Remembering Katrina: Interview with Kathy Randels

Early in August Jess Solomon, the USDAC’s Chief Weaver of Social Fabric, took part in the National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation sponsored by Pangea World Theater (whose Executive Director, Meena Natarajan, serves on the USDAC National Cabinet as Radical Equity Catalyst). Jess interviewed Kathy Randels, Artistic Director of ArtSpot Productions in New Orleans, Louisiana. ArtSpot Productions is an ensemble of artists practicing social justice and shared power and striving to incite positive changewith visually stunning performances and empowering educational programs.

Cry You One, Photo by Melisa Cardona

Jess Solomon: Kathy, we are approaching the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. But I don’t feel like “anniversary” is the right word—is there another word?

Kathy Randels: Commemoration? It’s still not right, but commemoration comes closest.

Jess: Yes. As part of the commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, what has the role of art and culture been in collective healing and storytelling? How can Citizen Artists support that? 

Kathy: ArtSpot is celebrating twenty years right now and we’re doing “rememberings” of all of the past performances that we’ve created. And we’re doing one on Saturday, August 22nd, a site-specific piece which was called Lower 9 Stories, in its original location on the levee where the Mississippi River meets the Industrial Canal. We did it in 1998 for Junebug’s Environmental Justice Festival. 

[Note: this was the culminating event in a multi-year community development project led by Junebug Productions, teaming resident and touring artists with New Orleans-area activist groups to explore environmental racism and environmental justice issues. Community partners included the Gulf Coast Tenants Association, the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, New Orleans Youth Action Corp., Christian Unity Baptist Church, and Chakula Cha Jua Theater Company.)

Jess: Tell me about Lower 9 Stories. How did that evolve?

Kathy: I was working with a group of high school students in the Lower 9th Ward. The work was initially funded through Planned Parenthood. It was using Boal work [Note: Augusto Boal originated the practice of Forum Theatre] and different theater techniques to engage the students at Lawless high school in talking about sexual health issues and general health issues—letting the students know there was a school-based health clinic, that there’s resources here for you. They wanted to have students be the presenters of that. We were doing that, and I was hearing about the Environmental Justice Festival from John O’Neal. While working in the Lower 9th Ward there was this kind of understood but not wildly publicized conversation about how the levees had been busted in 1965 in Hurricane Betsy. And every single person who lived in the Lower 9th Ward believed that the levees were busted. “Back in Betsy when it busted the levees and it flooded here and it was awful and people died. And the stench.”

It was very similar to Katrina, which is why especially in the Lower 9th Ward there was an element of “Holy shit! We’ve been here before.” It’s highly possible, but I think that it’s the neglect issue that is maybe more realistic. The neglect issue is still criminal from my perspective. It’s still racism from the federal government, anti-South-ism—it’s multiple things.

Jess: From the Environmental Justice Festival in ’98 until now, how has ArtSpot creatively responded to natural disaster in New Orleans? Is there support and resources for this kind of work? 

Kathy: We were really engaged in Cry You One with Mondo Bizarro. It was so successful and a lot of support came in for this specific work. Foundations came to New Orleans and were like, “Oh my God, what can we do?”

Jess: That’s powerful. How would you describe Cry You One?

Kathy: I would call it a site-specific performance journey. It’s a bit of a ritual, a community ceremony, but it’s definitely a theater piece too. It’s an eco-tour. We start the first half of the piece as tour guides taking the people on a journey, talking about southeast Louisiana. Halfway through, we take them to a dream world through a griot—a storyteller—and then it becomes even more metaphorical, more performative, more abstracted. It’s an adventure. That’s the performance part of it, the part that I directed. 

Cry You One, Photo by Melisa Cardona

There are other places that want to engage us with this work and these stories. We have a concert version. With Jayeesha [USDAC Cultural Agent Jayeesha Dutta] through her work with the Gulf Future Coalition we did salons in all five Gulf states. We used scenes and songs and the story circle process as part of these daylong Saturday salons she was organizing in the five states. There’s also a great website that shares a bunch of stories; that’s the part that Mondo Bizarro really administered.

Jess: Thank you for sharing about your work!

Report from ROOTS Week: The Intersection of Arts and Social Justice

USDAC’s Chief Weaver of Social Fabric Jess Solomon took part in ROOTS Week, the Annual Meeting and Artists’ Retreat sponsored by Alternate ROOTS, “a group of artists and cultural organizers based in the South creating a better world together.” What draws Jess to ROOTS? In her own words:

Those of us working at intersection of arts and social justice are shape-shifters, artists, organizers, and bridge-builders, drawing from a well of tools, histories and methodologies to transform, heal, preserve the communities, institutions, and people we are connected to.

It is important to share space together.

There’s so much potential when we spend time with colleagues who are doing similar work, specifically in our geographic region. We identify resources and share best practices that allow for amplified, more sustainable work. We provide each other opportunities for reflection, spiritual connection, and rejuvenation by just showing up. We mentor, are mentored, clean our vessels and sharpen our saws to go back to spaces we organize and create in, replenished and better equipped.

Alternate ROOTS’ annual gathering has been a touchstone in my development as a cultural worker based in the U.S. South and as a human being.

Dance break, ROOTS.

In this interview with Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard, the Baltimore-based artist-activist shares a few illuminating scenes from ROOTS week. 

Arlene Goldbard: ROOTS has a long history as an organization supporting the creation and presentation of art rooted in a particular community of place, tradition, or spirit. The website calls for social and economic justice and the dismantling of all forms of oppression. The theme of this year’s ROOTS Week was “Call for Transformation.” Tell us a little about how that was expressed. 

