 And I said, that's it, we're in a relay. And I'm handing my baton to Angelica. And I know she will not drop that baton. She will not. Whether she wins the race or not, does not matter. It just matters that someone keeps going. And today is a, you know, we're not over, OK? Not tenor or anything like that. But there is a handing off of batons here. There are things happening here. And then I end on my segue for the aster who, I don't say this very often. I would never want to follow him. You know, usually I can follow anybody and keep my balance. But really seriously, the man can present. And it was so interesting because the aster, you started out with the word that has been much of my life, the altar. You know, it's what I got well known for in the beginning, whether it was the altar, which is the ongoing record of the family at home, or the ofrenda, which is the ephemeral and temporary celebration of death. Those sacred spaces, those vessels, was just so flawlessly beautiful as an image. It held me all the way through. And so this idea of the pursuit of the holy, the pursuit of beauty, and your embodiment, may I say, when you were showing your dance moves? I almost got up with you. The exceedance of being. Oh, please, I'm going to take it home and just take it everywhere with me. It's my new thing. I love that. And the idea that the forms through which we express this exceedance of beauty are the key to what we make and who we make it with, the form. And we use form in the arts very often, either in dance, choreography, and music. In visual arts, formalism, the form. But I think when he takes it in his voice, it gives us a great deal of hope. And the idea of the building, the building being animated through the archives, through the training models, this tension between the poetic and the pragmatic, the me, we, the bucket, I just left on this notion of a kind of soulfulness. And his pickling and preserving, which my mother did, and I tried to learn and failed, it's just the perfect. It's really perfect, the preserving. And you talked about the natural and the artificial of this shelf life. Place over time, relationship over time, art over time. And I want to say that if someone ever asked me, how did this come about? Because all of this started in a path that no one could have expected. And it wasn't set. I mean, I came up in a time where, I mean, I was in a place, a program called Teacher Corps, which had to do with bringing people of color into communities of color. And I was on a team with my team leader, Yolanda Garfiaswu, and it completely changed my life. She was a Wahakena Indian. She was the master of the ofrenda, the day of the dead. And she taught me everything I would ever need to know about culture. The things that my parents hid from me, because they wanted me to be American, she had it all. It was like a living heritage that I had access to, well, to this day. And so this idea that what the asked her called the soul's imaginary. And we use the term theoretic of the social imaginary for quite some time. Another one of those words that got exhausted, because somebody finally gutted and used it for something it had nothing to do with. But the soul's imaginary, what is the difference between space making and place making? And really in the end, the kind of energy that it takes us to get this work done, the fundraising. So everybody in that first group started out on a path that was not known to anyone else. What the asked her does, maybe it was done in some way before, but not that way. What Suzanne does, maybe somebody played around performance, but not that way. And the same thing with Rick, not that way. But you don't know how it will happen. You don't necessarily have the skill sets when you start out. You make a lot of mistakes, you learn from other people. But the one thing that holds it all together, and that's why we're here today, is the idea of relationships. It is the people that you work with along the way, that you love along the way, that you break with along the way, that sometimes you leave behind or they leave you behind. Those are all part of those natural networks of what I think of as the organic making that we engage in. So we're very lucky now, because we're going to hear a future vision. And that's not to say that this morning was retrospective, because it was not. But the future vision comes from those who are either midway in their careers, beginning. And I know there are people here today that won't be presenting, but who are also equally as gifted and have made their mark already. It's simply not enough time for us. But hopefully, when we put our chairs in the circle and we're all together, those kinds of questions will arise. So we're starting with Rick's posse, as it's been called. And I won't introduce people by their backgrounds, because you have their bios here. And so Keir Johnson and Ornel Martínez from Amber Design will speak first to give their presentation. Hello, everybody. Really happy to be here today amongst such an audience. It's really an honor. And yeah, really happy to share today. And we started with a slide of a great individual and predecessor of ours. We're talking about Baton passing today. And for us, there's no better example than this man right here, Terry Atkins. I don't think that I would know Ornel or we'd be doing quite what we'd be doing today if it wasn't for his influence. More so on Ornel, but very much so in passing on myself. When we started, we started a mural making. And we started to branch off from that. And we showed Terry some of our early works of collaboration, performance, whatnot. And he was a very early critic and influence on our collaboration. And we brought our work very early. So to Terry to look at it, he has his own way of doing things. He thumbed through it. He was like, that's some bullshit. That's shit. That's some nigga shit. That's some nigga bullshit. Then he get to one where he be like, well, that one's not that bad. And those ones that weren't that bad have really developed who we are and our practice up to this point. So Terry, we thank you for letting us know what images were not that bad. How does this work? All right, so our first project is one called La Frontera. It took place in North Philadelphia. And I love North Philadelphia because it's a place where people are scared to go. But what happens to those people when the affluence of downtown aren't willing to invest in them? So we work a lot with these communities. And we really look to pull some of the stories that they naturally embody. And in this part of North Philadelphia, there's a divide between the Latin and Black communities. And it's not a divide of conflict, but it is a divide of culture. And both sides are very aware of that divide. And like most communities of color, it's also a place with limited resources, not a whole lot of access to art, not a lot of places of commerce, not a lot of places to shop. We had the pleasure of working with Gale at Asian Arts and developing a series on the Chinese takeout stores of a lot of the marginalized communities of Philadelphia. And this project La Frontera, which means the border in Spanish, is an evolution of that project. And it really is about giving people a cultural center in an environment that they're already uncomfortable with. So this is based off of bodegas in North Philly, all around Philly. And a bodega is where people of these communities go and do the majority of their shopping. What they don't do is go downtown to the museum to see the latest branches of culture and artwork. So we look to mesh that and mend those together and present a creative cultural place setting that would allow these communities that are somewhat separated to really come together and share. Share their stories, share their lives. For some reason, this is not working. And I'll wait for young entrepreneurs to get their product out. We created a system of non-monetary exchange, one based on barter. You come and you give a pamphlet, and you're able to get something that you would normally get in a bodega or something from a local vendor. And we also created a gallery and a place for convening. And all of this to create a comfortable environment but something that represents the institutional and cultural exchange of the more downtown areas. And all of this is based off of access and equity, because these places are the only places where people in these communities could actually go shopping and get something to eat. Similar with a project that was based off of the access of food and food as a real signifier of wealth and health. And so this variation of this project, we started almost like a catering business where, again, a system of exchange allowed community members to take place in a four-course meal that was based off of community recipes. But you had to come and give something in order to partake. It wasn't handouts. So we were able to really develop an ideal sense of interaction through these type of places. And this is the corner store, which, again, is about replicating things in these communities that they're comfortable with. But in an essence, that is more contemporary. So when they go to these exhibitions, they see something that's familiar, but yet it's a part of the community but something foreign that allows them to think a little further on the information that's being presented to them that they take for granted in their everyday life exchange. Good afternoon, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here today. I want to make sure I take a moment to thank Kerry May, Holly, and everyone involved, Rick, just to show our appreciation for allowing us to be a part of this conversation today. It's a very important conversation and dialogue that needs to take place. So with a couple minutes, I'd like to show you guys sort of an overarching sort of trajectory of our work as collaborators. Kira and I are collaborators, but there's also six other members to our collective or four other members, six in total, who just aren't here today. And they're all wonderful artists and brilliant artists, and it's been such a pleasure to sort of make work with them. So with that said, I'm going to show you guys just a series of performances sort of inspired by narratives of communities, different communities. We've traveled around the country and we've created work based on these specific communities and the stories that they have to share. And we've also used our bodies as a vehicle to sort of tell these stories. Right here, you're looking at a piece from a series we call Cleaning the Mansion, which is based out of a North Philadelphia neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion. This is a piece called Urban Space Jockeys, where we get in attire and costumes and we do these performances in communities and we engage the community through some theatrical sort of spectacle art and the conversations are amazing. If you look in the background, you see these young men who have no clue what we're doing, but they're very interested in what's going on. This is a group shot of a piece we did at the PMA. The time is short based on the move bombing in Philadelphia. You guys are familiar with the move bombing. They dropped incinerate bombs in the West Philadelphia neighborhood and killed a dozen or so people. And these are all the performances, the performers that collaborated with us at the museum, at the PMA, trumpet players, singers, poets, performing artists, and we all did a piece and that's Ramona Africa right there on the far left and she partook in that process as well. And we have this procession that led through the museum and all these performers would activate these different spaces at different times. It was all coordinated through our collaboration. And just to end on a current project that we're working on, we're doing this series of podiums and we're building podiums from found materials in different communities. We're creating a platform for people to sort of share the political, social, historical, whatever kind of material they wanna make. We just really wanna engage people and give them a platform to speak up and share the voices. So that's what's going on now and we're gonna be working with this project over the next year or so, but we're using social media as a component to promote people sharing their stories and narratives. All right guys, before I step off, I'd like to ask our mentors, are all the senior heads in here and when they get a moment to sort of share with us what it's like to fail and what does that mean to you and sort of how do you overcome that? Because a lot of the work we've done over the years did not all look successful, some of them were failures and you gotta sort of figure out how to make that happen. All right, thank you guys. Thank you for being here and for the invitation. Powerpoint is working. Alrighty, so, how do I start? All right, so my family emigrated to the US when I was two in 1990 and I think I've always been ambivalent about this idea of rootedness because we've always been entering into communities that were not ours, so I think I've finally found my roots in a community that is based on this idea of unroodiness, but before that, I was working in Los Angeles for six years in public art on both the institutional level and also on the grassroots level and I consider myself a chronic collectivizer. I'm trying to be much better about that, so I organized a yarn bombing collective that did public projects, which is not present on the slide right now, as well as the Micheletta Sink Tank, which is an art collective looking at racial equity in the arts through intervention and discursive gatherings. And I kind of left that all behind to work with Rick in Dallas, Texas, so this is the first iteration of translation when it was commissioned by the National Sculpture Center in 2013, so this is Rick's work in activating a community of 30,000 residents living in three square miles, all speaking 27 different languages. And the reason that they speak 27 different languages is because this was a site that was designated for refugee resettlement by the International Rescue Committee. So our residents are primarily from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, but there's been different waves coming in over the past 10 to 15 years. And what the narrative of this neighborhood also neglects is that there's a huge African-American and Latino community as well from when this was converted into a Section 8 neighborhood in I think about the 1980s. So there's several waves of migration into this neighborhood and there's a lot of different cultures kind of rubbing up against each other, which is incredibly poetic and beautiful, but challenging at the same time. And this is one of those more poetic moments when Rick and Sarah Mochuria and Darryl Radcliffe hosted a Vickry Meadows Got Talent show, showcasing the musical and performance talents of the residents. And as someone who lived for 10 years in Austin, Texas before making the Exodus to Los Angeles, I find it really necessary to explain Texas to people. So Dallas, Texas is one of the bluer areas of Texas, but it's also a city that exports its violence. So I moved to the city in May of 2015 and since then there's just, I mean, within seven months, there were these nationally recognized incidents of racial violence that I think most people don't put together as being part of the Dallas County area because the suburbs are named. So for example, McKinney is named, or Irving is named, or Arlington, but not the actual Dallas County itself. So this actually creates a really highly racialized, intense atmosphere that I think the actual city of Dallas, which is demarcated by the red lines, is in denial about. And that's why our existence is beautiful. So right now, translation is in our third year and our mission is we are a catalyst for highlighting the value of cultural diversity adds to Vickery Meadow's identity. And we place this identity at the center of conversation about the neighborhood's future development by empowering residents through leadership development, workshops, trainings, cultural events, and entrepreneurial initiatives. And one reason that we focus on leadership and entrepreneurial development is because these three square miles are being choked in by gentrification efforts. And we are actually in the northeast sector of Dallas and we're separated from a lot of the anti-gentrification work that has historically been done in the southern sector of Dallas. So a lot of our work this year is to think through how do we actually empower residents to cultivate their bases, their leadership, and to have a voice as well as to connect to these larger organizing efforts in Dallas. So right now we operate out of a store front at the heart of Vickery Meadow. This is an example of one of our classes. This is paper flower making and everyone is making flowers for our Dia de los Muertos event this past October. This was our August teaching core. So our philosophy behind leadership development is to really look at the talents and capacities that people have and that people bring with them when they migrate to this country. So we have Nesrin, our Arabic language leader. Ana, our Aztec dance hefe from Mexico City who has this wonderful indigenous practice. Abby who was a circus performer in Ethiopia and volunteered to teach Ethiopian dance while running his cell phone business. Alexa who was trained in the fine arts in Ecuador and Sara who was a teacher and the maker of our signature beautiful paper flowers. So right now we offer, yeah shoot, we offer about 15 hours of programming every week and we also host an American Sign Language course for deaf and hard of hearing refugees, a youth led zine club. They're making a zine about feminism this semester so I'm super excited. And also, yeah, an indigenous language class, Aztec dance, English as a second language and basically our residents know that they can propose initiatives and that we will find the resources to support them and that we define our work in a broad cultural sense so it doesn't need to be just about the visual arts like what Alexa does with her painting and drawing class but also with broader cultural issues such as language and driving and acculturation to the US. By the way, you guys need to stop me because I can talk forever about this. So this is an example of one of our public gatherings in front of one of three white cubes which are our public exhibition spaces that were placed throughout the neighborhood to activate public space. It's a very dense apartment housing so there's not a lot of public space opportunities. And this is an example of a gathering that our indigenous leader, Anna, organized of 60 Aztec dancers from all over Texas for her troops two-year anniversary and fun fact. So when Anna started out, when we approached her, I think last December, they were just dancing in the park and freezing so we said come practice in our space. She had four people in her group and through the support of translation she's been able to grow her troop to over 25 people now. They've since outgrown our space for practice and she uses our space for education, for costuming. So all of their costumes were handmade because her troop couldn't afford a $400 costume and it's just been this wonderful group of artisans led by one hefa. So one part that we do is leadership cultivation through cultural initiatives and then the other aspect that we do is entrepreneurial development because this started as an artisan market and we wanted to honor that history of what Rick started and also because it's a high poverty neighborhood and people are just looking for forms of supplemental income. So we work with this woman Tisha Krier who mainly works in South Dallas incubating cultural businesses to start a chef training program. So we've successfully incubated five chefs who are continuing to get interest from investors in starting their own businesses and our chefs hail from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Eritrea, Egypt and Iraq. And the story that I always love to tell is that one of our chefs after a catering event she said she would now be able to buy winter clothes for her kids and Tisha and I just looked at each other and cried and we were like, you know what, this, like we both have $100, like that might not seem like a big deal to us but it's a really big deal to people. So I think that's kind of beautiful and this is an example of an Eritrean dish which is full midamas cooked by Ghidorah, our grubby dude in the glasses who also happens to be an accomplished musician. We also partner with other organizations and initiatives. So this was a community garden that was put in by the Hunt Institute at Southern