable truth that racism is the foundational infrastructure of American capitalism. The extractive economy is predicated on a narrative of social hierarchy. But 2020 has given us the opportunity to invest in social equity. To that end, it gives us the chance to invest in the artful management of public spaces, to invest in artists as a means of cultivating a healthier and more culturally interdependent society. Our financial resuscitation should be tied to methodologies and relationships to the social contract. In order to do this, man, we must deploy artists in our country, not just to make art, but to intentionally make a healthy culture. We have to use art centers, not just to show art, but to make community the currency of arts organizations and the work of artists aren't some extra side hustle thing that America is doing. Right now, art is a lot of what is America itself. That value should carry over into how we build the economy for whatever it is that's coming next for us all. We can build the structural economy and the moral economy at the same time by integrating artists more soundly into our systems thinking boldly invite philanthropists and patrons and government to follow suit. When I hear news of a hitchhiker struck by lightning, yet living, or a child lifting a two ton sedan to free his father pinned underneath, or a camper fighting off a grizzly with her bare hands until someone, a hunter perhaps can shoot it dead. My thoughts turn to black people. The hysterical strength we must possess to survive our very existence, which I fear many believe is and treat as itself a freak occurrence. Those are the words of the incredible poet Nicole Sealy. I began this talk talking about the difference between psychopathy and social ill between a sick person and a sick society. And maybe now I'll close not by talking about difference, but the symmetry between acts of courage and acts of survival. I speak from the vantage point of the privileged and the hunted. When I think of most of the organizers, I really love and have learned from Brett Cook, Shinaka Hodge, Hadari Davis, Tango, Eisen Martin, Theaster Gates, Rick Lowe, Koran Davis, they're artists that are making oasis for cultural health in soulful ways. There's our acts of intellect, of community, and also the intense feeling that both their ancestors and the slave catchers is on a ass. And they are flight and fight. I ask of arts institutions and the people who support them, if not a pandemic, what act of nature would give us the hysterical strength we need to lift the country up to act as some of us must act with the courage it takes to survive with our collective health intact. Thank you. And I see what's being done to my kind just want to leave Wow, Bermouthi, thank you so much for that powerful for those powerful words and for that young man every time I hear that