Jess Solomon: This year was the second in a three year call to action. Alternate ROOTS is harnessing the power of our collectivity through an interrogation of Aesthetics (2014), Transformation (2015), and Emergence/Organizing(2016). There are things about ROOTS Week that stood out for me that I hope to incorporate into my practice. One of those things is ROOTS’ investment in the visual arts. Through the physical space and content, the visual arts highlighted issues of cultural and racial equity.

What also stood out for me was the intention of honoring indigenous communities, from a call to ancestors to sharing a history of the land. The spectrum of the visual arts also included indigenous artists. It was phenomenal and reminded me that there are always opportunities to incorporate the histories of place and space into our work. I believe it is also our responsibility to channel that energy in a deliberate way that leads to action and also leaves people feeling whole. 

A film called Always in Season was screened. The filmmaker is Jacqueline Olive. It has been in development for a long time. She’s been looking into the history of lynchings in the United States but also connecting it to present experience, specifically Black Lives Matter. We have data that shows black people are being killed by police every 28 hours. Since the film has been in production, she’s already included new stories of young people who have been lynched. At the screening, there was a lot of emotion and hurt and need to feel connected to people and a need to find ways to heal and a need to learn more, depending on where people were in their own evolution. 

It came to me that when we create we have to always be mindful of what impact we want and how we support people who went through difficult experiences, especially if they can be triggering. I was really fortunate and glad to be able to watch that with people I know and care about. I couldn’t imagine experiencing that in a movie theater.

Arlene: The keynotes looked really interesting. 

Jess: This year we had three keynote speakers to talk about environmental justice, immigration, and Black Lives Matter all in the frame of culturalequity. We don’t usually hear about cultural equity in terms of immigration or environmental justice. I learned a lot about how cultural equity is like the salt in the stew: it impacts everything. 

Colette Pichon Battle from the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy has been working in the Gulf since Katrina. Her first project was to get the folks of her community reconnected after they were displaced and since then, she’s been organizing. She wasn’t really invested in using arts as a tool but has come to a place where she realizes that art is a tool to take this work to the next level. It was really powerful to hear her say that.

Jeff Chang gave a talk about immigration. He encouraged us to look at the word migration; how migration is about ownership of our bodies and immigration is about legal ownership over bodies. He told a story about a time Martin Luther King was on a flight that got redirected. He had to wait in the restaurant. His colleagues were all white and in the restaurant there were different places for black and white to sit. He went to the back and recognized the different aesthetic quality which taught him who he was to those people. So Jeff’s conversation was about aesthetics and how that plays out in the ways that people are treated. Then he tagged that to immigration and migration and linked the history of racial equity and how that came back to immigration. It was really powerful. 

In the third keynote, Emery Wright from Project South talked about his movement work over the years and how he’s learned from young people. He shared who he’s been influenced by, and that reminded me how important it is to know your lineage. Who are your teachers? 

Arlene: What else stood out?

Jess: It was great to see USDAC folks collaborate within a ROOTS network. Cultural Agents Denise Johnson and Jayeesha Dutta were there, along with National Cabinet members Carlton Turner (Minister of Creative Southern Strategies) and Caron Atlas (Minister of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts). And I’m sure there were other Citizen Artists that I don’t even know who were in the room: we’re everywhere and all of our work is connected and that’s a great thing.

Arlene: I interviewed Carlton last year for a project about training for community-based arts work. He said that bringing people into contact across experiences and generations sets up a sort of informal mentorship. You meet up with somebody who knows things that you want to know and you have a conversation, and if there’s something in it where both of you want to go deeper, you maintain the connection. But it starts face-to-face, not in one of these arrangements where mentors are assigned, but when there’s some organic opportunity for that relationship to be formed.

Jess: Yes, in-person is really important. I know we are still trying to figure that out for USDAC, but if we get the resources I hope there will be some kind of convening.

Arlene: Absolutely! I can’t wait!

"I've Been Thinking About How Urban Narratives Shape Sexual Health Programs, Education, And Access."

By Visual AIDS-Interview 

Many thanks to Visual AIDS for allowing us to reprint this account of the evolution of two activist artists. Jon/Xon Henry is a Cultural Agent for the USDAC; an account of his Imagining in Harrisonburg, VA, can be found here. Hermelinda Cortés is Communications Coordinator for Southerners on New Ground (SONG). 

* * *

Xon Henry and Hermelinda Cortes are two southern queers from rural Virginia and currently collaborate on building cultural, spiritual, and political resiliency for LGBTQ people in the small town they live in. Visual AIDS publishes here a conversation between them about ... 

Hermelinda: Xon and I met in Richmond around 2011 when I was organizing a listening campaign in Virginia with Southerners On New Ground. As an organization we were doing these listening campaigns in 4 southern states to help inform the future of our work. This was right before our 20 year anniversary and on the tail end of strategizing about how to work in the South post Hurricane Katrina. SONG is a grassroots, membership based organization for southern LGBTQ people and our membership is multi-racial, multi-generational, and multi-classed. So, obviously, a lot of our people, and ourselves as organizers deeply connected in our communities, were facing some huge questions and had big needs for our region. Katrina affected us as an organization drastically. We were getting calls from folks saying everything was underwater. People were dealing with day-to-day survival, trying to find food, their meds, etc. and Katrina just amplified how much the state and both public and private infrastructure was failing us.