Mesothodist University and populated by refugee gardeners from the International Rescue Commission. So this is Butie, she's from Bhutan and she's one of our first pilot gardeners and I always say I really love her because she looks like my maternal grandmother. It's kind of bonkers but Butie's not bonkers which is great. And to close out, I think this is only a small slice of the really amazing talent and capacities existing in Vickrey Meadow and what I'm really excited about is we just got a grant for a storytelling program to start up a radio station and this all happened because I met a woman named Afrah and she actually worked for Al Jazeera editing video documentaries in Yemen and she was a human rights advocate who ran her own radio station. So she's just kind of here chilling with her one-year-old daughter now but she just jumped at the chance to write community profiles. So this is an excerpt from one of her community profiles. It's about one of our residents Latifah who took our artisan classes and Latifah I think is from Tunisia and then married a man from Iraq but was separated from him for 11 years while they figured out how he got a visa to come to the United States. So Afrah's going to continue in partnership with our community members to do more community profiles via radio, video, profiling and really tell the story of this really amazing and unique community. So super lucky to be working here and so happy to be connected to all of you and to talk more. Thank you. I'm sorry. I always say I don't freestyle so be patient with me. Be patient with me. I do some reading. So yes, my name is Christina Sanchez Juarez. I'm a Los Angeles based teaching artist by day and a public artist and an organizer by night. I'm going to be speaking today about the Cocina Vietta project in English translated to open kitchen but before I start I should say that the bulk of my emotional, spiritual and intellectual work this year has actually been centered in the realm of organizing in particular around the issue of the human right to housing. Nine months ago a group of artists, community organizers and renters formed the Los Angeles Tenants Union to combat the rental crisis that is engulfing our city. I tell you this because I often panic about being too many things at once, being an artist with various civic responsibilities, being a dependable organizer slash member of the tenant union and then getting up every day at six in the morning to teach young students the habits of artists. I hope that at some point during the rest of our evening we can talk about how we survive and embrace these dualities. Los Angeles is the largest restaurant industry in the country. Up until five days ago the medium wage for a Los Angeles restaurant worker was $9.24 an hour. The average one bedroom apartment in LA right now costs $17.50 a month. Los Angeles is also the wage theft capital of the US with over $26 million stolen from workers on a weekly basis. I came to this work through my husband, he's pictured here. Kaie migrated from Oaxaca when he was 17 years old and has been working in California kitchens ever since. He's seen it all, meager wages, discrimination, blatant wage theft and a lack of upward mobility. Cocina Vierta began as a performative storytelling project in 2011. Kaie and I wanted to meet and interview as many immigrant back of house workers as possible. At first these testimonies were incorporated into performance scores which were performed in community spaces, colleges and labor pickets. Later the project became more about highlighting Cocina Vierta collective members, giving professional cooks and servers a space where they could try out new recipes and hone their organizing skills. We describe Cocina Vierta as a nomadic experimental test kitchen. We use the food as a catalyst for relationship building, transformative dialogue and base billing. The work is done in collaboration with a small rotating group of restaurant workers, organizers and artists. We've worked in collaboration with the Restaurant Opportunity Center of Los Angeles also known as Rock LA on various Cocina Vierta projects and have been active members of the organization as well. Rock LA is a worker center dedicated to winning improved working conditions and raising industry standards for LA restaurant workers. This is where we've met and cultivated many of the relationships with the workers who cook with us and spearhead projects with us. The images I've shown you thus far are from our latest collaboration, a series of dinners slash conversations for and by restaurant workers. In June we teamed up with the Rock LA Leadership Board which is comprised of both front of house and back of house workers to host a four course meal. The guest list was completely made up of fellow restaurant workers. The main impulse for the dinners was to provide restaurant workers with a beautiful eating environment where folks could break bread and discuss some of the most pressing workers rights issues. I'm gonna switch gears a bit here. Last year after spending a few years working exclusively on labor themes within the restaurant industry, I went and scored myself a public art commission with the County of LA. Cossini Aviata is currently stationed at Victoria Park in Carson. We are commissioned by the LA Arts Commission and LA Parks and Rec to spend a year in the park investigating how food can deepen cross-cultural alliances. Funding for the project actually comes from Creative Graffiti Abatement Funds. Victoria Park is a 36 acre recreational facility featuring a gym, basketball diamonds, a cricket field, tennis courts, a pool, football, basketball courts, you get the picture, 18 hole golf course. It's a very sporty place and I'm not that sporty but I've adjusted. In addition to being an incredible resource of sports activity in an open space, it's a beautifully multi-ethnic community with African-Americans, Samoan, Latino and Southeast Asian peoples represented in the park usership. Our initial approach was to get to know the community was to immerse ourselves in park culture. We attended softball games, pewee football practice, as well as urban ballroom and Zumba classes. We conducted numerous one-on-one interviews with park staff and volunteer coaches and park users. We've also hosted recipe swaps in the park, built an advisory council and invited ourselves to a lot of politics. The recipe swap lab doubled as both a cookbook library and a place of exchange. We set up a library during the pewee football practice and during the, every year they have this annual Thanksgiving potluck. We worked as scribes jotting down community members recipes as well as giving away pre-printed recipes of our own. Through this process we began to identify the folks that we refer to as community chefs. Now a community chef isn't anyone that's been to the cordon bleu or anything like that. They're everyday people who are known in the community for being good cooks, giving people really people like Veronica Zuniga who whipped up 271 enchiladas for a Thanksgiving potluck. The research and development phase led us to propose the development of a community cooking show in the Victoria Park kitchen. So this is really why I was selected for this project. They have a kitchen. Five community chefs were selected and paired up with restaurant workers from our collective to film cooking instructionals. Each profile features a community cook showing a restaurant worker how to make a dish from start to finish. The restaurant workers serve as co-hosts asking questions about techniques, food history, cultural upbringing and their relationship to the park. There's another one. The profiles will be screened for the larger park community in the spring. The hope is that the screening will serve as an impetus for organizing a massive community potluck slash food festival that brings together the park's diverse cultural groupings for a day of celebration. And there's also, paired with this, I've also been working on a beautification project with an architect named Carmen Cham. These are the kids from the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. So yeah, we're installing a cookbook library making some different types of modifications to the space adding chalkboards, corkboards, outdoor graphics to some picnic tables and outdoor projection screen and all of this stuff is gonna be kind of launched with the screening of the cooking show. These are amazing kids, thank you. And the next of Suzanne's colleagues is Tanya Ingram. Hi everyone, my name is Tanya Ingram and I am a performance poet. I attended NYU and received my bachelor's degree in social justice education through performance poetry. I am currently pursuing my MFA in public practice at Otis College of Art and Design, which is how I got the invitation to be here from Suzanne. My work focuses on using my lived experience to aid in my own process of healing and in the process of healing for others. My practice is the personal. I have taught workshops at Rikers Island and in classrooms throughout the United States and in Ghana, West Africa. My goal is to bring my poetry into hospitals where I have found this to personally be necessary. So with that, I'm going to share two poems. The first poem is Ode to Walton Avenue and it's about the Bronx, New York, which is where I'm from and often when I hear of the Bronx from others, there's often this idea of this terrible place so I decided to write about it from a place of beauty. So this is Ode to Walton Avenue. Ode to Walton Avenue. Where I'm from. We smoke in staircases that paint the walls transparent. We block parties on school nights where mom watches from the window because the air Jordan's on your feet was next month's rent. We are what's good. We don't see butterflies in the hood but we do ask the chino from our ketchup on our fries. We are hydrants drinking ourselves dry. A mother's first of the month smile where grocery shopping is a sacred enterprise. We are the witness, never the snitch. We trust mercy will find us on a swing set so we push the wind behind us and kiss the space between back and forth hoping to welcome the clocks on our wrist. We are barking mad pit bulls that our time has become. We are 15 and brother and trial after trial and when will they come home? We are not home for Jehovah. We are careful adulterers creeping up the back staircase proving human enough to validate every mistake before we die like our memories before the exit plan unfurls. We seal our lungs into plastic containers and reserve the option to breathe. We are feeling. A bullet on the new year. We're having a front window in the Bronx is like scoring front row seats to a Knicks game without the home court advantage. A street fight after cousin JoJo's sweet 16, a holy brawl amongst royalty an illusion injected into a boom box, a magical stereo. Big Junes mixtape or un servicio en la iglesia de Dios if the God we serve ain't packing then we don't believe. We are the watchtower of thieves and spectators. We speak the language of boondock and rat pack, nomads wearing the block in our bloodstream. We are divine and hood and welcome. I left these doors open for you. Come in. Thank you. And the second poem is a list of advice that I would give myself. And I found this poem to be most impactful whenever I read it to students. And it's called unsolicited advice to skinny girls with bitten nails in awkward glances after Jean Ann Verlie. When your best friend's father invites you over, say no. When the girls at school tease you for wearing pay less light ups, do not wrench your face, smile, then tie your laces. When you finally learn how to dougie and it's 2011, show off to everyone you know. When you finally learn how to do the original Harlem Shake and it's 2011, keep it to yourself. When your mother asks you to buy her a pregnancy test, do not slam the door behind you, do not snatch the 20 from your birthright when she says she is pregnant, do not sacred suck your teeth, do not holy roll your eyes when the boy with the intrusive shadow calls you a white girl, do not cower your head, do not question your black when your grandmother says you act like an old lady, take it as a compliment, set the teapot, knit the turtleneck, check on the apple pie when the next NYU student acts to touch your hair, laugh, then ask if you can touch theirs. When your best friend's father invites you over, say no. When you catch your brother with a porno, act surprised, laugh it off, do not call him a sinner. When your mother asks why you take so long in the shower, teller you hate this cancer, this dark that wears you like a plague. When you discover your grandmother is bipolar and schizophrenic, hug her, then Google each illness when you question if you are anything like her, hug yourself, then Google each illness when you cry in front of your brother because he has just learned you are not his full sister, do not slump your shoulders, your eyes are a well, the thirsty crave pour into him. When you visit your brother at Rikers Island, do not blink to hold back the tears, you are Moses, he is the miracle, this is the Red Sea. When your mother brings your sister home from the hospital, do not hide your hands, do not fear you will drop her, she is a medallion in a collection plate of screws, treasure her. When the older woman with silver hair and loose teeth calls you a nigger, give her the finger, give her Jay-Z's the blueprints, give her the word of God. When your mother's ex-boyfriend puts his hands on your brother's grab the chair, when your mother's ex-boyfriend puts his hands on your sister grab the frying pan, when your mother's ex-boyfriend puts his hands on your mother, grab the phone, grab the knife, grab your voice, this is Armageddon, this is taken back what the devil has stolen, do not fear, do not cower, do not question, when your best friend's father invites you over, say no, you are resurrection, you are silence turned, shotgun and death has no place here. Thank you. And the next presenter that is with Suzanne is Adako Uta. Peace everybody. Carrie Holly Suzanne, it is such an honor. Again, thank you, I can't say enough how wondrous and important and necessary this space is for folks like me. My hands are open for the baton, so please, please, please keep passing them along. I'd like to begin and also close with a community act of resistance. So I wanna invite you to bring your right hand to your heart and your left hand to two inches below your belly button. And on your next inhale, I want you to take in 30% more oxygen into your cells and 30% more out of your cells. And do that again and bring even more oxygen into your body, into your mind, into your spirit and exhale out. And on the next inhale, I want you to tell yourself that you matter and then turn over to someone next to you and tell them that they matter. And really mean it. Thank you. We live right now and have always lived really in a time where our breath, breathing, waking up, choosing to be alive is an act of resistance. There is so much even in our dreams that are actively trying to kill us. And so every moment that we intentionally breathe and every moment that we intentionally tell ourselves that we matter and move from that truth and every moment that we look at our neighbors, whether we know them or not, that they matter and treat them, treat them like the humans that they are and the divinity that they are, that is an intentional act of resistance against patriarchy, against racism, against ableism, against homophobia. And that kind of work is what I have been up to for my entire life and I feel really fortunate and honored to call myself a healer, a liberation educator and organizer and a performance artist. But most of all, I am somebody who loves really, really big and ever since I was little, my goal really is to make love, as Khalil Gibran said, to make love really visible in every single act that I do. Harriet's Apothecary is one of my love children. It is a collaboration with Harriet Tubman who this work is named after and it's also a collaboration with my ancestors that I have descended from. I feel very fortunate enough to say that I am a first generation Nigerian. I'm an Ibo woman who grew up in Nigeria and come from a long line of healers and organizers and communists who have dedicated their lives to serving for liberation. So Harriet's Apothecary is many things. It is an underground railroad to freedom led by the indigenous wisdom of our ancestors and it's based here in Brooklyn on our work this year or last year, we started in 2014. Last year our work had the opportunity to travel across the country and into the palms and hearts of I.T. and also Kenya. Harriet's Apothecary is a response to the direct and indirect forms of violence that black indigenous and people of color every day from gentrification to mass incarceration to police brutality to depression, to being raped, to being abused in the nonprofit industrial complex. We are a response to that. We are a manifestation of a legacy of healing justice, a framework where we get to build political and philosophical convergences of healing inside of liberation. And we are rooted in the resilience and the oppressive experiences of those who are actively resisting to create a life that we deserve. Harriet's Apothecary is an intergenerational collective of an all black team and I love saying that an all black team of cis women and queer and trans healers and activists who are following the legacy of Harriet Tubman to create liberation in our tissues and also within our communities. We seek to transform trauma and relieve stress and really recognize that our work, we recognize that we are all traumatized every single one of us on a daily basis. We are constantly on an individual and collective way experiencing direct and non-direct exposures to violence and how that manifests inside of us and around us is huge. So from a headache to having fibroids, I am the fourth generation of women in my family that has fibroids and that's not a coincidence. To living in organizations or working in nonprofits which I've worked in for the last 20 years where people are actually not doing what they say that they are doing, that their values and their practice, there's much, much distance. And so we wanna interrupt that. We wanna interrupt that significantly and the work that we do does just that. So how do we do this? And these are a number of our healers in our collective. There are 22 of us and each of our healers has very different magical powers as I like to say. Some identify as organizers, some identify as Ricky Masters, some identify as anti-colonial therapist, the list goes on. Audre Lorde said many things best. Caring for ourself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and this is an act of political warfare. We in the work that we do are participating in many, many acts of political warfare. This is us on the Brooklyn Bridge cleansing the city. Cleansing the city of its history of colonialism and its history of mass incarceration against black and indigenous and folks of color. So we get to show our love in many, many different ways. One of the main ways that we get to show love in our community is through our healing villages. We throughout the year create these seasonal healing villages that bring together our healing artists and organizers and offer individual and collective healing spaces where people can interrogate the healing genius of their vessels and also critically analyze how these systems of oppression and injustice are affecting them on a physical, emotional and spiritual basis. We had the honor of being invited this past year by Brooklyn Museum on first Saturdays in March, which is Women's History Month. And first Saturdays, how many people have been to first Saturdays? A couple of y'all. So for those who haven't been to first Saturdays, it's a free event on a Saturday that draws about 10,000 people. This is our first event last year and the year before, which is when we started, our reach, we had only four seasonal healing villages and every single healing village had anywhere from 150 to 300 people. When Brooklyn Museum invited us to meet an audience of 10,000, we were very nervous and we also said we were ready. And we also told Brooklyn Museum that we hope that you're ready for us because when we come into a space, we reclaim that space and we take up space as black people, especially as black women and queer and trans folks who are often told to be small. We said, no, we're not gonna be small. This is a white institution and we're gonna come in here with our full blackness and bring in our indigenous practices and we're gonna interrogate how whiteness occupies the space at a museum and also in our streets in Brooklyn. So right