Cultural Organizing for Community Change 2022
“Get Activated” with Urban Bush Women
NOCD-NY and Arts & Democracy co-presented our annual Cultural Organizing for Community Change on January 8, 2022.
We started the morning by connecting, discussing the cultural organizing framework, and sharing values behind the work, which included words from Emily Ahn Levy, Hasiba Haq, Caron Atlas, Hatuey Ramos-Fermín, amalia deloney, New York City Council Member Shahana Hanif, and our colleagues including Karen Mack, Sage Crump, Mark Valdez, Kathie deNobriga, Tamara Greenfield, Kemi Ilesanmi, Judi Jennings, and Claudie Mabry.
During the lunch break, some participants joined a brown bag discussion:
How We Stopped the Wall, with Maxine Rebeles and Juan Ruis
In Laredo, TX, members of the No Border Wall Coalition waged a multi-year battle against the US government to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, and they won. Join Maxine Rebeles and Juan Ruiz for a brown bag lunch discussion to learn about the journey and some of the creative strategies that helped them win.
Before we broke into sessions, Urban Bush Women allowed us to “Get Activated” with some physio-espresso movements facilitated by Courtney Cook and Mikaila Ware.
Session 1 breakouts included:
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Building Liberatory Infrastructure with Sage Crump, National Performance Network
Just as it does us as people, our organizations and institutions are shaped by the coercive nature of racialized capitalism. This means it is important for us to think through the decisions we make and how we move to find patterns and praxis that subverts the habits and best practices offered to us through white supremacist frameworks and develop our own processes and structures that are aligned with our cultural values. This session will use a set of learnings from a national cohort of arts organizations of color, to grow our collective understanding of what is possible and what it takes to live into the just future we are working for.
Mapping Power Together with Rosten Woo
This workshop will take us through the history and practice of power analysis and power mapping in both community organizing and contemporary art contexts. We will work together to learn some key strategies for visualizing power, extend and adapt them to fit our circumstances, and create sketches that will let us collectively see the landscapes of power that we navigate with new clarity. In this workshop, artist and designer Rosten Woo will take us through a visual history of power analysis and conduct a hands-on, collaborative exercise in power mapping in small groups. Participants will leave with new tools to bring back to their community.
A People’s WPA: Supporting Culture and Building The Future with Carol Zou and Brienne Colston, United States Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC)
The USDAC is excited to host an interactive discussion that furthers our work with A People’s WPA, a cultural organizing project that revives the transformative spirit of the original New Deal’s WPA, but updates it for today: uplifting the essential forms of labor society needs in this critical moment of increasing demands for racial and economic justice. We will brainstorm ways for participants to develop A People’s WPA in their own communities, and build relationships to strengthen our work together as a national community of cultural workers.
ReMember Restore - An Archival Journey with Courtney Cook and Mikaila Ware, Urban Bush Women
We cite our bodies and our environment as reservoirs rich with experience and memory. This forum draws on UBW’s various approaches to experiential research, relationship building, and restorative practice to recall and share the information we already hold and that which we can glean from our surroundings and our senses. ReMember Restore invites participants to center our personal, communal, and environmental knowledge. Explorations may include movement and theatre exercises to embody family stories, sharing recipes, and activating memory through our senses. Through art making and communing, participants will uncover information that’s been waiting for this moment!
Writing Through Fracture with Kayhan Irani
Forced migration is not source, it’s fracture. Dispossession isn’t who we are, it’s a condition created by oppressive systems. Using performance excerpts, guided movement and meditation activities, and writing prompts, participants will travel through fracture to unearth their individual guiding metaphors - personal and culturally resonant imagery that affirms your purpose and offers a portal to source.
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After a break to socialize and “Get Activated” again with Urban Bush Women, we broke again for a second round of sessions.
Session 2 breakouts included:
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Collective Recovery Zine Workshop with Ayako Maruyama
“One way people heal is by making connections to others, to nature, and to their communities. CollectiveRecovery provides methods for helping us heal together” (University of Orange). In this workshop led by Ayako Maruyama, who is part of the University of Orange Collective Recovery Team, we will set collective recovery intentions for the year by making zines together that you can share with others.
Embodying Ecology with Jose Richard Aviles
The ongoing conversation of climate change coupled with a constant push and inclination into a digital space leaves us wondering: what will happen with the physical space? As we are being conditioned and coerced into investing into a digital space, there is fear that we’re also disidentifying and disconnecting from the physical space, thus this constant battle between the digital space and the physical space is a conversation that urban planners, artists and activists should be centered on. While urban planning is focused on the built environment, we also need to be focusing on an ethos that restores the relationship between Body and Earth. Embodying Ecology is a workshop that explores this concept and “BioReconciliation”. Through dialogue, somatics, and scenario based exercises, we will explore this notion that calls for urban planners and others to reimagine our role in the Climate Crisis discourse.
Food + Story = Change with Carlton Turner
In this workshop we will experience food centered community story sharing as a tool towards equitable community development, social cohesion, and building collective agency. This workshop will be led by Carlton Turner, co-director of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture). This workshop will provide a look into Equitable Food Futures, a multi-year participatory action research project done in collaboration with Imagining America.
Place IT! An Art & Sensory-Based Approach to Inclusive Community Engagement with James Rojas
Place IT! is an art-based approach to community engagement and planning for under-represented communities that will help participants with skills in critical thinking, creative problem solving, collaboration, and civic literacy. Part of a healing process that recognizes daily struggles and allows a deeper level of thinking, the session will tap into our emotions through personal memories. Storytelling allows us to convey emotion and talk about our environments in a language that maps and charts can’t communicate. Objects allow us to think beyond words and explore infinite possibilities. Art Making lets us envision, investigate, construct, and reflect. And Play helps us to relax in a public setting, conduct inquiries, experiment, and have fun.
Radical Approaches to Disability & Ableism with Dustin Gibson
Grounding ourselves in a moment in which ableism is a central feature in the collective navigation of a pandemic, we will work through understandings of disability that challenge a stagnant status. We’ll also work to draw the dependent connections that ableism has with labor, gender, economy and more.
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After breakouts, we returned to the full group with a closing by amalia deloney of Arts & Democracy.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Thank you to New York City Council Member Shahana Hanif, former New York City Council Member Brad Lander, New York State Council on the Arts, Humanities New York, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and you for help in supporting this workshop.