Xon: When we met, I was the president of the Student Alliance for Sexual Diversity at the University of Richmond. We were a new group interested in pushing an activist agenda at the university; our main focus was getting the university to add gender identity & gender expression to its non-discrimination policy, which would make us the first in the state. At the same time, we are also hoping to break the campus bubble at our school. I was coming into my own politic and art praxis and hadn’t learned that I could actually combine my politics and art together.

Hermelinda: I don’t think either of us realized how important our brief overlap in Richmond was or how much we would collaborate until a couple of years later when we were both living where we are now in Harrisonburg, VA. We are both people who had significant access to LGBTQ life and networks through our work in both art and activism, but I think we both found living in a small southern atmosphere again to be isolating in a number of ways. Growing up in Augusta County on a small family farm, I was somewhat used to this experience as a young queer person before the time of social media and Ellen. Even so, it always felt important for me to come back here and I think the collaborations that Xon and I have engaged in around arts and culture and politics has been about breaking that isolation for ourselves and for other LGBTQ people here.

Xon: I grew up in Rappahannock County in Virginia, which is arguably one of the most rural counties in the Commonwealth as it doesn’t have a single stop light and only recently got cell towers. Our graduating classes for the county never really exceeded one hundred. I didn’t really know any queer people or culture as a kid. Did I mention we didn't really get any TV reception? I really connect to Hermelinda’s feelings of isolation and misunderstanding. My only real exposure to HIV/AIDS was through narratives that cast it as a punishment for sin and consequently as a death sentence.

In retrospect, I was probably pretty lucky to have had a radical sex ed teacher during my senior year of high school who actually went against abstinence only education and taught us about putting condoms on bananas, albeit nothing about anal sex. It wasn't until late in my undergrad career that I learned about (free) HIV testing, and actually had my first test with Fan Free Clinic in Richmond. While in Richmond, one of my long-term boyfriends was the main caregiver to a relative living with AIDS/HIV; it became a regular conversation in our relationship, which proved to be very illuminating. When I moved to NYC for grad school at NYU/Tisch, I was astounded to learn about all the various resources, organizations, histories, exhibitions, and groups dealing with the issue of HIV/AIDS. I was actually a little nervous about moving back to Virginia because I had grown a bit accustomed to all these resources.

Hermelinda: Where we live, like many places in the South, there is only one AIDS organization that serves a very large geographic area and we just found out that a clinic over the mountain that provides crucial resources to HIV+/AIDS people is about to close. So, there is this element to our collaborative work that has to deal with the reality that as an entity we don’t have the resources to provide direct services to the LGBTQ community that can seem really overwhelming. I think though that we are hopeful that engaging our people in a way around organizing and activism and art can be our contribution to lifting up people’s spirits and building the relationships we need that directly contributes to our survival.

Xon: I am always excited by the potentials of collaboration; it’s one reason I initiated the OId Furnace Artist Residency project because I wanted to create a platform for collaboration around social justice. O.F.A.R. recently collaborated with our local HIV/AIDS service organization, Valley AIDS Network, on a collage making workshop; the collages will be released in the next edition of SLAG Mag.

One of the region’s largest organization, THRIVE, just announced they will be closing down as Hermelinda mentioned. I was recently at a conference presentation on PrEP that encouraged folks to start taking it. When I got home, I called a few local doctors in my area. Most didn’t even know of the drug or didn’t feel comfortable prescribing it. I ended up getting a referral to the University of Virginia’s Infectious Disease & International Health Department, which would equate to about a 3 hour round trip commute.

As of late, I’ve been really thinking about how urban narratives shape sexual health programs, education, and access. This was some of the framing question behind Hermelinda and I’s first official collaboration in Harrisonburg, the Southern Homo edition of SLAG Mag. That edition uplifted artists who identified as queer and southern. It proved to be a very interesting and inspiring project because I got exposed to artists I didn’t know about and whose work touched upon issues and concepts that inspire, influence, and intersect within my practice.

Hermelinda: That collaboration was really great for me, because it brought me back to thinking about the cultural part of organizing which feels like it can get subsumed by the sometimes rapid pace of campaign organizing. Doing cultural work and building cultural resiliency has always been such a huge part of our movement. I think about the role that drag queens have played on our journey to get free. I think about the AIDS quilt. I think about the writing of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. I think about my friend in NC who is working on a collaborative illustrated southern queer tarot deck called Slow Holler. All of these pieces of culture are absolutely necessary and SLAG Mag was a place for me to reinsert and reimagine my own participation in that part of liberation.

Harrisonburg Imagining

Xon: I think the idea of reimagining and cultural citizenship is something that is coming back to general activism. The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is a prime example of the new entanglement between activism, art, culture, and politics. After we collaborated on SLAG Mag, we wanted to further our entanglement, which launched We Are Here. We Are Here, is exploring how culture and community might shape queer activism. So far, we’ve organized queer skate nights, brunches, postering campaigns, and movie nights.

Hermelinda: We think this is why the work of Visual Aids is so important, necessary, and helpful in all kinds of different contexts. Like the recent interview with Luna Luis Ortiz. Those parts of our history are lost without work from people like Visual Aids.

Xon: I learned first about Visual AIDS through the first condom giveaway campaign “Play SmART.” I was a campus organizer at the University of Richmond and we are always on the look out for engaging (and free) opportunities. After receiving some condoms from Visual AIDS, I just got onto the listserv and have stayed attune to your work. I finally had a better understanding of the organization when I lived in NYC via my advisor at NYU|Tisch, Pato Hebert; It was very inspiring to learn about the deep and continued impact of the work.