here, this is actually our closing ceremony. We started off with an opening ritual and a closing ritual, but throughout the night, we had 25 different healing stations that people could participate in from sound healing to guided meditation to doing vision boarding around what does resilience mean for your inside of your body? And what does resilience and safety mean for Brooklyn in a state where anti-black racism is vastly growing and huge? We had sessions on using acupressure as a tool to deal with rape, being a survivor of rape. We had sessions where people had an opportunity to learn how to ground themselves in the face of microaggressions in your organizations. So these all these stations were spread throughout Brooklyn Museum and we also had a space that was only for black people, which was a struggle with Brooklyn Museum because first Saturdays, 10,000 people, they said, you know, are people like to be anywhere? And I'm like, well, white people like to be everywhere and it doesn't mean that they're gonna get to be everywhere. And so we intentionally created a space just for black people to talk about how to heal from anti-black racism here in Brooklyn. I'm really grateful that Brooklyn Museum agreed with us and really trusted us because this is the first time that they were able to do something like this. And at the end of the year got invited by Andrew Lehman, who is the founder and creator of First Saturdays and we were named as one of the top first Saturday programs ever in the history of First Saturdays. So the community is our heartbeat. When we started in 2014, one of the things that we wanted to do was really listen to what the needs are of the communities in which we serve. And one of the significant things that a lot of people named that they wanted was a space where they couldn't only just go and receive healing services, but really learn these concrete tools that they can take back with them to their organizations, to their homes, to their classrooms, to their universities. Folks wanted to know, how can I increase my own healing powers? People wanted to know, you know, my abuelita, my great, great, great grandmother, used to use herbs back in the day. I really wanna connect with that wisdom. I wanna remember the story of my own DNA beyond slavery because we know that slavery and colonialism creates an amnesia that sometimes can be resuscitated and we wanna resuscitate that wisdom. And so we created our freedom schools which we launched this year. And our freedom schools are spaces to do just that where people can have intentional dialogues, do workshops, create strategic planning sessions, and really take all this healing wisdom and artistic wisdom back into the spaces where they come from. This right here is an example of one Chelsea Renee Long is leading a session on creating herbal medicine for folks who are queer and trans folks who are moving through transitions in their bodies. I should name that Harriet's Apothecary. So we're based here in Brooklyn and the space in which we hold most, if not all of our healing work is at Black Women's Blueprint, which is based in Crown Heights. They are a civil rights and human rights organization working to end sexual violence against Black women and trans folks. They also, inside of Black Women's Blueprint space, also hosts the Museum of Women's Resistance. So we feel really fortunate that the space, the container that we get to do the work is healing in itself. So every winter, capitalism just rises. And we believe in cooperative economics. We believe in bringing the money that we make back into the hands and hearts of our people. So every winter, for the last two years, we've created a holiday bazaar and swag swap that intentionally has vendors and healers that specifically identify as Black, Indigenous, folks of color and who identify as cis women and queer and trans folks because we know that in the market, folks that look like us and folks that have our identities don't have the opportunity to have their work celebrated and also to get money for their work. And so this past year, the first year we started off with 15 vendors. This year, actually, December 20th, we had 27 vendors who were selling their own, every single artist made their own thing, which was really incredible. And some artists, it was the first time that they ever sold what it was that they made. And for other artists, they've been selling since they were little. And so we had things, as you can see, from Color Girl Hustle Hard mix tapes to scarves, to Yone Steams, to decolonization, herbalism textbooks, learning how to make your own medicine. So there's a range of beautiful, beautiful, powerful work. We have also been getting invited to do training and consulting, both nationally and internationally. So earlier I mentioned that one of the things that we see as activists, as people who are dedicated to movement building work, is that we are not immune to systems of oppression. So from the moment that we come out of the womb, we are socialized to be destructive. We are socialized to be not who we are, to not live in our birthright. And so a lot of organizations have been coming to us, asking us, how can we actually meet our vision in an embodied way? How do we do that? And also, how do we stop ourselves from reinforcing these very specific injustices that we're seeing out in the world? So I was giving Carrie May earlier an example of how organizations, or people in organizations, have to constantly face different kinds of microaggressions from racism to sexism, or how many folks here work 80 hours a week and you're not sleeping and you haven't seen your family. And having that impact insomnia on your body is actually impacting how you're treating your staff, or it's impacting how you're choosing to listen to your fellow colleagues, or it's impacting how you choose to see yourself. And so in our work with organizations, what we do is we create spaces and strategic conversations and trainings and retreats for people to do some necessary healing work so they can actually embody what it is that they say that they're doing. We've had the opportunity to do this with folks like Black Lives Matter. Patrice Marie-Colors happened to be a really, really good friend of mine, and we got invited this year to work with all the Black Lives Matter chapters across the country. They hosted their first retreat in Detroit this summer and we led the healing efforts with them. We also got invited last year to, or the year before, to the first ever Black Lives Matter freedom ride to Ferguson, where there's over 500 people coming from across the country to stand in solidarity with activists. And we led the healing justice efforts there, building a day and a half community clinic for activists and organizers to heal from the impacts of their work and to heal from the impacts of living as a person of color in this country. Most recently in November, we partnered with the Estrella Foundation. So Estrella Foundation is the only organization across the world that specifically funds LGBTQI organizing work. And they have a new initiative with the USAID called COMS Labs, where they work with international grantees to support them in developing their capacity around communications technology. And for some folks, healing. So this past November, they were in Kenya and South Africa and we got invited to coordinate the wellness track to build a healing village for the activists there and also lead workshops around sustainability. And for us, when we talk about sustainability, we don't talk about necessarily the length of how long our work is, but we talk about actually how do we live through what we are doing and also how do we match what we say with actual practice. So, Harry's Apothecary is an intergenerational village and that is intentionally so. We see far too often inside of our work that there is distance between elders and young people. And we wanna like you continue passing on the baton. So we have apprenticeships throughout the year with young people supporting them in increasing their own healing powers and organizing strategies in the community. This is to the right over here is Emily, who is a junior right now at Panoma College and she was an apprentice last year and she's gonna be bringing Harry's Apothecary. She's gonna be doing her own healing village in California this year. This is some portraits of our work throughout. This is in Haiti working with survivors of violence, specifically sexual violence and we created a number of different healing remedies. This town in Leogon does not have a clinic. The closest clinic is about two hours away. And so we worked with local herbalists and artists to create herbal medicine that was specific to the young women and older women's needs and they were able to create that and also pass that knowledge on. Patrice, our work in Ferguson, we got to go back to Ferguson again this year for a week or this past year for a week to do healing work there and then at the African Burial Grounds with Black Youth Projects. So our work really thrives on collaboration. We really believe in family. We are grounded in interdependence and so please, please come connect with us. This is how one of the many ways besides talking to me that you can get connected to our work. Thank you so much for bearing witness to this and I look forward to continuing this conversation. And as I'm walking to my seat, take another breath and tell yourself that you matter. Thank you so much. Hi, we have Carrie's colleague, Lonnie Graham, next. Oh, good heavens. My name's Lonnie Graham, you know that. It's an honor and a privilege to be here, thank you. I'm worried about issues of marginalization and access. I was trained primarily as a regular kind of an artist, one of those people that's supposed to sit in their studios and make stuff and then hope for the best, I guess, and put the rest under the bed or put most of it under the bed and then hope for the best. So ultimately, because of something that happened to me in Japan, I was visited by some of the ancestors and it came to me at that point that I started to need to make stuff that people could access, that people could understand, that when people saw it, they would be able to relate it to something that they could see and recognize in their own lives every day. So at that time, I had an opportunity and was able to make this kind of an installation back in the 1990s that when people were able to see it, they could walk into it and they could, this was for my Aunt Dora. They could, it would be a full sensory, it would just use all your senses. You could see it, you could hear it, you could smell it, you could sit in it. You could enjoy who Aunt Dora was. You could watch Ed Sullivan on television and listen to Louis Armstrong on the radio, which is what it was like to be in my place because I would see these things in museums where you could see Marie Antoinette's chest of drawers and enjoy them and I thought that it was important that you would be able to see our folks' stuff the same way that you could see everybody else's stuff that was held in high esteem. It started to make sense, this issue of accessibility. Given that, I wanted to make sure that I was starting to address other things that made sense to people and other things that were important. I started to work on the spiritual thing, right? This living in the spirit house. So I thought, okay, well, what's important to people? What are the most essential aspects of our human condition? You got your spiritual thing and then you've got the body and you've got the mind. So you've got the mind and the body and the spirit. So if you need to feed the body, then you have to get some food. So I had been working in Kenya and with a farmer who was growing food for his family in the same way that I was working with my uncle in Pennsylvania who was growing food for his family. At that point I took food, well, I took a bunch of people from the United States over to Kenya. I took a bunch of Kenyans from Kenya to the United States. I had this African American garden project that worked for a long time and spawned many other gardening projects that would have to do with, of course, community access. But it had to do with feeding people. Those garden projects kept food on some people's tables. It enlightened other people. We kept schools open. It turns out that many of the young people in schools that we built gardens for simply weren't nourished. They weren't getting proper nutrition. So once they started to grow these gardens in their school grounds and use the food in the course of their daily lives, their test scores went up. When the test scores go up, the principles look better. When the principles look better, they get funding. The schools stay open. It started to make sense on some level. So I was acting as a facilitator in many of those, in many of those projects. This one where I built this little, it's like a little store inside of the museum. It had to do with people that were sharecroppers and lived out in the Carolinas. People that had sort of suffered at the hands of other individuals who lost or who were able to gain from their losses. So it's kind of along the lines of food, but had more to do with honoring all of those individuals that had sacrificed in terms of trying to make a living for themselves. This is another one of those institutions or instances where it becomes a metaphor, it becomes a symbol of people that had suffered a loss. This was in Philadelphia, in a community that had lost the place where they had held sacred. So I built this little building so that they were able to go and have weddings and have christenings and have a place to go where they felt safe. This, we got the place where their church used to be and we made this little building so that they could address their, what the community thought was their sacred cells. I thought that was important for them. Okay, yeah, this was one of those, this is in Youngstown, Ohio. We, there were people that just didn't get along. There were people that lived on one side of town and they didn't get along with the people that lived on the other side of town and the community government in Youngstown built this huge community center right in the middle, hoping that these young people would go into it and use it and they didn't. They weren't interested at all. So I had to go, they called me for some reason and I had to go in and try to activate both sides of the community to go in and use this facility to kind of help to validate the local government in some way. So I just went and I talked to them. I did something that I had been doing for many years. In 1985, I started this project called A Conversation with the World that I'll talk about in a couple of minutes, but I didn't do anything except go talk to people. I stood around and I asked people what was important to them and I photographed them and I brought all of those photographs and I stuck them into this facility in order for the people to see the photographs they had to go in. It wasn't really complicated. It was just a matter of going and talking to some people that I guess other people were too afraid to talk to, maybe. Yeah, E. So in San Francisco, they asked me to come over and have this conversation with the world that I had been doing like I said before with some people that lived in San Francisco. So I didn't do anything any more complicated than standing around and, you know, as I encountered individual in the streets, I would photograph them and I would take a little tape recording of them and I would record their words. I would visit people in their homes and I would sit and they would invite me in for tea and I would talk to them and I would record their words and I would take their pictures. I would give them their photographs. I engage with these individuals and it turns out that a conversation with the world and I'm gonna take a minute and I'm gonna tell you about this thing because what starts to happen to me was something that was like, it was like a revelation. I mean, I've had many, right? But this was a particular revelation because what started to happen is I started the project in 1985. I talked to a bunch of people up until around 1990 and it didn't make any sense. I thought it was kind of stupid, right? Because I'm talking to all of these people all over the place and they're all telling me the same thing and I thought, this is dumb. This is a dumb project. I'm gonna put it down. So I put the stupid thing down and then, you know, every now and then I would go back and I'd try it again. You know, if I would go someplace, I'd go to New Guinea, I'd go to South Africa, I'd go to Kenya or something, right? And I'd bring it out, I'd get the tape recorder and I'd get the camera and I'd take some pictures and I'd ask people questions. It's the same stupid, you know, the same answers. And I thought, this is dumb. Let's forget about it. So I'm in Mali. I'm gonna tell you a story. So I'm in Mali, right? And I'm on top of this big mud building. It's a beautiful thing. And I'm talking to an emom and I asked him the questions because they're the same questions. I thought that if I had like the same questions it would be kind of like a template, right? That I would take this template of questions and I could just ask a whole bunch of people the same questions and then they could respond and then that way I could just, like I'm a professor, right? So I needed like a way for people, I needed to have, you know, a way to measure and a way to judge to sort of justify my research. And I thought, okay, so I'm sitting up there on top of this building and I asked this, you know, this religious person these questions and he answers the questions and he answers the questions the same way that this little guy in Mexico answers the questions. I went into a little hut in Mexico. The guy had made a building from earth. You know, there was a similarity. There's two earthen buildings. There was a very humble individual that had his animal parked outside the building. I made my way inside this dark room he invited me in. I asked him the questions, he answered them. I'm sitting across the world in another hemisphere on top of a religious building and I asked the mom the questions and he answers the same way. Okay, I'm in Japan. I'm in the northern part of Japan and I asked this woman who's living on a farm in the North, I'm in South Africa and I asked this, I'm on the other side of town in Cape Town and I asked a white South African the same, same answers. I'm thinking what the heck, what the heck, what the heck? I can be in any part of the world, I can ask any person the same questions they're giving me the same answers. If I'm getting the same answers from everybody around the world about the same questions that has everything to do with the essential aspects of human nature, if I can ask anybody in this... I ask ya, they invited me to Calgary. I asked the Native Americans, these guys, they had a problem. They wanted people to understand what their problems were. They asked me to help them. I asked them the questions, they answered the questions. They put the questions up on billboards downtown just like these people in Somalia did. Oh no, oh, I beg your pardon, these aren't Somalians, these are refugees. These are Finnish people. These people live above the Arctic Circle in Finland. This is where the refugees wind up in Finland. I asked them the questions. They had issues, they wanted to be heard. Sadly, oh, they got heard. Sadly, many of the people that I worked with in this population were killed because of xenophobia. But I talked to them. I put the questions out. They wanted me to do the same thing in New Zealand. I did that. These young people wanted other people in their community to understand what remains important to them as an indigenous community. So I put them up, we put them up on billboards. Those projects continue. You can look online. I'm just a facilitator. I just want people to understand how and why and what's important for human beings in the world. Why it's important that we can all exist. Why it's important that I can ask everybody the same questions and their answer in the same way. That's my conversation with the world. Thanks. Get this down a little bit. All right, so my name is Angela Camero or Angelica Muro, which is the duality that I experience on a daily basis, being raised in a society, essentially, that heavily promotes and values assimilation. And so I really felt a connection to everything that you were talking about in terms of socializing and conditioning and also connecting values to practice. And so what I'm going to do is talk about myself as an educator today, because I feel that that's really important