 For whom America, the beautiful, spacious skies merely mock the black bird with crippled wing. We slice the black bird's throats, ask her why she does not sing. No one remembers there was no head start, no exposure to art of the wrong class, of the wrong cast placed on the lower track at six years young, ain't recovered since. We ask the black bird why she will not fly while the law walking off with her wings. So savage these only see equality in 63 black and white dreams. Is it so savage to dream at last free in technical apprism tinged in the right to be? Is it so savage to dream at last free? To dream at last free, dream at last free at last free at last. My name is Bambuti, I make poems. Sometimes small ones for my two kids, sometimes evening length epic ones for like the Kennedy Center or Lincoln Center or the Chautauqua Symphony or the Philadelphia Opera. But I've been thinking a lot so much, not so much about being on stage, but about being in the audience. Like right after the lights go up. You know, princes just performed or some kids at your local Y or some MacArthur genius from Beijing. And you're in the audience and you're completely inspired and there's a whole bunch of people around you also in the audience that are similarly inspired and then what? What then? So my work as the chief of program and pedagogy at Yorba-Wena Center for the Arts is to activate inspired communities, to take that moment of post-show inspiration and transpose it in time to a year before the show itself. My gig is to make creative communities for social change. So to begin a little context, Yorba-Wena Center for the Arts is a 23 year old arts institution in downtown San Francisco. We work with large corporate entities. Very often Apple will do a product launch on our stage, vanity fairs having their establishment summit in our theater right now as we speak. We also work with small community minded organizations and we work with civic organizations like the San Francisco Planning Commission to prototype and reimagine what our main thoroughfare in San Francisco Market Street might look like. Yeah, next slide please. So while we're doing this work, we function in a lot of the ways that most traditional art spaces function. Next slide please. Which is to say that people show up at Yorba-Wena Center for specifically to have a transactional cultural experience. People show up to come to the galleries or come to see a performance and absorb the content and then leave shortly thereafter. Next slide please. So what this does is it preserves a typical cultural hierarchical relationship between content and the people that we serve, right? Most of us grew up maybe going to a museum as a kind of culturally marginal experience and at the museum some curator presents ideas from on high and passes it down to the people below. I think that's a terrible model for cultural exchange. Next slide please. But this is how folks have normally done it, right? So about four years ago, we started thinking about Yorba-Wena Center in a different kind of way. We thought of ourselves and of most arts institutions as existing on a plane somewhere between the entrepreneurial and the academic. Which is to say that arts centers or cultural institutions are places where communities might exchange ideas like on a university campus but without the added pressure of seeking a degree. In the same way, we are hubs for makers. We serve the entrepreneurial instinct but we don't harbor the pressure of replicating ideas to marketable scale. Next slide please. So where we exist instead and the practice, the social practice that we've developed on our way, on our trajectory to becoming more of an activist institution is harboring instead or cultivating instead community-based think tanks that are organized around artistic questions. Which is to say that instead of coming to see a show and being inspired by an artist's presentation of an idea, we bring people together at the root of the idea itself, at the point of artist inquiry. We bring communities from all over the Bay Area that also are in practice of many different kinds of disciplines, right? So the folks that you're looking at right now, I'm looking at a farmer, I'm looking at a software developer, I'm looking at a sophomore at Stanford who is going to be a neurologist, I'm looking at the dude that wrote the book on the history of funk, I'm looking at a midwife and a doula. These are the kinds of folks that we bring all in one space. Not only demographically diverse but psychographically diverse. Next slide please. Yeah, these are a couple more of our folks. I don't know if anybody has an iPhone but when you slide the iPhone over and it makes that clicking sound, you're looking at the dude that created that platform. You're also looking at the cat that brings the roots to the Fox Theater in Oakland. Next slide please. Next slide please. So what we've done is we've asked these folks to come together around the central question that one of our curated artists is asking of themselves. So the choreographer David Dorfman in thinking about his piece, Profits of Funk, was asking this question, if soul encompasses a striving towards a more egalitarian, beautiful, expressive culture, what is the future of soul? So our first community think tank was the future soul think tank. Next slide please. What we've done since that time is to continue to organize groups of folks around these big ideas so that they're not only addressing issues of soul but also climate and economy and place and the design of the urban future. Next slide please. So instead of this kind of vertical, hierarchical exchange of ideas which I think most cultural institutions truck in, we instead are seeking to harbor a more horizontal, rhizomatic approach to how culture is made and how the cultural imagination leads itself to the public imagination and the public will. Next slide please. So what we do is we ask these folks to come together and after about, I don't know, eight to 12 months, we say take the idea that we've been ruminating on in facilitated conversations all this time and create a physical or experiential or participatory response and prototype that response in our building. So the general public and the public intelligence then becomes the content providers for our museum alongside award-winning choreographers, playwrights, and high-end corporate entities. Next slide please. What we've done then is re-imagine the public square, re-imagine the public space and ultimately held our audiences accountable for making culture with us. Next slide please. What you're looking at, next slide please. What you're looking at are examples of our body politics community think tank. Folks who are responding specifically around the question, what is on the other side of my body's joy? And what is on the other side of my body's shame? Next slide please. These are questions that were first introduced to us by the playwright, Young Jean Lee, who graduated from Cal, was born in Korea, has won OBE awards for her plays. Her last piece was just on stage at the public theater. I've recently saw her perform with David Byrne in the UK, really a tremendous mind, but there were more folks that showed up to Yorba Buena Center to see the community responses to her questions then showed up to see her play, which is kind of extraordinary. Next slide please. This is Candice Antique Davis, one of my favorite artists, and responding to the question, what's on the other side of my body's shame? She created an entire song cycle where she documented a history of shame in the African-American community over the last 150 years. Next slide please. This is another response, except this woman, Daniel Carriero, was thinking about what's on the other side of my body's joy? And she created a soccer clinic right outside of the theater where multiple communities could come and participate. Next slide please. So I show you all this, next slide please. I show you all this because I've been thinking a lot, not just in my artistic practice, but in my practice as father about law. Like, what is the cycle of a law? And in a maybe very cynical way, an idea doesn't become a law unless money is involved. And I think perhaps the only thing that's more powerful than private funds is the public imagination. Next slide please. So what is a cultural institution's responsibility in shaping and informing the public imagination? If culture precedes policy, how do cultural institutions get away with just harboring other people's ideas without facilitating the manufacture and energetic reciprocity that comes from an equal exchange of ideas? How do we not just harbor culture, but how do we deploy it? How do we do more than present artists that have brilliant ideas, but use those artists to catalyze action in our communities? Next slide please. What you're seeing and what I've been describing to you is our answer. Cultural institutions must have a social practice. We must do more than be repositories for inert meaning. We must be catalysts for a different kind of meaning and civic action. Our community-based think tanks, which are ways of using cultural incubators to bring an idea to fruition in the public will, these are our responses to a kind of accountability matrix that we think all cultural institutions should subscribe to. This is how we generate culture that moves people. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.