After organizing Harrisonburg’s open call unJURIED exhibition, it’s hard for me to create hierarchies of favorites, but I do find the work of Sunil Gupta and Robert Getso in the Visual Aids online Artist Registry+. Their work has expansive impact in relationship to the viewer through its connections, histories, and feelings.

Hermelinda: I’m always drawn to photography. I love the work of W. Benjamin Incerti & Kia Labeija

Xon: We are currently gearing up for the relaunch of Pride in Shenandoah Valley and we are hoping to incorporate elements of visual arts into this year’s Pride.

*  *  *

Jon/Xon grew up in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountain and xe is now pursuing an MFA in Studio Art from James Madison University. Along this journey, xe has received fellowships and grants from xer respective universities, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mildred's Lanes, and Arts Council of the Valley. They currently organize/create/manage/live the Old Furnace Artist Residency in Harrisonburg, VA.

Placekeeping: East 9th Street, Lawrence, Kansas

Cultural Agent Dave Loewenstein, some of Lawrence's Citizen Artists, and many other local residents and allies, have been mobilizing for many months to inform and arouse the public. Their cause is the future of the East 9th Street corridor, an affordable, hospitable neighborhood for artists and others of modest means. 

To promote it, they’ve just launched the East 9th Street Placekeepers website, a rich repository of documents, commentary, and images. It’s an impressive site, demonstrating how Citizen Artists and other local residents can be a resource to their communities, helping people understand what’s at stake when it comes to the public interest in culture. It portrays a community deeply concerned about the process and impact of “a partnership between the Lawrence Arts Center and the City of Lawrence to remake a seven-block stretch of East 9th Street. The project is funded by a $500,000 Artplace America grant, approximately $2.5 million from the City of Lawrence and an undisclosed amount from private developers and donors. It is by far the largest public art endeavor the City or Arts Center has ever tried.” 

The site’s creators state its purpose:

This site addresses lack of transparency, inequity of representation, and obstructions to the neighborhood’s ability to shape its own story. It is an effort to provide information that can help residents better understand the implications of and alternatives to this first of its kind project in our community. It is also our hope that this site may serve to help other cities facing similar placemaking projects.

Increasingly, “placekeeping” has come into usage as a counter to placemaking, the central concept animating a notable rise in local development funding through Artplace America, the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town program, and others. One stimulus for this discussion has been a 2013 essay by Roberto Bedoya, Secretary of Belonging in the USDAC National Cabinet, exploring “the politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work in placemaking in civil society.” On the one hand, people are delighted at a new infusion of cash to support arts-based community work; on the other, as Roberto writes, is “US history and its troubling legacy of ‘placemaking’ manifested in acts of displacement, removal, and containment.”  As he puts it, 

The relationship of Creative Placemaking activities to civic identity must investigate who has and who doesn’t have civil rights. If Creative Placemaking activities support the politics of dis-belonging through acts of gentrification, racism, real estate speculation, all in the name of neighborhood revitalization, then it betrays the democratic ideal of having an equitable and just civil society. Is the social imaginary at work in Creative Placemaking activities when enclaves of privilege are developed in which the benchmark of success is a Whole Foods Market?

In Lawrence they define placekeeping this way: 

We define Placekeeping as the active care and maintenance of a place and its social fabric by the people who live and work there. It is not just preserving buildings but keeping the cultural memories associated with a locale alive, while supporting the ability of local people to maintain their way of life as they choose. Placemaking, which is the term used to describe the East Ninth project, is a process of urban renewal that leverages outside public, private, and nonprofit funding to strategically shape and change the physical and social character of a neighborhood (often working class) using arts and cultural activities.

The East 9th Street Placekeepers site isn't an official project of the USDAC or the local Field Office, but it clearly reflects the cultural values that are central to our work, and of course, Agent Dave and some Citizen Artists are involved. 

The Lawrence Field Office opened last September. (You can find the first of a two-part blog series here telling the story of why, how, and what they’ve been up to; click the “newer” link at the bottom of the page to read part two.) Lawrence is a college town—both the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University are based there—of about 90,000 souls in Northeast Kansas. In a largely conservative state, Lawrence has a reputation for liberal tolerance, but doesn’t always live up to it. If you visit the town’s Wikipedia page, scroll down to the arts section to see an image of Dave Loewenstein’s beautiful “Pollinators” mural, painted in 2007 and eradicated in 2015 despite a popular campaign to save it. 

The Lawrence Field Office took shape as the East 9th Street Corridor Project was ramping up. Early on, Citizen Artists and other residents pressed for information about the project to be made public. There had been much speculation about the budget, timeline, and work plan, which had not been released even to the City Council. East Lawrence residents, alarmed at the central role of real estate developers, began mobilizing neighbors to weigh in on the project. They took part in public design meetings. The East Lawrence Neighborhood Association (ELNA) put forward a statement of shared values stressing heritage, diversity, and local control. Dave was one ELNA representative to Lawrence’s appointed Citizen Advisory Committee on the project, taking part in many meetings and hearings. 

In June, as critical decisions were about to be made, the USDAC wrote a letter to City Commissioners urging them to adopt ELNA’s values, prioritize local artists’ participation in the project, and apply a conservation overlay district to the neighborhood, recognizing the need for preservation and protection. We wrote:

What is happening in Lawrence, with East Lawrence community members contesting the approach underlying the Ninth Street Corridor Project, is not unique. Across the country, we are seeing advocates of community preservation rooted in diverse, resourceful, low- and middle-income housing come into conflict with a community development model that fails to recognize the cultural assets of an established community as valuable social capital. 