in terms of how it is that we are teaching community engagement or social practice, especially in a program that I'm in. So I'm a professor and chair of the Visual and Public Art Department at Cal State Monterey Bay and Seaside, California. The Visual and Public Art Department, or program or major, VPA is a hands-on program that brings together studio and community art. In my role as faculty and chair, I develop curriculum, manage various public art projects and explore historical analysis, individual aesthetics and community collaboration. Issues of community access and community change are at the forefront of creating art that is meaningful to both VPA students, faculty and community. We emphasize communities and bridging the many social and cultural disconnects within the Monterey and Santa Cruz counties that surround us, such as examining social political issues like gender, race, social economic class, and sexuality. So here we have a few projects that I've worked on with my students through service learning. So in terms of my craft, my wheelhouse is integrated medium photography. So that means media culture, digital public art, digital and analog photography. But our program collectively also supports mural and painting, sculpture installation, performance art, museum studies, and arts education. We're a really small department, which means that we fluctuate vastly between maybe 80 to 100 students at any given semester. And so we work very closely with our students and pride ourselves in valuing reciprocity, ethical inquiry and self-reflection. So overseeing an academic program that continually engages in dialogues of community access and community change is challenging, to say the least, as is the recruitment of students who are interested in social practice, which brings up larger questions related to public art practices and rural areas. And more importantly, what are the social issues of import to millennials living in a rural area? So the last question brings me to a project that I'm currently working on with the Center for Community Advocacy. And so for this partnership, I am working with an agency that essentially is promoting housing conditions or unhealthy housing conditions of farm workers that are living in the Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. And so what the Center for Community Advocacy does, I'll just call it CCA, is they shed light on the challenges of housing within regional farm worker communities. This is directly tied, or this project is directly tied to an upper division, service learning, digital public art course, where students learn about oral history, as well as video production and digital photography, digital arts. So the reason why we partnered with CCA is because they've been known for about the last 20, 25 years as a champion for social change for various farm worker communities. They're based out of Salinas, California, and I don't know how many of you are familiar with Salinas, but it's an agricultural hub. Some call it the salad bowl because of the main industry that's produced out of there, which is the spinach that you eat and the lettuce that you eat is most likely from the Salinas Valley. And so it's the world's largest municipality of agriculture, and it's the largest city in Monterey County, but it's also incredibly demonized in the media for its large Latino population, excessive gang violence and crime rates, which are all symptoms of a system that prevents children of agricultural workers from overcoming the social economic class that they were born into. So for this partnership, we're documenting the living conditions of farm workers through video and interviews that emphasize the effects of inadequate housing on health and everyday life. So surprisingly, even though CCA has been an advocacy group that's been along for a long time, they have very little resources and aren't very tech savvy and don't really have a whole lot of artists that they worked with before in terms of actually documenting the various issues that they're dealing with. So our idea was to essentially externalize the living spaces through using projection in public spaces. We have also a partnership with Destination Salinas to activate downtown Salinas, which is experiencing revitalization like everything else. And so like housing in California, as had been talked about earlier, is incredibly expensive. And so with this comes all kinds of revitalization and that's what's happening with downtown Salinas where housing costs have soared. And so again, so CCA has little documentation to work with and so we'd like to, like I said, put these images, these videos, these stories into public spaces to facilitate a conversation about issues of equality in the largest Salinas community. And so this in particular was of interest to both the CCA program and the Visual and Public Art program. So the Center for Community Advocacy connects us with tenants of the housing communities they consider to be amongst the worst and therefore in need of documentation. And so this is a trailer park located in King City, California. King City is a small town in the Central Valley with approximately a population of 13,000 and has experienced really slow economic growth in the last 50 years. Like most towns in a rural agricultural-based area, King City has a large yet underserved Mexican-American population. The lack of political representation is evident in terms of its limited resources. It is difficult to find employment outside of field work, which most refer to as trabajando en fee. I myself grew up on a migrant camp in California, San Joaquin Central Valley. This is a valley that's one of the largest producers of agriculture in the world, yet home to a large group of underserved, underprivileged, underrepresented Latinos where many live below the poverty line and subpar migrant camps with their entire family. So the problem here is that many of these camps were intended to house only men and are far from ideal living conditions for families that include men, women, and children. So agriculture forms the economic base of this area, but ironically, California's high cost of living has left agricultural laborers and their families with little recourse. In the Salinas Valley, where most of our community projects take place, lack of housing is a huge issue, both in terms of affordability and availability. The little housing there is is often dilapidated, unsafe, and expensive. And so here you have an image of the same trailer part that I showed you previous to that. And so in this image, that area in the front there is where this fire here took place. And so this is in King City, the trailer parts in King City, all of the tenants are Mexican. Most of them are undocumented. They live there with their, sometimes multiple families in one trailer. And this was a fire that happened last year where the access from the fire department was really difficult because the place is not up to code. And so people actually died in this fire because they were actually warming their house with the stove in order to have heating. And so this is an example of the, really the horrific living conditions that they have to live in. So I'm currently organizing meetings with VPA students, tenants, and CC organizers. This project has not been, of course, without challenges. My multiple encounters with the oppressive landlord have been extremely unpleasant, but we understand that it's not unusual for landlords and property managers to use intimidation tactics with the tenants or behave aggressively towards faculty and students. So in closing, the entire situation is beleaguered. Again, the living conditions are extremely bad. The rents are extremely high. The tenants are extremely burdened. However, this like any worthwhile project is important. But it does bring up much larger issues of engagement and reciprocity, exploitation, and voyeurism. I manage community projects. I teach ethics and social responsibility, which require constant reassessment of community access and what constitutes change. All this said, I am so fortunate to be here today and to be in dialogue and conversation about the many challenges inherent in teaching community practice, community engagement, social practice, community organizing within the context of this newness that everyone has referred here today as we develop a new language, new methodologies for teaching. So I'm in this for the long haul. So we can talk today or tomorrow or 10 years from now. I'm down. Thank you. Theaster, so these are, this is Theaster's Pussy. Welling and working, toiling and failing. I've been working on this field. I've been toiling on this field for a long time. I've been working on this field. I've been praying on this field for a long, for a long time. My name is Yao. Been so awfully thankful to be in this space to have this microphone and to just talk with you guys and share with you. I'm also very thankful and appreciative of the generosity of good people and bad people and all the people who make this time possible. Again, my name is Yao. This thing is always in the way. I always have a thing with microphones. But I'm born on Thursday. That's what Yao means in the Akan tradition. Akan is the umbrella tribe for the tribes that my parents are from. My dad came to Chicago in 1973. My mom came in 1976. Singer, an actor, my dad, my husband, life moves. And I'm currently working on a project with Mark Bermute Joseph called Pelota. Also, I am a member of the Black Monks of Mississippi, the Aster's baby. Child, it's growing. And also, I do a really interesting service I felt for myself, a necessary service through the Rebill Foundation called Work on the Sabbath. Work on the Sabbath began because I was always very, words just didn't come when people would ask me, what do I do? What type of music do you like? What's that? What style is that? And I generally wanna tell them, leave me alone. I don't really wanna talk right now. I just sang, I just gave it. I don't wanna talk right now. But talking is important. Communication is important. So I decided to investigate that through my dad's taste. I figured if I were to kinda understand what my dad liked musically, then I might be able to figure out who I was, what it is that I am. So I listened in the listening house for about a month to my dad's records. I took my dad's records and I just listened. And poems and music came out of that and was inspired from that listening. And then on a Sunday, I would share it with the community in Dorchester. And it has grown. It's now a monthly process, I would say, where we have food and DJ and sharing. So for some time, I had been in the entertainment business. And I realized I don't like entertaining, I like sharing, I like being in spaces where I can receive an exchange and give. So that is what work on the Sabbath is for me. It gives myself, it gives a community, it gives friends and foes and strangers an opportunity to witness sharing. The answer called me five, six years ago and he said to me, you need to be doing your stuff in places where people appreciate what it is that you do. Audience was the question, it was the conversation. Who are the people you're sharing? Who are the people you're giving your stuff to? And I said, cool, yeah, I agree. But I was never really, really thinking about that. So this moment gives us all an opportunity to think about things that probably were parts of our bodies that we didn't really move on, you know? So he said, you need to be performing in these spaces where people really appreciate what it is that you do. And he said, I'm going to help you do that. And for some time now, I've been performing in museums and in these cultural institutions where, like paintings, you are appreciated, you're valued, it's a thing of a value. You don't want to, I don't want to anymore compete with the clamor of alcohol and somebody's conversation about baby daddies and whatnot. It just interferes with the process. So I've kind of given like a little summary of who I am, but I also kind of want to talk about where I'm going. And also to say that I need some help. And it's okay to ask for help. And I don't know what forms of help. I really don't. I just know that help is needed. So I've been also very interested in photography and how photography might serve my music or the other way around. I've also been saying to myself, perhaps I need to abandon music and focus on photography or focus on other voices or in a way. And when I say abandon, I don't mean to totally dismiss the thing that is here, but to just shift the focus, you know. So I decided to shift the focus back on my dad. My dad has a story when he came to Chicago of a time where he almost lost his life. In that moment, he was at the train station, he's at the subway, and five or six men accosted him and they were wanting to throw him on the tracks. And he said to them, they're not my age, they're not my age. And they stopped. They said sorry and they ran off, you know. So with that story, what I gathered from that story, a couple of things, one thing that's really actually bothering that bothers me is that perhaps they did not kill him because he was not an African American. But the other thing I'm leaning on more is the fact that his language saved his life. His language saved his life and it made possible actually this moment that I'm having this conversation with you. But it made possible for my sisters to be born, it made possible for my mom to, for him to ship my, bring my mom over to Chicago, so forth and so forth. But I don't have the language. I don't have, he didn't sew it in me, you know, for reasons that we've kind of talked about since we've been here, assimilation and comfort. So, when I was thinking about that, I kind of got upset a little bit because I have a really interesting thing with my dad. He frustrates me. But I also rather feel this really huge sense of pride and happiness that my father was able to do the thing that he did, not only for himself, but for us. So I want to now create something of a video, a photo-based story that rides adjacent to my dad's being here. So I'm going to end with that. It's about a two minute video if you guys will check that out. But in it, my dad is pouring libation. He is thanking the ancestors for his journey, for the journeys of all of us. And it's in the language, in tree. And I just want to translate it before we get into it. Our father in heaven, here is some drink. The earth on which we stand. This is your drink. Asunafot, which is our clan, the elders of our clan who lead us with good leadership, gracefully who we respect. This drink is for you. Kwekudro, Kofi-Fofie, Kwame Frimpong, Yaw Barnier, Kwa Benadapa, Ekuya Serwa, Ya Asantwa, Ama Benawa. We thank you. Take this drink and remember us and support us in everything we do. Any person who has evil intentions make them suffer on this earth. Thank you. Kwekudro, Kwame Frimpong, Kofi-Fofie, Yaw Barnier, Kwame Nadapa, Ekuya Serwa, Ya Asantwa, Ama Benawa, Ya Dama-Sek. We thank you. We thank you. We thank you. We thank you for your kindness. We thank you for your kindness. We thank you. We thank you for your kindness. We thank you for your kindness. We thank you for your kindness. We thank you for your kindness. We thank you for your kindness. The next presenter is Isis Ferguson. Thank you all so much. My name is Isis Ferguson and I want to express gratitude. I feel like I'm very, very rarely in a room surrounded by folks where the language of justice and art and liberation is our currency and is our discourse. I very much feel like I'm home so I just want to thank you all. I'm gonna do my best in my 10 minutes to cover the last 10 years of my life. So I'm just gonna give you little snippets. I'm gonna talk about my 26th year through my 36th year as it relates to learning, creating, organizing, offering narrative and gathering space in various communities. Notions of place run throughout my story so it's where I'll begin. I live, work, love, and create in Chicago. As a cultural worker and now, as what Theaster likes to call me, an arts administrator, I am and have always been to a certain degree incredibly concerned with place and belonging, not because I felt out of place but I wanted to make place with people. I wanted to claim it. I wanted to imagine better space than is offered to us because they do give us space sometimes but it's junky. It's not ideal. So the team that I belong to principally works on the south side of Chicago. A storied part of the city with a rich cultural legacy. Neighborhoods populated by Southerners who uprooted themselves from Mississippi, from Georgia, from Alabama for the promise of prosperity that an urban industrial life can bring. Generations later, there have been famed residents, people who you all know who have literally invented the sound styles and art forms that the nation has come to revere. Harlem, since I'm in Chicago or I'm in New York, I wanna say that Harlem has long been lauded as the symbolic capital of black life in America but Chicago is cresting. Chicago has tried to shoot its shot as the soul of urban black America. Bringing up the sons and daughters like Gwendolyn Brooks, Quincy Jones, Chaka Khan, Sam Cook, Tommy Dorsey, Thomas Dorsey, the father of gospel music and the Johnson Publishing Empire of Ebony and Jet and the list goes on and on and on. On the same blocks that have housed these cultural giants, unknown unsung citizens have worked hard trying to provide for themselves and to mobilize mass political and social movements of progressive change and resistance. And in the past few decades, these same neighborhoods where people like Gwendolyn Brooks and Quincy Jones sprung up are the very same blocks that are now garnering the reputations as undesirable, unsafe, lacking investment opportunities and without a clear path to a viable future. That's the lane I find myself working in, establishing and supporting creative hubs in cities, developing an ethic and a language for those of us who are enthusiastic about cities and see arts and culture as the key animators for transformation. I am not a builder, traditionally speaking. The Aster employs architects and designers for his spaces to physically get the structures built out and renovated. Programmers and administrators, like me, curate experiences for people who visit and populate the sites. I design the social setting that fosters the collective experience, engagements that get people to leave their own homes and come and share in something public, something that's about an exchange, whether that's about ideas or a performance or even just a hang. I haven't said this term yet because we've all said it's restrictive, but what I'm talking about in a way is creative place-making. It's concerned with the livability of a place. As Carrie May said, for some of us, it's a way of life, but it has been co-opted and institutionalized. Creating, organizing, narrativizing, if that's a word, and nurturing the cultural ecology of a neighborhood is the most concrete method I know how to employ to impact the quality and the livability of a place. I relish in the collective life and the people who gather in place. I believe that useful, successful places, places I like to call places of purpose, contain at least five attributes. They are, one, sacred spaces where core ideas about identity and belonging get built. So I call these places of refuge. A time and a location marked by exploration, curiosity, investigation, and experimentation. I call these places of discovery, where neighborliness becomes an act. Immersive experiences forge deep bonds among participants. Relational exchange is primary, where individuals get cemented to one another and to the place. I call this a place that affords us the ability to commune, where value systems get articulated and practiced, where we ask big questions about the world and offer innovative solutions and responses, where we listen, where things emerge. For me, this becomes places of inspiration. And finally, there has to be that setting where friction and questioning live, where circumstances require a response or a reframing or a reflection. And for me, these are our places of challenge. I arrived at these ideas out of my own experiences and from the foundational texts in my academic training. This is a little dated, you can tell I went to school in like the late 1990s, early 2000s. But these books represent the feminist scholars and the theorists who were concerned about gender and race and intersectionality, which for real at a time was a truly visionary idea. These works contribute to the formation of my theories of language and justice and equity. Ideas that drive all of my work and allow me to offer, as the sister in the front