As Commissioners, you have the opportunity to stand for humane values against a notion of beautification that devalues both tangible and intangible heritage.

But despite considerable outcry—check out the Citizen Voices section of the East 9th St. Placekeepers’ site for an interesting sample—East Lawrence neighborhood advocates lost the vote. 

The East 9th St. Placekeepers’ site features a wealth of written material from other communities facing similar challenges and from commentators across the country who put their weight on the side of placekeeping. All the primary sources are there too: the ArtPlace proposal, planning documents, a conversation with the Art Center’s director, local news coverage, and more. It’s a great resource for anyone who wants to understand this debate. Local activist artists have produced banners, posters and stickers, some depicting the project as a Trojan Horse for developers, and you can find those images at the site too. 

The Placekeepers have urged people who care about this issue to show their support and contribute to the site:

Having numerous supporters will show that this is not the work of a few, but a collaborative project by many who believe that the information on East 9th St. Placekeepers is important for everyone. It will also show that we are not intimidated or afraid to share our support publicly. Transparency is key, and we feel this will give a louder voice to those with valid concerns. 

We salute them for it. 

Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

Holding Space for Self-Care: The Decatur Imagining

Decatur is the seat of DeKalb County, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metro area. The population of 19,000 is about one-fifth African American and otherwise mainly white. Clicking around the city website presents a picture of someplace that’s a little bit country (a flock of sheep is brought in to graze in Decatur Cemetery each summer, keeping down the invasive plants) and a little bit progressive (the City Commission endorsed a late-June vigil for the nine people killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, saying, “We will take this tragedy in Charleston and mourn for it, learn from it, and commit to being better people because of it, speaking out against racism and working to be a community that is welcoming and equitable for all”).

Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard interviewed Decatur-based Cultural Agent Mattice Haynes about her Imagining (one of fifteen across the U.S. this summer and fall) held at Decatur ArtHouse on 6 June. 

Arlene Goldbard: Your Imagining was intended specifically for creative workers. How did that idea come to you and how did it play out?

Mattice Haynes: Denise Brown, who came on as my partner, is a young designer who is interested in social change and design. It was her idea! There is a high level of burnout working in social change and activism. Many of us are good at caring for other people but not caring for ourselves. We’re good at listening to other people but not always listening within. That’s been part of my own journey the last couple of years. It’s been important to me to support creatives and changemakers in sustaining and nurturing themselves as they do their work.

Arlene: Did it feel like engaging them with their own creative imaginations was a form of self-communication or self-contact?

Mattice: It felt important to hold a space for them. So often folks are either directly or indirectly holding space for others. It’s more rare to have these these explorations to creatively express. So yes, it felt like a form of self-caring. The feeling that everyone expressed afterwards was that everyone felt welcomed, they felt safe, they felt like they could bring their full selves. I think they felt they didn’t have to hold others as much: they were being held. 

Arlene: What are some of the ways you created this context for them?

Mattice: We had a good location. I’m really grateful to the Decatur ArtHouse. The owner there, as soon as I told her about this she got really excited and came on board. It was a beautiful open space with lots of art and art-related activities taking place. We had a creative nametag-making station with lots of art supplies. And so in the beginning, everyone was engaging their own creativity right as they walked into the space. People coming into a space like that often expect to stay in their heads even if it’s an art space. Having to dive right in and do something with your hands was helpful. 

Local artist Lennie Mowris  had a station there and was talking to folks about her work. There was a station for children to draw and color. At another station, folks could engage by identifying their power word. It was really simple and really intriguing. My friend Denise created strips of paper with different words written in white crayon. If you take watercolor and brush over it, the word is revealed. She had written out words with a power theme; people really enjoyed that. This was all as people were walking into the space.

Arlene: And how did you structure that?

Mattice: We used a World Cafe format. [Note: this is a form of small-group dialogue where participants sit around tables for three or more successive 20-minute conversation rounds, then change tables.] We started with a welcome that was an invitation in the form of live art by local artist Mike Molina and it was just incredible. He had us circle up. We did some movement to get the body moving. He did a piece that called in ancestors and other folks who influence, support, inspire, our continuing creative power. That was an unexpected piece for folks and set the tone for people who are really tapping into their own power and recognizing that. 

Then we did a little bit of intro of what we were going to do, introducing the World Cafe and moving people into their first round. We did three rounds of small group conversation at tables along with art-making, so people were not only having a conversation but also using art materials to express their response to the question. It was about creative power and creative expression and how you’re using it in the world. The final conversation was around the vision for 2034: what they would like to see when arts and culture is really at the center and we’re using our creative power to transform our communities.

Arlene: You’re an experienced facilitator of group processes and engagement processes. Your website describes you as a “creative, inclusive meeting designer and facilitator.” I’m wondering: because of the infusion of art-making into the Imagining, were there parts of this you hadn’t tried in a group setting before? 

Mattice: World Cafe invites people to draw or doodle on the table, so that’s always an element. But we did take it a step further by putting art supplies on the table. They did draw or doodle and they could also make things with the materials. That seemed to work well.

Arlene: That’s sort of magical, isn’t it? How if you’re doing something with your hands it releases your mouth somehow to be able to say whatever is arising?

Mattice: Yes, absolutely. I liked how people engaged around that. 

Arlene: So what surfaced in their visions of the future?

Mattice: A lot of people wanted to see more spaces like the one that we had created there, that they had helped create. There was a lot of talk about the diversity that was in the room. I think people had a lot of appreciation for that. Particularly the intergenerational component, people seemed to be really excited about that. We had children as young as nine and folks up into their sixties and there was real interaction between the different ages. For some it was their first time in a diverse space, with people coming together and thinking about the future and creating together, working across what may seem like divisions. And then there were also specific things they would like to see in communities, like community gardens, for example. There was some talk about a future with less class-based inequities. People really went broad in terms of all the things that they would like to see from changes in how we educate our children to finally ending homelessness. 

Arlene: That vision of inclusion and equality and belonging is so powerful. I’d say that across the various Imaginings, that’s the number one characteristic that everybody everywhere says of the future. That is poignant at this moment in our cultural history.

Mattice: My life’s work is centered around this. It was a good reminder that some people are in very different settings on a daily basis and cannot or don’t feel like they can be their full selves there. They may not have that kind of diversity in their team or office or organization, may not be able to work across those differences without hierarchies. It’s a good reminder for me of how important the work is. 

Arlene: Also an interesting reminder that there’s no substitute for experiencing something on your own. You can talk about it all day but it’s being there that gives people the feeling. 

Mattice: Yes. A young poet closed us out. Her name is Paris Stroud and she’s the state champion for Poetry Out Loud. She recited beautiful poetry and told her own story, how she found this passion for poetry just a couple years ago in high school and how it opened up the world for her. People were touched to have her be a part of our program. 

On the Road with the USDAC

During the last month, USDAC folks have been on the road, listening, learning, and sharing at convenings with artists, activists, journalists, and media-makers, from across the country. Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz reports on a few of the places he’s been lately:

Allied Media Conference

In AMC’s own words: “Held every summer in Detroit, the conference brings together a vibrant and diverse community of people using media to incite change: filmmakers, radio producers, technologists, youth organizers, writers, entrepreneurs, musicians, dancers, and artists. We define "media" as anything you use to communicate with the world. You are a media-maker!”

USDAC Weaver of Social Fabric Jess Solomon and I led a workshop entitled “Story Circles: Sparking Interdependence,” responding to the question “How can we listen deeply and be together better?” In addition to meeting wonderful folks, conference highlights included:

• The Philly-based Spatial Justice Lab led a thoughtful and generative hands-on workshop on creative tactics for fighting displacement, “Speculative Cities: Becoming Place.” The Lab—run by Althea Baird, Jenna Peters-Golden, and Ash Richards—is described as “a space for imaginary practice…facilitating intergenerational spaces where soul-speaking art can dream and enact new possibilities for our places and our people.”
•  An excited audience packed the room for a book launch and reading of Octavia’s Brood, an anthology of visionary science fiction and speculative fiction written by organizers and activists. (Manish Vaidya wrote about it here in May.)
•  Patrisse Cullors, #BlackLivesMatter co-founder, turned her keynote address into a dance party and call-and-response for black activists.
• Lifelong activist and civil rights icon Grace Lee Boggs celebrated her one-hundredth birthday!

The AMC brings together a robust community of practice, becoming a pop-up learning village of sorts. I found myself pondering what kind of infrastructure we could create to enable that kind of learning year-round. What kinds of online or offline tools and actions would allow us to extend the collaboration—and impact—beyond these few days?

Images and Voices of Hope

 IVOH’s website highlights “media as agents of world benefit,” and goes on to say:“At Images & Voices of Hope (ivoh), we believe that media can create meaningful, positive change in the world. Our global community includes journalists, documentary filmmakers, photographers, social media specialists, gamers and more. Our common thread as a nonprofit is the desire to effect positive change through our work in media.”

I was delighted to accept an Award of Appreciation on behalf of the USDAC at IVOH’s “Restorative Narrative Summit and Retreat” held at the Peace Village in Haynes Falls, NY. Highlights included:

•  This conference offered and unpacked the useful concept of “restorative narrative.” This phrase is intended to describe journalistic work that goes beyond the coverage of immediate devastation and trauma to a longer-term story of individual or community recovery and resilience. The restorative narrative framework is strongly resonant with the USDAC’s programming and its focus on imagining a future we want inhabit and help create.
•  DC-Based artist, activist, and educator HawaH screened his powerful film, Fly by Light, documenting the personal journeys of 14 Washington, DC, teenagers who take part in a life-changing peace education program in the woods of West Virginia. Highly recommended!
•  The inaugural cohort of five journalists chosen as Restorative Narrative Fellows shared what they’ve been covering for the last six months: “stories that show how people and communities are learning to rebuild and recover in the aftermath, or midst of, difficult times.”

Arts-based restorative experiences are so core to what the USDAC is about, I wondered about the boundary between categories: how might we expand the conversation beyond journalism-based restorative narratives to other powerful ways of sharing and connecting. Our People’s State of the Union is definitely a form of restorative narrative. What if we viewed the entire people-powered USDAC as a restorative narrative? What implications would that have for our work?

Netroots Nation

This annual gathering, this year in Phoenix, AZ, first took place in 2006. In Netroots’ own words: “We amplify progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate. Through our annual convention and other events, we strengthen the community, inspire action and serve as an incubator for ideas that challenge the status quo and ultimately affect change in the public sphere.”