said, skills of code switching and translating across the power of fault lines. I translated that training into some essential questions that I always return to in my work. And so I'm just gonna read them aloud. Who are your people? What conditions are needed to flourish? What is your purpose? What is possible? In my own life as an organizer, convener and language provider, I've concentrated on designing community by creating sisterhoods. This manifested itself in a group called the Venus Collective in Chicago. For six years, we hosted Venus the Event, which was a celebration and a showcase of women's art, visual and performing arts, crafts, wares, et cetera. Women sang, performed spoken word, exhibited photography, sculpture, apparel, painting and mixed media art. We also did all of the labor. We developed into a community that organized the large creative events that hundreds would attend, but it wouldn't have mattered if only five or six attended. It wasn't about the numbers. And we also gathered so that we could become beyond event friends. We gathered for monthly women's circles. Smaller shows that celebrated an individual woman artist and raised money to donate to projects that had progressive gender politics at the center of their mission. There are very few that do. I'm still working to establish sisterhoods. The scale has simply shifted to thinking of cities as sisterhoods. The method has remained the same. Animate place through art and culture. Use a language and a framework of equity and justice. My work simply now lives worth the Aster's development work lives. Together, with my team at Place Lab, my University of Chicago colleagues at Arts and Public Life, with the Aster's larger crew of makers at the The Astergate Studio, or with the other cultural leaders he employs at the Rebuild Foundation, we are becoming a force. A collective art practice that is preoccupied with cities and raising questions about making them more equitable and lively places. Each unit of the art practice is trying to accomplish three things in our varied and interrelated projects to demonstrate the value and necessity of cities. One, we are trying to unleash the possibilities of place. We're trying to make platforms, the thing that then makes the thing. To demonstrate a process for ethical redevelopment. This is nuanced development and I think we have feminists to think that tell us time and time again to think and articulate the process and reflect on the process. And then to create places of public assembly. These are the vessels that The Aster talked about. Many of you might know The Aster is relentless. This is passion and purpose work for him. And for those of us who manage or are lucky enough to stay. His appetite and the breath of his work is not greed or fueled by a desire for traditional power. He's not trying to become the modern land baron of the south side of Chicago, despite what you hear or read. The drive and ambition is fueled by love and held up by grace and by mercy. I put his social responsibility next to other prolific cultural forces like Bell Hooks, Robin D.G. Kelly and Cornel West sometimes. Public intellectuals working and writing to uncover the connection between love and community. I made this postcard for Valentine's Day of All Days. In 2013, while I was the program coordinator at the Jane Adams Hall House Museum in Chicago, we had staff and visitors send the postcards as notes of gratitude to people who often don't hear any notes of thanks at all. To people designing and impacting the social, political, economic and artistic life of Chicago. On one side were Robin D.G. Kelly's words. Once we strip radical social movements down to their bare essence and understand the collective desires of people in motion, freedom and love lie at the very heart of the matter. And on the other side, we printed the often trotted out phrase of Cornel West, never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. And after Adaku spoke, I can now add making love visible. I think the Aster's work and my small place within it is hard work. We are like the pads that shock the chest, jolts to enliven for long lasting prosperity. We are pulled by the lore of the local a book he gave me months and we are trying to be responsive to and responsible for the places where we are at the current time. So that actually does trace my last 10 years of intentional and unintentional creative sharing. I share that with Yao that I'm very much interested, essentially when you boil it all down, I care about sharing and gathering. So thank you. Carrie, did you wanna say something before we... Oh, I'm sorry, Maria. That's bad. I, too, brought my timer. So yeah, thank you for having me, Carrie. And thank you, Rick, for suggesting me today. I had the pleasure of working at PRH or being a resident there this past fall, which is phenomenal. So my name is Maria Gaspar. I'm an artist from Chicago. I grew up on the West Side, predominantly Mexican-Mexican immigrant community. West Side, the Aster and I are both on the West Side. And I'm gonna just talk about one project because it's because of the limited time and I just really wanna focus on one that I think really exemplifies a series of issues that I've been really grappling with for the past few years, not only myself, but a lot of my collaborators. So it's a project that began pretty early on. When I was about 12 years old, I was in Catholic school and in Catholic school in a Mexican-American community. We were taken to the jail, the local jail as part of a Scared Straight program. And the idea at the time, a failed program, was to scare kids straight, mostly kids of color. And what I remember the most about my first visit to the jail was not so much going through Division I, which is the oldest part of the jail, but in seeing mostly black and brown men, people that look like my uncle or my brother or my friends, but also I was really interested in the way that my teachers, predominantly white teachers, were really scared. And there was a very interesting tension that was happening that I was witnessing that I had no idea how to articulate because of course I didn't understand the prison industrial complex, nobody explained that to me. That wasn't something that we were talking about. And so that really stuck in my mind until now and in my heart. So my artistic practice is interdisciplinary. It's long-engaged issues of displacement, the longing, as Roberto Bedolla talks about, disbelonging, silencing and erasure. Seemingly public spaces that have always been places of contention for me are places that I really grapple with in my work. I was raised through a kind of mural activist history in Chicago and I was really impacted by things like the graffiti blaster program in Chicago. So this is a program where the city, you call the city and you tell them that there's graffiti on your garage, the city comes in and blasts it away. But what was interesting is that they would blast it away in brown. And so for me, there was something about that the act of concealing or erasing something was revealing something at the same time. And partly I think it was blasted brown because the aesthetic of the city is brown. You know, a lot of these brown brick architectures. But also as an artist interested in the brown body of the immigrant body that in a way there was a sort of political act. There was an act of browning out which I was really excited by. But in a way the city was entrenched in kind of erasing a local narrative. That there are ways that the neighborhood is communicating through graffiti, through language on walls that the city would come and completely wipe away. So to me it was a way of erasing local narratives of local histories of black brown stories. So it was about spatial justice. It's about power. So for the past three years I've been looking at the various ways that the largest architecture of my neighborhood is also the largest single site jail in the country. It's called the Cook County Jail. It's also the location for the yearly Mexican Day Parade. And since I was a kid the Mexican Day Parade has been setting up floats in front of the jail. And there's a lot of communication that happens between division one cells and folks on the ground. So how is the jail negotiated within this community? It's right in the center of a neighborhood. How does the jail become visible or invisible locally but also nationally, right? As we think about mass incarceration in this country. So some quick facts. The jail is located in the Lawndale communities of mostly brown and black low income and working class communities. There's over 100,000 people detained yearly about 10 to 13,000 daily. The jail is not a prison which means that 95% of people are awaiting trial. Sometimes they're awaiting trial up to six years. 85% are charged with nonviolent offenses and what the sheriff calls crimes of survival or most recently a lack of mental health services due to the decision of a very conservative governor and I won't go into the long list of educational and services that the current mayor has closed in our city. The reality is that mass incarceration as we know is a systemic problem based on a lot of racist structures. In 2015, this article came out called Chicago's Million Dollar Blocks and it was a series of research that was done that identified that the jail has a population that are coming from five very specific neighborhoods all on the south side and all on the west side. Many of these neighborhoods are the same ones that have a lack of employment and social and cultural opportunities as well as the location of a lot of those CPS closings that were done recently. So on the immediate outside, there are 80,000 residents. This is what the jail looks from the administration building. Half are young people. So this is side by side. We got a big place of incarceration next to this neighborhood. So we think about the prison industrial complex, all of those layers, but then it's further exceeded by thinking about all the local micro economies that work around that jail. So we got the taco truck guy that will hold your cell phone or your purse for $2 because there are no lockers in the jail where you can put your stuff in or the senora down the street who will sell you a white tee for $4 because sometimes women visitors come in with two revealing attire, so they're turned away. So all this. So 96 Acres is a project that I started in 2012 with a lot of local collaborators, including a local CDC caught in Lassa, Chicago. It's a series of long-term interventions that are on and around the jail site that include a lot of research, dialogue, organizing and really thinking about how we can further talk about all the misperceptions that go along with a place of incarceration, the way it impacts communities of color. I work with an extensive group of people. We've created eight site responsive projects, personal stories, a sound archive, and we started an education initiative. Again, things that sort of grew out of the process. So 96 Acres is made up of a lot of really radical cultural workers, a dedicated group of educators, healthcare workers, formerly incarcerated youth, artists, journalists, organizers, and many, many others. And a lot of these folks are people that are really rooted in the neighborhood or work in the neighborhood or have some sort of stake in the issue. So I'm gonna briefly just talk about three different projects. They're all very performative and action based, so I just had to take a little excerpt from each of the videos. So I'm only gonna show you three. But just so you know, the work has ranged from collaborating with artists to create zines with prison abolitionists to developing portrait series in front of the county courthouse. So here is one that's done by youth where they generate a text and then spray wash it onto the jail wall. Jail throughout the neighborhood. I think it's getting people to think about it. Like the jail's here, it's my backyard, but like doing this is like, you know, it's starting to get your thoughts like, yo, yeah, why do we have a jail like right here? And this community and like that makes so much money has something like this here, you know? And we don't have a museum. We use the pressure wash for the neighborhood usually to remove graffiti. And this is interesting because this is like reverse graffiti, so I really love this idea to use it to put a positive message just by cleaning. Seeing like, oh, today's your day. It might just change your thought on something that just happened or something like an argument you might have had with a loved one in there. When you look at the jail, do you see people? But you don't see them as a person, person. You see them as someone that did something bad, someone that just bad society and served to be the place they are. But sometimes things that people don't really do bad things to be in there. Well, yeah, I have family that's incarcerated, you know? I'm one of my cousins. So I think that was a really important bit at the end. Sometimes people that end up there didn't do something bad, right? So the next piece that I'll show you is a recent, it was done in August and it's a series of projections that were projected onto the Cook County jail wall. You're gonna miss the first part of the video, but we collaborated with a group called the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project that runs a project at Stateville Prison where most of the men they are serving several life sentences, they created animations, and it was then projected onto the wall. And then you'll hear a teacher, a local teacher, that did a project with her former student whose father had been incarcerated and deported to Mexico. And so you'll see these letters that they're working from to create this animation. So the idea was to represent stories both from the inside and the outside of that wall. This Melissa Garcia story, and she's a young woman. She was a student of mine at Wells High School. She had a very difficult life. She, her father was incarcerated for at least 10 years. She really knew him for only one year. And when he was released, he was sent to Mexico because he was undocumented. And then about a week and a half before her high school graduation, her mom, Odead. She was telling me that her aunt had found a box of letters from her father and she had not known about it. So that's basically what this is. It's her story, but it's told through her father's letters. I feel like it's breathing air into the neighborhood like a side of, it's literally the side of the jail from inside and out. Cause we're representing the letters Melissa gets from her father and then what he saw in there. And then her reflections about it and what was happening outside of jail when she was at home with her mom. I happened to be passing my, my daughter was looking at and she's like, mom, let's see what it is. So then we started reading it. It, it made me sad cause it made me think about my son and his daughter. You know, he made a mistake once and then he did it twice. So she's little right now, but when she grows up maybe that's how she's gonna feel. Don't understand it until you're living it, you know? I mean, I never expected my son to be in there until it happens to you then, you know. So these series of interventions are meant to create dialogue. And as you can see, there was a bunch of people sitting on the opposite side of that jail. There's a factory that we've been collaborating with that's been around for 60 years. And at first when I talked to them and said, we would just like to use your power to do projections. And they looked at my standard projector that I was using from the CDC. And they said, Maria, this is a terrible projector. We really wanna help you get a better one. And through that relationship building they ended up getting us a state of the art like $50,000 projector where we were able to properly project these images. And one of the things that the owner said is we don't wanna get involved in anything politically. But he just wanted to support. But that was one of the things that emerged, you know, is how do you start these conversations that may not necessarily, they're not necessarily agreeing to something but they are trying to support a sort of greater vision. And so I kind of liked the way that sort of worked out. And so the last excerpt I'll show is by the Visible Voices Ensemble which is a group of formerly incarcerated women that collaborated with the Goodman Theater and their project was called the Visibility Projects Station right outside of the Visitor Center. Time. I did 13 years of incarceration. So we moved from on an outside to say everybody needs somebody. When we're behind those walls we feel like that our voices don't matter and what we have to say doesn't matter. And so Visible Voices when presented to me was a wonderful idea, a way to have an outreach to our community, to our families, to our friends, and to just anybody who just doesn't understand what all this is about. But the idea with the kites was that if people who were out in certain portions of the jail could be able to look up and see that. We're able to get messaging inside that this was happening so that people knew that there was support out here. My name is Israel Dana, I'm here to... So what we're asking ourselves right now is how can we reimagine 96 acres? 96 acres is the equivalent of 74 American football fields. But maybe through these projects we can all collectively think to ourselves what else can take place there? And hopefully that'll create some necessary change. Thank you. I am deeply moved by so much of what I've heard today. I really am. And we have only a little bit of time. So what I wanna do, I wanna move this center table out of our way. We're gonna somehow make a lovely larger circle. But I think if we just move this one, I think we might just be okay, right? All right. So come on in, come in with your questions, come in with your comments. We don't have a lot of time, but we've got just enough. So just move it, just move it. If we have whiskey. There are a number of people in the room that haven't spoken from, for instance, from the Asia, the Asian Arts Center. And so I would like to invite some of those people that haven't spoken this afternoon. Maybe they might want to start a little bit of our conversation. We'd love to hear just a little bit about from you. Okay, all right. Come on in guys, don't be shy. And I'll pass around the mic. So, and does somebody wanna help me? I think I need to like maybe some, just somebody else to help me facilitate with passing a mic around. I think we've got two mics maybe. Do we have another one? Those were here from some of our other guests that haven't had a chance to speak this afternoon. All right, there are, and I think that maybe there might be other questions that come up. Some of these questions that come up, of course, we won't be able to necessarily answer. But before we leave the circle, one of the things that I would like to propose is that we do figure out a way, I'm hoping that we will convene again. I'm hoping that we'll convene in Chicago at Dorchester Project, and I'd like to propose sometime in June. And if that's possible, or maybe at Project Roe House. But I think Chicago is pretty central. Chicago is pretty central. So it's easy for a lot of us to get to Chicago, and then maybe again we might move it again, maybe in the fall, maybe Suzanne you might have us out in California, right? So I really wanna make sure that we have everybody's information, everybody's email addresses and so forth so that we can continue on if that is what people really desire. I know that I'm gonna be working. If you ask her and I will be doing something, it'd be lovely to have some of you join us, okay? And then I think another thing too that I wanna stress before we leave the circle because we know that time now is of the essence is that we have, I'm proposing a website that we develop a small website that pulls together many of the ideas, the presenters and the guests that were here today, and that maybe there might be a small group of you who might be interested in writing, who might be interested in posting, who might be interested in helping me to organize, pulling that together. So I think that that's another way that we can sort of keep in sync and in touch with one another. Again, if that is a real desire amongst the group. Yeah. Okay, so from some of our other guests who haven't had a chance to speak today, are there like some issues and or concerns, ideas that you'd like to just quickly share with us? Pass it on. There's so much to absorb. Thank you, it's been kind of an incredible day. And one of the things that keeps resonating, for me, across many of