Revolution at Netroots, Photo by Joe Brusky

I took part in a panel called “Lessons Learned: Scaling Culture Projects from Grassroots to Global Using Tech.” Fellow panelists represented Burning Man and People for Bernie. Some conference highlights included:

• Without a doubt, the conference highlight was a direct action led by Black Lives Matter activists during a town hall event with Democratic presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders. Interrupting the proceedings with song, participatory chants, and tough questions for the candidates, this powerful action brought urgent attention to a “state of emergency,” effectively placing black lives and racial justice at the center of the rest of the conference, garnering major national and international coverage which has already affected the larger presidential campaign.
• Paul Getsos, one of the organizers of the People’s Climate March, offered the useful phrase “coordinated decentralization” as a key principle for organizing around climate change. On 14 October, for instance, the People’s Climate Movement is sponsoring a “distributed day of action across the United States.”
• The Overpass Light Brigade, “forged in the activist climate of the Wisconsin uprising,” writes messages in light and displays them in public spaces. During the closing party, it was an honor to get to hold the "V" in REVOLUTION (and LOVE!) alongside some incredible artists and activists from across the country. This was followed by an explosive performance by activist and rapper Immortal Technique. Much gratitude to the many folks who were a part of making this trip meaningful and memorable and much respect to those who courageously took part in the direct action.

Netroots asks us to think of this gathering as “a giant family reunion for the left.” While the panels were wide-ranging, the conference has its roots in online organizing. Take a look at the program and you see lots of sessions with names like “Best Practices in Digital Analytics: Using Website and Social Media Testing to Optimize for Virality.” How can the USDAC and other arts and social justice organizations become more strategic and nimble in using political organizing technology to mobilize large-scale creative and cultural action?

Let’s talk about it!

What's Important to Us: The Baltimore Imagining

In mid-April, West Baltimore was the site of an uprising as people took to the streets to protest to the killing of Freddy Gray, who died in police custody. Just two months later, on June 20th, West Baltimore neighbors took part in one of the fifteen Imaginings across the U.S. this summer and fall, dreaming together of a future unmarred by violence and racism. Baltimore is a seaport city with an economy that has morphed from manufacturing to service. Nearly 40 percent of the West Baltimore population lives below the poverty; 85 percent of the population is African American. 

Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard interviewed West Baltimore-based Cultural Agent Denise Johnson, who organized the Imagining with partners CultureWorks, Out4Justice, Theatre Action Group, the Parks and People Foundation, and Bon Secours Community Works (where the Imagining was held). 

Arlene: How was the Imagining received, given all that’s happened in West Baltimore?

Denise: People wanted to stay! They didn’t want to leave! I think the biggest things that came out of the Imagining are the next steps that individually and collectively people want to do.

Folks are at a place where they want to find a way to address and improve the community. Not only the physical aspects of the community but the way that the community interacts with itself. They want to find a way to move from just services—the community being serviced—to a community that is more interactive with one another, to have a more powerful voice in terms of what they really want. I’ve heard people say we have to find a new narrative to talk about community and that has to be a narrative of what’s important to us. Why can’t we access certain resources in our community? Why is it so difficult? People want to move forward and think in a different way—in a more powerful way—and be bold enough to ask for what they want.

Arlene: It sounds like this really gave people that opportunity to apply their creativity rather than the typical thing of go to a public meeting, complain, feel frustrated, go home.

Denise: Absolutely. At the Imagining there was no complaining. It was folks interacting with the art, interacting with the music, interacting with each other and defining the dialogue. Like Sacred Space was one of the dialogue groups. When we planned it, my thought was to talk about spaces within the community that can be reused. But it ended up being a conversation about finding community in your own home. That is what happens when people come together: they define things a little more. 

Arlene Goldbard: I understand you began engaging people outside the building, even before they got to the Imagining.

Denise Johnson: Outside we engaged folks as they were passing through, asking them two questions and letting them decide which they would respond to: “Tell us about your community” or “Give us an image about what you would like to see in your community. Most people wrote down words like love—more love, less violence—helping each other more. Many people drew images of flowers and added symbols to those flowers.

Arlene: I think you had four dialogue sessions: Sacred Space, Intergenerational, Re-entry into Child Support, and the other one was iJustice, is that right?

Denise: Yes iJustice was both an exhibit and a conversation. [Note: This work by West Baltimore artist Ashley Milburn showed at Gallery 1448 in March. It was described as “an exhibition of social justice art inspired by iPhone images that have turned into provocateurs for justice and image making.”]

The exhibit consists of images of alleged police brutality. They’re these really big, bold, bright-colored images of the young men that were killed: police standing over them, a woman embracing them, things like that. The facilitator, Ashley Milburn, started the conversation off with why it’s called iJustice: the power that young people have bestowed upon themselves to take images of these things. If it wasn’t for them and the cell phone, we would not have been able to capture things the way that we did. His end result for the conversation is to move people past anger and frustration, to get into a conversation about race, but then to try to visualize race and race relations. It’s a session that allows people to enter and exit however they want to, whether it’s with anger, frustration, sadness. But the end result is really to ask “how can you think about race differently? How can we talk about race differently?” 

Arlene: What about some of the other dialogues?

Denise: The Child Support Re-entry conversation, that included guided meditation. They ended up summarizing that one of the things that can be done right now was to turn off the TV, the cellphone, and the computer, and spend at least one hour with your children without any of those things. That was a first step that any and everybody can do. And they defined that the most important thing that we’re talking here about is family. And so, we will be planning another one of those conversations; the facilitator is a licensed social worker and wants to plan another conversation. 

Arlene: Tell me about the music and readings.