the talks, but particularly thinking back to something the Astrid brought up, if I can find it, was the notion of, oh, an adaku too, black space. And it doesn't just have to be black space, but that idea of spaces that are, what is the relevance of spaces that are special and restricted with intention and mind and how important that is, and what are the conversations that can happen in those spaces that don't happen when spaces are mixed? And I felt like some of that was kind of coming up in smaller ways in a lot of the presentation. So that was just something that really has stuck with me. Again, running, in my particular case, running a POC organization and really being interested and committed and very feel an urgency, particularly in this moment about building, continuing to build and have thriving POC organizations and POC space. So that's something that's really sticking with me. Yeah, one of the things that resonated with me in a lot of the conversations, was also the need to archive some of the work that we're doing and archive the stories that we're collecting in the communities, because it's not like a formal, there are no formal museums or institutions in these spaces where we're working. So that is something that I've started thinking about in my own work. Yeah, so that's, I guess for me, one of the things that resonates a lot is the question or the, It's like, what do I do? Or the theme of sustainability. And I think it's something that I've definitely been wrestling a lot with and I spoke about this on the train and in kind of processing what it's been like to have Rick working with Asian Arts Initiative over the past couple of years, really just thinking about, I think that there isn't a single answer and that there does need to be sort of a spectrum of what constitutes success and that there can be projects that are about a singular poetic moment that could have many different ripple effects and that there also can be things that sort of continue on for years or decades. And then since my primary role as a sort of cultural worker is also in running an organization, for me I have a question of like sort of how do we, it's maybe similar to what Kevin was saying, but sort of how do we build, especially sort of organizations and institutions of color, but to be able to provide kind of the framework or to be able to be there to sort of fill in the gaps, like in between the times when we're fortunate enough to be able to have artists partnering and focusing with us in the particular communities where we live. I am very interested in knowing what people want. I'm really interested in this question. Like what do you want from your practice? What do you want? And it goes back to something that we've talked about earlier and it's also something that I know is like one of the most difficult questions to answer. I mean, the thing that I am deeply aware of, like I read everything, I really do. I mean, I really look at a lot of stuff. I don't know any of you. Essentially, I don't know anything about you. I don't know anything about your work. I don't know anything about your practice. And so you're doing this work, you're doing this work and you're doing much of this work like in isolation, right? Or under the radar, or something, right? And this is, I mean, do you feel as though the work that you're doing is, of course, feel that the work that you're doing is important, but how do we know then about the work? So we know about The Astros project. We know about Suzanne's projects. We know about Rick's projects. I mean, these, you know, they just had like a fabulous article in the New York Times. Wonderful, right? You know, and it's beautiful, beautiful, but there's other work that's being done. So how is this work not being discussed? Why don't we know about this work, right? You're doing all kinds of work. NATO was doing all kinds of work over a creative time, right? So there are many, many different kinds of things that are going on. And so in a part, that's one of the reasons I'm sort of asking about, well, what do you want? How do you go about doing it? And then how do we know about it? I mean, we talk about social media as being the sort of like panacea, right? You know, that we have like this amazing tool where, you know, all can be known and grasped and understood and put out, you know, that there are all these vehicles, and yet most of you are flying under the radar. So this idea about what you want, I think, is also connected to in part, how are you funded? Where's your money coming from, you know, and who is supporting you? So who is supporting your efforts? I mean, you kind of arrived at a place that I've been thinking about is, well, there's a couple of things. Funding is definitely one of them, but also just a kind of like a support, a network of support where you can not only cultivate ideas, but you can bounce things off of mentors, peers, you know, space where you can generate. I think a lot of the times why I've been singing, a lot of the times why anybody knows me outside of this space is because of fiaster, you know, because I performed, you know, at a Biennale, you know, terms that I didn't know before. I knew, you know, so I think a lot of times it does take a type of generosity, but where is that generosity? Where are these clubs? Thank you. I'm kind of curious if people need history, if they're interested in history. And I asked that, I don't mean that ironically, when I started getting involved in this kind of work in the 1980s with people like Lucie LePard, and we created a group called Political Art Documentation Distribution, we began to try to create a network of other practices around the world, but around the states and put them in an actual archive, which now is actually in the Museum of Modern Art. Lots of ironies there, but is there. There was no internet, of course. We tried to create sessions like this, bring people together and have discussions. Precisely, as Carrie May said, to get to know what each other was doing. And yet probably very few people here even have ever heard of PAD or know about this archive. And I'm wondering to what extent you really just want to rebuild the wheel over and over again, which is not necessarily always a bad thing. There is that dead weight of history that Marx talked about, which you sometimes have to throw off. So I guess this is one part of the question, and the other part is there's, people have said there's a feeling that something has changed now. There's a sort of shifting up of these activities. And I'm wondering if we could get more concrete about what that feeling actually consists of. I want to speak a little bit, though, about something you said, though, about people working in isolation. And I'm not sure, I mean, I understand what you're saying, and that's true in certain instances. But I also, I want to connect that to your initial question, you know, what do people want? And I know for myself, and I think many artists this way, you want to make your work, right? You want to be able to do your work. And then the question is, what do you need to do your work, right? So for some people, you need visibility to get resources to do the kind of work you want to do. So it becomes a need to be present at situations like this, or be in the New York Times, or be, you know, these kind of things. If you're work, if that's what you need to do the work. But there are many people that are doing their work that are doing their work and they don't need it. You know, you know, I was, you know, and I bring that to the table from the perspective of one of my mentors, artist named Jesse Lott, who is of the same generation of David Hammons, who went to school in LA at the same time with David Hammons. His working, kind of his way of working is very close to it. But Jesse has this notion that he just wants to make his work and share it with people. And he's happy doing it right in Fifth Ward. So he didn't need, so he didn't need to be known by any of us because it, because being known by us doesn't help him do what it is that he really wants. And I think it's, so I think we have to really, you know, when you talk about what you want, if what you want is to make the work, then you have to decide what are the things you have to do to make the work. I agree with that, but once again, I'll just say that there are many circles of where that could happen, right? Someone could draw their major support for what they do from the public sector, right? I mean, they can be, you know, they can have access to the political and public sector around them that they won't need the art world, right? They don't need it. So they don't need that recognition, they get the recognition. Then there are some that can do things where they just need the recognition of their community, right, because they will fuel them and they will get them the resources to do what it is. So it's just many different ways. And I just want to, I mean, I'm saying that because I just, you know, I think that, you know, as artists, when we connect to the art world, we become the center of the universe in our own minds. Yeah, like, I mean, you know, we become the center of the universe, but there are many other universes out there that people are operating in and doing great work. You know, and the question is, I mean, is to just really know what it is that you're interested in doing and then what you need to get it done. And there are many different ways to do it. But I would agree with you, but I think the thing that is the most problematic for me and that we all struggle with in ways that in a sense compromise us and the real work we want to do is how do you make a living while you're doing it? So many of us for years have taught those jobs aren't as available as they used to be, but we still teach and essentially full-time jobs in order to go out and do another full-time job afterwards. Or we're lucky enough to participate in the market to a degree that it can bring money in. You go up and down with that or you have a job like curation or some related thing. The real issue to me is there's not enough resources to staff those people who really wanna do this kind of work. And so I think that we have to explore each of these systems and critique the systems, but a long time ago when I was working in Chicago, somebody, one of the artists came up to me and said, you know, we have a position. If you're working in community, you need to be paid for your work. I said, oh, that'd be great. And I said, but I've never paid for my work or rarely paid for my work. And they said, well, we don't think you should do the work then. And I just looked at this artist and thought, what planet are you living in on that you think I could not do my work? And the other thing I wanna say about the art world is it provides you with a discourse of peers. If you carefully pick your art world, like Leslie always said to me, I pick my art world. Rick's the art world, he may not feel it, but he is the art world, Amalia's my art world, Kerry's my art world. We all participate in a discourse that lands halfway between activism and form. Somebody was talking about form. And I think that's a critical issue that is not only about doing good for others. I have a quick comment. When you ask what is it that you want as an artist, my first thought was money. And I'm not talking about funding, I'm not talking about commercialism, I'm talking about income. And this is very much what you're saying as well, where New York keeps going and now we're starting up in a bubble again and it keeps going. The stratification and the inequity is through the roof right now. So what ends up happening is that artists, it's, I actually went to a symposium earlier this year that was talking about strategies to stay in New York and have longevity. And they're essentially based in assets and buying property, which was a complete mood points and 90% of the people in that room. And I thought the symposium should be about income. It's how can you even begin to entertain having any kind of ownership over your own property to be able to think and do this other kind of work? That is step number one. And it goes so deep that people can't even begin to think on that level. They can't even begin to think, what is it that I want or that I need and how do I get it? Because they are working three jobs because they have no time to do anything. They don't have time to go to their friends opening. They don't have the energy to go to this and that. Other activity that is meaningful in our own communities. And that's the conversation that I want to have. You know, I was like, where is our income? As artists and in jobs that are related to art. I teach. I work as a studio assistant to an artist. I work in a bar and I'm an artist. Sorry, your hand. Thank you so much. I feel like I don't know where to start. I work at El Puente, which is a human rights organization based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was here with my boss, Frances Lucera, Executive Director. I am just so blown away by this whole event today. I'm so grateful to have and heard from all the panelists, all the speakers this discussion. And when you ask that question, what do we need? What do we want? For me, what the sister just said about income that was like right on the money, just to be able to live. Like not even thinking in terms of making money, but just like living, like making a living. But what I want and what I need, my work is with undocumented immigrants. I wrote a play based on my interviews with undocumented immigrants from Latin America. We're at the Fringe Festival. We've had a lot of interest and a lot of success with the play. But what I need is allies and a team. And what we're doing here today, like 10 times a year, five times a year, I can't tell you how incredibly helpful the question is for me just to meet up artists and to ask each other the question to learn from each other. But to like a mentor, a team of people that understand me and my project and what I'm trying to do, people who can help me put the pieces together, like the public sector, the community sector, the art sector, like how do I put all of that together? Like I know I'm an ESL teacher. I teach English to undocumented immigrants and that's one part. And then I'm an artist, I write plays, I act. How do I put all the pieces together? I'm involved in the immigrant rights movement. I'm going to rallies and protests all the time, protesting Trump and all this. How do I put that all together? Like a team, like where's my team of allies who can meet like a smaller group, something like this on a regular basis, maybe once a month, who can help me put all of that together into some kind of roadmap or some kind of strategic plan to just create a piece of art that speaks to the rights of undocumented immigrants and what we have in common with them. When people, I remember when my art career was starting to grow, I met these couple people who we would call like famous art people. And if you took the fame away, what I found was that they were actually asking me these very key questions. And one of the questions was, so who's on your team? Right? And so what they meant by team was, who knows everything about your work so that you could call on them in a dime on a dime and they could write about the work. What curators do you know? What healers do you know? Like who's loving you? Who's in your corner loving you? And I think that sometimes we think the only way to do that is through a formal organization that you would actually create a board for a not-for-profit that would do all of the things that you actually need as an individual. And so maybe one way of thinking about this is like, who's my board? Who can I call on that would act as a kind of partner in my life that's like maybe ahead of me, there's my phrase again, ahead of me, I could call them the same way I might aboard and say, look, I just need to be able to talk to you three times a year. Would you be willing to meet with me for a coffee? And I'm gonna download some things, right? Like Rick did that for me. Carrie made, when she came to Chicago, we hadn't met before. And she was like, oh, okay, I'm gonna call you tomorrow. And she called me. And it was like this, and so I think that some of the luxury that what looks like success is that these people are kind of ensuring a certain amount of survival by creating the team that they need around them. And I think that that's actually something that we can do with more consciousness. Yeah, and more agency. And it doesn't actually take a grant to do that. It takes a willingness to be humble and ask people that you really believe in to be supportive of the work you do. So I just had a quick comment. I'm here as a practitioner, but I'm also here with, as a board member, I sit on a board of a foundation that gives money to painters and sculptors. And it has been giving money to artists for 20 years. And it's only this year that this foundation is suddenly starting to talk about socially engaged art. And I really feel this, that the question about what do artists who do socially engaged art want is a really important one. I can't underscore how important it is to communicate to foundations what you need and what socially engaged art is. Because I have a feeling that a lot of foundations don't have a clue. I mean, there are a handful of foundations that are, I think, jumping on a kind of bandwagon and supporting the work. And it's great that they are. But I really don't think foundations know how to gauge a success of a project. I mean, I think they're still measuring success through demographics, just the old sort of old ways, old models, old tools. They don't understand that you may need money for planning, for outreach, and you may need multi-year funding. You certainly have to build in failure to your projects to learn from it. So, I mean, I think that as a network, we really have to advocate for this kind of work. And we have to explain to the people that we are asking money from, what, how they can truly support us in really meaningful and deep ways. I just want to respond to that. Yeah. And NATO and then we'll come to the funding, because somebody's got somebody to say something. I just want to make one, I just want to throw this out for you on the board of a funding entity or any other funders or whatever. And for the artists, too, is to just know that artists have generated this whole consciousness about social and community-engaged work, but it's been forced into this thing of outcome, which is shifting all the resources to developers, right? Whether developers or institutions and so on and so forth. So all that money, I mean, we're generating all this energy around social and community-engaged work. Artists are doing that, but not very many artists are getting the money. So that's part of our money. That's part of the problem, is going somewhere else. So one of the things we do at the Cree Time Summit is not only, I'm just thinking about power and famous artists first, not famous artists. And I think we're in a historical shift where this kind of work is only going to grow, but the opportunities are going to stay about the same amount of numbers. And in fact, when we talk about faculty, it's far less, and that's gonna stay the same. Which is to say that there's a different kind of thing when you can be famous from your art versus not gonna be, which is to say make a living versus not. And I think that in some ways, for those that aren't gonna make a living off this art, which we'll call the multitude, there's different ways of thinking about art. And that kind of complexity of publics and working across networks to some degree liberating because you don't have to worry about that authorship thing and you can do coalition building. But I do think we need to stare income and equity in the face and realize that a large majority of the people doing this work are not gonna get paid and there is a real class war happening in this country. And so what are the models of working that refuse authorship that aren't gonna make a dime out of the art world but wanna build networks in a condition of resistance? Because it's a very different thing than someone that's making a dime out of the art system, which for those of us that can, hold on tight and don't let it go. But it's hard to say to young people like, hey, look at me, you can do this too. And they're just like, I hope you're right, but I don't think you are, you know? I just don't think the math is gonna hold up in the next 20 years. And it's true, it won't. So what do we do about that? And I think just in terms of our own communities, being clear about the economic realities and how that shifts our kind of institution building and infrastructures is a dire need, a real dire need. It's interesting, I was gonna make a different comment, but I wanna respond to that. I'm an artist who makes my living as an urban planner. And one of the things, I work for the city. One of the things about being an artist, I was telling some folks this earlier, when you're an artist who works for the city, all of the other artists who work for the city come and find you. And they say, I do this too. And so there is something that's happening and it's not recognized. And I'm not sure if that's important or not, but for me, being an artist in that space gives me a certain kind of leverage that I wouldn't have if I was an urban planner working as an urban planner. So as an artist who works as an urban planner here in New York, I'm working on a lot of kind of large scale neighborhood change right now. And so many of the things that folks have brought up in this room today about this real craving to know and to be known are things that people in communities are saying too. There's this sense that once upon a time, we knew, like we knew what was going on. We knew who was down the block. We knew we had this insaherent sense. Nobody can quite articulate how we knew, but we knew and we want to know again, but we don't know how. So that's what I want to know. How do we do that? How do we come to know again? I have two comments. One, early on in the day, Suzanne was saying that she was concerned about the young and not knowing community organizing. And it's really, really interesting. So I work at an organization called Apple Shop that's in a town of 2,000 people and has been there for 47 years. In my head, I don't know anybody in my crew people that are young in my region who don't understand community organizing as the base of everything, right? Because there's no other way where it gets done in rural communities. You have to work every avenue you have because there aren't many avenues to explore or capital to be had. You have to, like for instance, I was also thinking a lot, Rick, of what you were saying around time, right? Like if I think about what I need or what Apple Shop needs or what my region needs, it needs sustained time to create a different future. That's what it needs. And it doesn't, and a lot of the time, we have to, how we get that time is we come and make connections with other people, other communities that are dealing with similar things because we know we're not gonna get anywhere unless other people get places, right? Nobody's free until everyone's free. And yet that takes time away from place-based or community-people-based work. And so I think that, I don't really know how to solve it, but what I think is true is that, for instance, I thought it was interesting, Rick, when you were saying it's taken 20 years to see certain outcomes from the row houses, right? That when you are doing that type of long, haul work with people or in a specific place, having the time to literally just build and try again and fail and redo, it takes a while. And I think we're always in this hesitancy to do, do, do, prove, prove, prove, be huge, show what we can do, da, da, da. Yes, and sometimes I think we really just have to make sure that we are taking risk and opportunity when we can. And yet also recognizing that there are certain people within, say, the arts field that are able to move quicker because of their access to certain capital institutions or the fact that there are even public art jobs. Like, that doesn't exist where I live. Anyway, I'm just saying, I think that if we're as a country or as a society gonna get to a place where we understand community-engaged art in a way that creates the societal change we want to, we need to understand the different paces that this is all happening in and figure out how to support one another and kind of be generous, reach out to, pass the baton to places that we see actually needing a little more to get going. You know what I'm saying? I mean, I think all the people here are doing that and I really appreciate it, but. Let me just say that, let me just say, just one quick correction. I meant artists, young people. I didn't mean all young people. I worked in with Apple Shop for five years, I know it well, but I think we're not teaching young people community organizing in art school settings. Are you, Nick? Okay. I just wanna say that I feel that so much and I'm glad that you spoke because one thing that was kind of in the back of my head was, as I was watching the presentations, I was like, this is, these practices are, for the most part, rooted in urban city centers or cities with international connections. And that's actually not a context that I'm working within in Dallas, even though it is urban, but it doesn't have that international cache or that, for example, Apple Shop is working in the South and I think that the challenges are really different and the ability to form networks and to have supportive allies are really different too. So sometimes I'm like, all I want is for all of you guys to move down to Texas, you know? So that I don't have to count the number of socially engaged people on one hand, right? But I think what I want on a larger level is how do we think about these practices which are supposedly rooted in place, not just as practices that are actually in really migratory urban international centers, but as practices that are actually insuburban or in rural places where people don't leave for 20 or 30 years. So like those are my two desires. Great. So I want to shout out the resource generation for a moment as a potential strategy offer. For those who don't know resource generation is an organization that encompasses people with wealth and they intentionally give money to a number of different spaces. And last year, they made a commitment to give $1.4 million to Black-led organizations and they were able to fund 100 Black-led organizations across the country. And that was a very specific commitment that was definitely ushered by a lot of Black activists from across the country and I think there's an opportunity to do that here. I don't think we're here at Ford Foundation that obviously has a lot of access to a number of different kinds of resources. But what would it look like to bring different foundations and folks who have money together to one, educate, to expand the definitions of what socially engaged art. So it includes our stories and then two, start to redirect the streams of money intentionally into the work that we're doing. And also there's a lot of folks in this room that are doing incredibly powerful, impactful work that also need a number of resources. And so I'm curious for the folks who have a lot of privilege, what it would look like to utilize that access to bring funders together and to bring folks who have a lot of access and ask the question, can you make the commitment for a year, for five years, for 10 years to give this amount of money specifically to this kind of socially engaged work that is specifically funding. And I'm gonna say it's the folks of colors work across the country. And I think it would make a significant shift, honestly. Yeah, the piece from what you shared, what the folks were on the floor, what is your responsibilities? I think a question that we all have to ask ourselves with the power and privileges that we have, what are we gonna do with it? Yeah, I'd just like to make a thought. I think as members of our creative field, we're in a very special time of self-definement. I think that we could build coalitions that could really create what we're looking for. But it's kind of within us to be the glue to allow that to happen. I really like ideas of self-dependency and autonomy and really initiating the resources that you're looking for yourself. Now, that could be seemingly very difficult. But I think through a creative entrepreneurial mind and the right networking is like, I don't know if I'm gonna see anybody in this room ever again. I don't know if I'm ever gonna hear from anybody in this room ever again. But there's so much potential here that we could, just with this little circle, never mind the extensions of it, that we could almost achieve anything that we would want to. It was really great to go in Pittsburgh and meet or hear from the guy from Comfort Kitchen who as a Jewish man had all this hate coming from him because he was representing the culture that is the supposed enemy of the Jewish state. Now, as a Jewish man, he was called anti-Semitic. He was called all this. His funders pulled the funding from him. He said, hey, you represent anti-Semitic. But at that point in Comfort Kitchen, he had already become so successful. He was like, hey, I don't need your funding because we're able to self-fund ourselves. So I'm interested in how we can kind of coalition and build to where we wanna be, but not have to always walk around with our hand out. That's just a thought. I'm taking the mic. I think Anani wanted to say something, Lani Graham. Thank you. And then Amaya. I've been really good. This is made to let the younger artists speak, so I'm holding it, I'm gonna go, wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay, go ahead, Lani. Thanks. There's, within the context of the conversation, there are a number of key issues that all of these things go back to. One has to do with some level of repository or a place of reference, where all of our work can be referred to and be documented in a substantial and respect. So that people understand what we do has has and retains value. Then that goes back to another really important and essential, you know that has value, is value. This culture and the conversation is coming up a little bit too early on. We really can't move ahead in a substantive way without some level of really serious commitment. There's no reason on earth that any one of us should be prevented from doing what we love to do, what we were born to do. Without some level of support, it has to be acknowledged. There have to be people and places that know and understand and acknowledge what we do and who we are as artists. Acknowledge the contribution of what we do in a substantive way. I guess I'm talking about money. What do you do? You're a bartender, you're a teacher, and you're an artist last. I'm sorry, you're an artist first. And then you do all of those other things. I'm an artist first. I'm sorry, I can't help it. I was born then. It was something that I understood when I was very young. Why does that have to be a stigma in this society and in this culture? Why are we marginalized as artists? There's the question. That's the thing that needs to be answered by the society at large. There's the infrastructure that needs to be established in order to support our efforts. Donald, and here we are, working really hard with society, with culture, with people. What about all those other people? With the means to support you, the way that you need to be supported to go and do the project that you've already built the foundation. You understand what I'm talking about? You understand what I mean? Oh, yes. You know who those people are. You know who they are too. And those are the people that need to be invited into the room. Those are the people that need to be invited into this conversation. You asked me what I need? That's what I need. I need for those people to be in the room when I'm talking. When you're talking, I need for those people to be able to share in this conversation. That's what I need. Thank you. Okay. Amaya, Amaya first, and you've been waiting to go also. Amaya, and then? Sorry, Bayate. Well, I think we've been talking about, you know, big goals, larger issues of appropriate remuneration, the support, the structural changes. We've been fighting that same battle for a long, long time and we'll be doing it longer. But I feel like we're present in this room today and we've been listening to each other and there have been people talking about everything from healing to violence against women, to following the heritage of their father, to the idea of larger global structures of organization, to very rooted localized issues about why is a giant jail in the middle of a Latino community? And I think if we've been listening to each other, some of you know somebody already or you found somebody maybe in this day that you're interested in knowing more. So I think that one of our more short-term goals, using both the information on the network that's in the last page of the handout as well as the potential website, is to start to see if we can't build some maybe begins either in regional because it's easier to find each other and get to each other. It might be like-minded issues and themes, feminism, sexuality, housing, healing. Somehow it feels to me as though we shouldn't really leave today without beginning to establish some of those smaller alliances, coalitions and support networks because in the short-term that at least opens the door for people to have the board, so to speak, the team. And you know that whole big discussion about whether the art world knows you or doesn't know you, whether you're under the radar or above the radar. And some of us who've been in it a long time were under the radar, over the radar, behind the radar. They found us, they lost us. We got rediscovered again. We may never get rediscovered again. We had our 15 minutes and maybe that was all there ever was. So I feel like just speaking for myself, chasing that thing, the art world, which we now know is composed of hedge funds. First it was biennials, now it's art fairs. The auction houses, you know what I am talking about. It's just money, money, money at the deepest, purest level of greed and investment. So we could still keep chasing that and maybe someday there'll be an initiative that will help some of you to balance out your living. But in the in-between time, I think the one thing you have is your passion and your passion that's shared with other people. And so if we could at least begin today to maybe decide a next convening, begin to maybe see who identifies with each other in either rural, smaller gatherings or like-minded practices. Because when I was listening, I mean the practices are wide ranging. They're some of the really deep social practices. Some of them are led by really almost a fine arts thinking. Others are led by community consortiums with long histories. None of us do the same kind of work, but some of you have affiliations with each other that could help to create maybe some informal alliances. I'm not talking about a giant network and we all get a badge or pay dues. I mean we tried that and that doesn't work. You don't know how many of them belong to. But I just feel like this is such a great moment to listen to all of you and see what the future looks like. And I guess the question is what do you need? But the other question is what do you have? What do you have right now in your work, in your relationships and in this room? Because I think that that's where you start with what you have. So there's a couple of things that I just want to summarize really quick. I think one thing that's important for us as artists in this time is to really be willing and able to redefine how we think of ourselves and what we think of our skillset as being. And I think we all have a very distinct and multifaceted area of expertise and it transcends different mediums, right? So while I was trained as a photojournalist and I've become a fine artist and multi-media artist, what I actually, some of the things that I actually know because I know a lot actually at this point, but some of the things I actually know in terms of skills are, I understand storytelling. I understand visual literacy. I understand how to imagine something, go through the process of researching it and then figure out how to make that thing I imagined a real thing. And I think, I could go on and on but there's these different skill sets we've learned by being creative people that actually transcend a specific discipline or specific practice. And I think it's important for us to think of ourselves as people with this area of expertise because the expertise of imagining something and then figuring out how to create it, that's going to the wayside. I teach college and I have so many who come into the classes and they only know how to be given instructions and follow them and they think they should get an A. They don't know how to think critically and figure out, no, it's a serious problem. They don't understand how to take information, process it and then utilize it versus another scenario and figure out how it fits their benefit in those different scenarios. And that's something that we have that's extraordinarily valuable. I also think it helps us to look at what we do as a public service as well and to think about our idea first in terms of our work but then also think about how many different ways that idea can manifest. So I've been doing some work lately with trans media which is basically art and media that can exist on multiple platforms. And one of my colleagues once compared it to a toy I used to play with when I was a kid called Transformers but you could apply it to anything that's like a comic book story. Whereas this is something that is an idea that's a core idea that can manifest itself many ways. It could be a comic book, it could be a movie, it could be a toy, it could be a coloring book. It can be a narrative story. So how can our ideas and our interests translate as physical sculptures, as experiences, as paintings, as drawings in all these different multifaceted ways so that we can always find which audience can be engaged through which path. I think those are some really important things for us to think about that allows us to take back a lot of our power instead of, as Nels mentioned, helping our hand out so often. I was really interested in returning to the conversation around failure because I feel like what I need most is a safe space to fail. I feel like so many grants and so many fellowships and so many residencies are so product oriented that you actually don't get the time to think and process information. So you're constantly driven towards making your product so you can fulfill your grant requirements so that you can get funding again that you don't really get the time to think. And so I think, I don't wanna say more than money but at the same level as we want money, I also just need time to think and to process. And so today was really overwhelming for me because my brain goes very fast but I'm also trying to process all these thoughts that are happening and trying to digest and having to check out of the conversation so I can digest what I just heard so I can re-enter the conversation. And so often we don't even, we're gonna all leave and we don't really have time to sort of download and decompress and we think about everything that we've heard and so I don't really need time to make more art but I really need time just to think and to think publicly and then for someone to tell me that line of thinking doesn't make any sense and to be told that and to get that critical feedback so that my practice grows. So I think I end up in a very reflexive art-making practice where I keep doing things the way that I know how to do them because I don't have time to think about other ways to do them because I'm constantly worried about making a product so I can get funding for the next round so I can do this whole process again. So when do we actually have time as artists to sit and think without any pressure of having to present an artifact that we thought and made something and that's what's been really frustrating for me as an artist. I think one of the wonderful things about this is it feels suddenly like a level playing field. Feels like no matter what the status of our careers or projects, we're all like facing so many of the same issues and challenges. I wanted to just get back I think to what you said Lani and Amalia and a long time ago, Carrie, that you said you need to know what to ask for and you need to know how to ask for it. And it seems to me here that everybody knows what to ask for. I mean, this has been an incredibly articulate event. There's no doubt that you all, we all, I know what we need to ask for. I just spent the last six years in Denver running a small nonprofit photography organization. My aim was to build community and to build up the community for contemporary photographers and contemporary photography, which in Denver is very much the C word. There was a lot of pushback from that. I gave myself a timeline of three years before funders would be receptive and be coming to the table. Six years it took and they were still not ready to commit. It's like it's hard to believe that as an old white guy I hit the glass ceiling there and it was really frustrating. I realized I didn't know how to ask for what I needed. I didn't know particularly how to ask for money. And I think asking for money is the most difficult thing that I as an administrator as a director have had to deal with. Personally, I would like to learn how to ask for money. I'm betting here that most people sort of have that challenge as well. Just to bring up your question, I'm sorry about a circle of support or your own board in some ways. One thing that was very successful in Denver was run by one photographer who was kind of like a maven in the Malcolm Gladwell sense and he used his network every two years ran a photography Denver which grew from a very small event to involving about 160 galleries. It's very informal how he did it was just contact all his friends, meet in his garden, meet in his house and contact the people that you know that are on your same wavelength. And I think that just doing it in a grassroots way is nine times out of 10 going to work. I certainly wouldn't rely on an institution to do it for me having been at one. But anyway, I'm starting to ramble but I do think kind of things, as you said, Carrie, knowing what it is and knowing how to ask for it is so critical. And I come out of this event here feeling really inspired to learn how to do that. Yeah, hi. Thank you all for having me and it's been great. My name is Alex. I'm from Apple Shop in Kentucky. And I have agreed with very, very much of what's been said here today but there's two particular things that take issue with. And I want to challenge. One was this idea of publicity, right? Publicity. Whether you had heard of our organizations as a measure of success. No, no, no, I don't mean, I'm not trying to rephrase. Would you, yeah. Well, and I phrased it poorly. I didn't mean to straw man your point. What I mean to say is just that in the case of some organizations like Apple Shop, that's an incredible challenge. For 50 years, that's what we've been trying to do is to make areas like New York aware of us because we're invisible, right? We're one of the few, I've traveled a lot of places, right? I've been a lot of places and Native American reservations and Appalachia in my opinion are the two hardest places to live in America in terms of social services, life expectancy, drug abuse, law enforcement, political corruption, down the gamut. It's irrelevant to most of America that that happens in Appalachia, they don't care. It's one of the few places that can be openly ridiculed on almost any medium, redneck, a hillbilly. It's so poorly understood, issues like guns are just, guns are important to rural people, but it's laughed out of a conversation amongst, I count myself very liberal, but I'm also Southern and that shapes my view of issues like the Confederate flag because I would seriously doubt I grew up in Jackson County, Eastern Kentucky as the only black person in an aggressively racist county that I've been called the N-word. I've fought more on the basis of race than probably anybody in this room, right? It was my name, yet I can distinguish between a Confederate flag and racism because I care about the distinction. But it's easy to wipe away a whole bunch of people who are as bigoted or whatever, ignorant, and then forget about their concerns. And I think that's a lot of what Appalachia has had to deal with is expressing the fact that one, we're not all toothless and ignorant and racist, and then the other part of Appalachia is we're the only one doing it. So if we're not heard of, then it's even a further sort of amplification of the need for this part of the American experience to not be ignored. Nevertheless, it is, and that's a struggle. And we have a marketing department and we have 100 documentary films. We've been around for 50 years. We have a radio station that's been broadcasting for 35 years. We put out media to be heard. Yet Ada's picture was on the front of an Atlantic article four months ago. I don't know how many people read it, but would people have read it? Would you have picked up that article if the subject matter is rural America? A lot of us read this other New York Times article, but I'm curious if the Atlantic article would have gotten as much play. And I just have to say, that was the best presentation I've ever seen. Lester, you shook me to my core with many things that you said, but I do wanna disagree with one, but please don't ignore the fact that everything else you said I agree with. But it was about the consequences, the ripple effects of something like a cafe. You know from the black experience, and I'll sort of echo that too from the rural experience, that one concern I have about that, about not having a sustainability plan. Any event has consequences. Anything that we do will have ripple effects. So that can't be the goal in and of itself, in my mind. It would be to try and predict. Now this is an impossible task, nevertheless this is the human goal, is to try and predict consequences from a set of actions. I'm not gonna eat if I didn't think it would satiate me, but I'm trying to predict the outcome. It could be that I eat and I'm poisoned. Art, on the other hand, can be created for the sake of itself. Art, like in my opinion, unlike a cafe, art can be created because the artist wants to create it. Now there's a lot of restaurant tours that create the restaurants that they want to create, which is why restaurants are the least successful business in America, right? And then, and so the ripple effects, now I'll go back to this rule in black, you know it's a common refrain in the black community, that if you give something new and different and it doesn't work, at least black people think that the impression will be, that's not, we're not gonna get that again, right? They tried it, they messed it up. Same thing's true in rural communities, where we're trying to start a tech company. If that fails, it has to fail for the right reasons. Otherwise the ripple effects will not be positive. It'll be an affirmation of previously held suspicions. So that's my one criticism, is just that I think creating a cafe for the sake of a cafe, it's a completely unpredictable consequence. It's not that the ripple effects will be positive, which I think was the insinuation. Who knows what they'll be? It may be that no restaurants will open up in this area because look, this one had so much support and still it failed. So maybe we can all start there and try to also respond to the question of failure. I think I should first say, I should make an admission that there have been times in my artistic practice where I stopped making so that I could work two day jobs so that I could save money so that when I go back to my artistic practice, I could have the kind of autonomy and discretion to, like in a way, art was seasonal, art making. It wasn't like I have to do this every day or I'll die. It was like, there's a thing I want to do and no one's interested. So I'm gonna work for two years to do the thing that I want to do and then I'm gonna do it. And that there was a kind of willingness to make some sacrifices in order to realize this thing that I wanted to see. I rarely hear or see artists talking about the sacrifices necessary to make the work that they want to make ultimately happen. So whether it's a place to stay or a city to live in or that in a way, we believe that we should be able to carry our artistic practice forward all the time and there is no sacrifice in a way. Like we're artists, we should be able to make. And I haven't found that to be true for myself. So part of the admission would be, I have to accept in my way of knowing the world that sometimes even when I try to do a thing successfully, a system might keep it from being successful. A system might work against me toward its failure. So even in my great black optimism, I know that there's the potential force for failure. So I've kind of incorporated that. I've said to myself, all right, I've conned myself. I tricked myself out. Like, okay, this could really not work. But I'm super committed to this thing. The admission is, I actually love business. I love business, business. Like really, like I love doing deals. I'm really organized. I love leading people. And that there are all these skills that we never talk about, back to your point. There are these other complementary skills that are absolutely crucial to a certain kind of survival. But we never talk about those skills that are absolutely necessary in this world, in this world, in this world today, a certain set of skills are imperative. And those skills are not being taught to us in eighth grade, in third grade, in our MFA programs, that the only people that are actually getting it are neurosurgeons who are doing research in labs in a system that will work. Or I talk about this all the time, MBAs who are being taught, if you try to make a deal and they say no, you shake it off, you go back, you meditate to yourself, brother, and you say tomorrow, I'm gonna sell that car, right? And it's like, all of the spiritual and motivational teaching is being taught in the motherfucking MBA program. And it's like, well, how did they co-opt? Faith. How did they co-opt hope? But in fact, the cats who are most interested in this world system working understand that the things that artists used to know are the things that would make this world work. And artists are now chasing rubrics. Now, the reason why we gotta move so fast and work so hard to try to make the thing right is because we know that if it's being judged by a portfolio manager, that they're gonna look at the thing, they're gonna think about outcomes. And so one of the things that you can do, Kerry May, is talk with our officer leadership and say, as we're developing this thing that we call social practice, these are some things that we've found. That in fact, it's not a one-year project that will yield a certain kind of success. It's a relational process and that in some cases, the only times that we'll see market success of a certain kind is over 10 years, right? Which means that we have to be committed to a way of living with an artist or a way of the health of a community over a long period of time. And we're gonna be committed with you as you figure these things out. I have another admission. The second admission has to do again with maybe with school or with learning. Somebody mentioned learning over here, but there's a way that the thing that I talk with Yao about the most is not about how do you game the system or whatever. It's like, are you willing to ask the hard questions to yourself about whatever is next? So I may not have the luxury of a mentor, but there's a set of things that I really wanna learn. And so I read the biographies of artists because I think that those biographies help to answer a certain set of questions that I would also wanna ask Rick. So when I think about Joseph Boyce, now that we're in this conversation of like social sculpture, I recognize that, oh, actually Joseph Boyce isn't my guy. He was more like the proponent of an idea that he didn't practice. I'm actually interested in certain, but I would only know that about Joseph Boyce if I actually was willing to read the 48 books about Joseph Boyce, right? And that Joseph Boyce wanted to be loved more than he wanted to be a badass change agent. I have my thoughts about this thing. So it's like, oh wow, I'm actually more interested in people who know how to do small scale development and combining them with people who do faith work and combining them with people who are interested in this pedagogy of the oppressed. And it's like, how do you start to carve out by asking questions of yourself and of the things that are in the world that are available to us for free, how do you start to carve out something that looks like school? The MFA by itself will not give you what you need to be a successful artist. The MBA by itself, a degree in theology, a degree at all, school probably won't teach you how to learn. And so how do we then grapple with those truths that I actually knew that the cafe wouldn't fail? I knew that, I don't own the building, I knew that if the university, like if whatever, that there was a way in which by making the gesture so big that there would be people around me that would hold it up and that if I was a failure as a potential restaurant tour, that there would be another person that would be like, oh, I actually know how to make restaurants. All the people I know who know how to cook, who know how to manage, don't have the money to build the thing. So what I was interested in was just kind of really occupying the space so that the demonstration of the thing could be evident. And then people who actually know how to do the thing could get in. That's why I appreciate it. So the advantage of sitting next to the aster as you know, he's gonna end up with the mic at some point and you can grab it. I just have a quick comment about history. We've talked about it repeatedly and I think the whole event was set up really in terms of history. How many of you here know what Apple Shop is? Raise your hand. And Doug Lee Cock and... Okay, but this is really, this is important. This is important because it's about, like I worked for Apple Shop for five years. It's about the networks that we formed in the late 60s and throughout the 70s that are maintained today. And I think we're doomed to repeat the, you know, repeat the wheel over and over again if we don't start sharing this information. Apple Shop, like Judy Baca Spark, like Liz Lehrman's project, these are the quintessential early promoters and producers of this kind of art. Lorraine Leeson, I mean, yeah, I mean... Voices from the bell? So the point is only, I think it's on you guys also to learn about these histories and know who Doug Lee Cock is and know who Huey Smith is and Elizabeth. I think it's critical to understand the values that these projects came out of because they are not the values that are expressed in MFA programs or in social practice that you see in most museums. And I think that this is gonna start to happen. I mean, it's, you know, one of the things that I think it's so exciting about always about teaching, even though I don't like students very much, you know, precisely for the sort of same reasons, you know, most of them are really interested in getting an A, and not much else, they're really not interested in the work, though I really had a wonderful time actually in Monterey with your students. There is this, you know, this idea about legacy is absolutely critical. You know, when I'm teaching, it's the thing that I'm often encouraging my students to do, to really do this kind of research, to do this kind of writing that, you know, we do have a feel that I have an obligation as a teacher to really point students in very specific directions and to demand a certain kind of work from them and a certain level of investigation, a certain kind of investigation from them and it's the kind of work that, you know, that I think I would like to continue to do. I'm very interested in the idea of like an oral history project. You know, one of the things that you said, you know, Amaya, that I think is so important, you know, I just have to say that in putting together this day, thinking it through, I started thinking about it sometime in the summer, early summer, and you know, yes, it needs to be a longer program, right? That the art of change initiative I could use like another, you know, six months a year too easily to really sort of flesh through, I think a lot of the ideas that have really began percolating. But when I started putting it together, I really did want to know who was who, who was doing what, and what were some of the issues, and what were some of the strategies, the strategies for working. And then who were really some of the people that I really wanted to have in the room? And then a few, maybe a month or so ago, a month and a half ago, Amaya's name just floated my head and I can't even begin to tell you what it means. I say, out of everybody in the room, if the gifts, the extraordinary gift that you've brought to this day, that you've brought to the work, that you've brought to the field, that you've brought to the level of commitments, tenacity, insights, brilliance, compassion, has just been extraordinary to watch. You know, I was listening in this room and I was hearing a lot of frustration. There's a lot of frustration in the room. You know? But the one thing that you said that held like glue was what do you have? If you can start with what you have, then it moves you forward in a really profound way. That if you're dwelling on what we don't have, right, then that's where you are. But if you start to open up that space of what do we have and then how do we use this to build on, then I think that maybe something really amazing and remarkable can come out of this. I want to encourage us to really figure out a way to reconvene. There are certain people that I'm very anxious to have for their conversation with because of the specific work that you're doing. I'm hoping that that has happened for cross currents of you in any number of ways. If there are people that you wanna bring into your circle, that they are mentors and people that you need to know to learn from and to offer to, right, to offer to, I am often available. I'm a busy girl, but I'm often available. My husband said, why don't you just make a couple of pictures? Come home, come home later, how? You know, my assistant said, what are you going? She said, I'm going to work. You know, I'm going to work. I am committed. I'm in it. I'm not going anywhere. It's my life, it's my work. It's the only thing that I think about. How do I in my time bring it? Bring what I know, this little stuff that I know and make these little tiny incremental steps on the path. But I know that I've done as much as I could, I've done my job. Of course, I'm worried a little bit about love it. I wanna roll in it, you know? I wanna roll in it. But more importantly, I am really thinking about the ideas, how to advance the ideas. And I've been advancing ideas long before anybody gave me any money. And we'll be doing that onward, right? And so my projects, no, they're not necessarily funded. The projects that I care most about, they're not. They probably won't be. That's all right. You know, I figured it out. And I think that this idea of, you know, really figuring out the connections, the connectors with how to make things happen in your life and in your work and through, you know, just, you know, like I love business too. I love figuring it out. I love really figuring out how to make all those dots work. So there are resources in this room, incredible people that are doing some important things. Some of you are doing things that are, and you're sort of struggling along, but you're doing them nonetheless, trying to work it out, trying to work it out and trying to figure out the details. Can I propose, again, several things because it's really sort of wrap up time? What we have in this room is, of course, incredible capacity on all kinds of levels, on all kinds of levels. I am going to ask the Ford Foundation to assist me in developing a website for this very specific project, or I'll just, my assistant and I will work on it and we'll pull it all together. I'm hoping that maybe one or two people might volunteer to work along with me to sort of establish it and help me organize some of the materials that will go into it, but we'll start it and it'll be up in the next couple of weeks. I'll just like knock that part out and then we'll figure out how to pull. I would like all of you to sort of think about contributing to it in some way, whatever way you want to, but in some way, right? And then more importantly, I would really like to think about the idea and I'd like to see a show of hands of people that would be interested in convening in June. June. And would we be able to convene at Dorchester Projects? Is that, right? Right? Right? So we'll have to figure out, you'll have to figure out how to get there, but we'll be there, right? Theast will feed us and we'll have a place to convene and maybe we'll be able to figure out how to beat some bushes and shake some leaves and maybe a couple of coins will fall someplace, but start saving your money. And with that, I'm not really sure what more I need to say, other than I am absolutely honored, deeply gratified that you were all able to come today and to share your ideas and to begin, to begin a process of thinking through our work and our effort in this space of art and possibility, art and change, art and practice, art and revolution. Thank you so much for joining us. There's Cocktails Outside.