Denise: The music was just unbelievable. Jahiti, he’s a local artist, he teaches at one of the schools in West Baltimore. He started off sharing a story about he and his brother. They used to be a group and he lost his brother; he’s grieving and he’s trying to get used to singing by himself. He sung us three different songs, and everybody felt what he was feeling. Shakia and Friends played and sang outside. Horace Ellis did a powerful spoken word piece breaking down the word “imagining,” and people got connected to one another, they got connected to the event, they got connected to the concept through it. Sheila Gaskins did a reading of a scene she wrote based on Ashley Milburn’s Last House Standing. 

William Sands' compilation of images and music by Jahiti from the Baltimore Imagining in June 2015.

Arlene: So what did you take away from the Imagining?

Denise: One of the things that we planned was to have boards all over the building so that if at any time people felt something, heard something, wanted to say something, they could just write it on those boards. When we came back together from the dialogue groups, we took all of the boards from outside and throughout the building and we put them all around the floor. I asked people to do a movement or make a statement about today and to stand in between the boards, like claiming or naming, kind of like a bold stance. Before he took the picture, the photographer said, “Wow!” 

People really enjoyed themselves. I could tell from the fact that folks said that we should do this again. The fact that someone called another meeting right after the Imagining, and I didn’t have to do it as the Cultural Agent. The fact that people had time scheduled to continue most of the conversations—for me that meant we chose the right conversations to have. The fact that we got some outside resources that can be useful in moving the work forward. And I think the biggest thing is that the groups that got together to plan this, from the Imagining everybody has built some additional resources and gotten input from the community about some of the things that are important. So the Imagining served its purpose: to imagine and to take what folks have imagined along with that energy and move an agenda forward.

Stockton Imagining: drawing together

On June 13th, Stockton, CA, was the site of one of the fifteen Imaginings across the U.S. this summer and fall. Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard interviewed Stockton-based Cultural Agent Natalie Crue. Stockton is a remarkably diverse blue-collar city of 300,000 in California’s San Joaquin Valley, surrounded by agricultural land and the waterways of the Delta region. This year, Stockton was honored as an All-America City by the National Civic League; a few years ago, Forbes Magazine called it one of “America’s most miserable.” 

Arlene Goldbard: Give us a little of the Stockton context for the Imagining.

Natalie Crue: This city has been in a state of disrepair for years. When people hear about Stockton that’s all they talk about: gang violence, political corruption, and all these other social ills that plague our community. I think people are just sick of it. Yeah we can get more police, yeah we can get body cams, yeah we can pump money into putting a Band-Aid on the situation, but people are eager to really do something. And some people don’t know what or how, so this is the opportunity for people to come together and really discuss how and when and why and how to implement.

Arlene: I think your Imagining took place in kind of an unusual venue.

Natalie: Yeah, we hosted the Imagining at a venue called Café Coop. It’s basically a collaborative co-working space for nonprofits, entrepreneurs, technology companies and creatives. Meeting Esperanza, the executive director there, for the first time and talking to her about what we are trying to do at the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture—she was really gung ho about it, whereas a lot of other venues were like “we don’t understand, what’s this arts and cultural stuff?” But Esperanza got it within seconds. It was only natural that we explore how we could use the venue to bring everyone in, to host the imagining.

Arlene: What was your intention with the Imagining? What did you set out to learn or accomplish?

Natalie: As a Cultural Agent, you have these ideas in your head that you want to bring people together and use the Imagining as a catalyst for social change in the community. But through the planning process and the actual Imagining, my perception of why I was there shifted a bit. I realized that we can come together and talk about creative strategies, but what we really need is to draw people together. That was something that doesn’t really happen here. I’ve rarely seen so many divergent groups in the city in one space at one time, and I realized the importance of that. Not just creatives, not just tech folks, not just people that are starting their own businesses, but people from the community, people from organizations, people from City Council. I also learned that while we have a lot of interesting things going on here, it’s necessary to push the envelope as well and to take creative risks as we do at the USDAC. 

Arlene: What are the obstacles or characteristics of local culture that makes it so hard for people to come together across those lines? What’s going on?

Natalie: I think it’s ideologies. We have on one hand what I like to call “traditionalists.” People that are into traditional art, traditional models of doing organizing work, or people that have formed organizations utilizing traditional models. And then you have other people that are creatively thinking outside the box but are often pushed to the margins in cultural work here in the city. That’s caused a huge rift, not only in separation of groups, but also access to funding and other resources. 

We had to be aware of that in language, for instance. People can easily get lost in language, especially when you’re well-versed in this cultural space. I know people get lost in my language: “What are you talking about?” “What are “marginalized communities?” So we would have to reframe a lot of what people were saying just to open up the access so everybody understands each other. 

Arlene: So what was notable or surprising about how that played out at the Imagining?

Natalie: The joke around here is that Stocktonians are professional complainers. Knowing this, our co-facilitators Ryan Camero, Matthew Blacconiere and I developed a section of the forum where we talked about solutions. In that piece the youth really stepped up and voiced their opinions—I was surprised because usually they’re shut out of the spaces where they could actively talk and say whatever they want—one of them was like, “We should do a teen festival.” And then a few of them agreed. They generated a lot of interesting ideas. 

Afterwards, my colleague Ray and I were talking to different youth. They were talking about having venues and different spaces and the projects they were working on, how they needed more resources to do X,Y, and Z. They had tons of ideas within that short period of time. Afterwards they were willing to engage even more, telling us about more of the things in their heads.

The young people were from an organization called With Our Words, run by Aaron and Tama Brisbane. They performed slam poetry twice during the event, two poems at the beginning and two at the end. Their energy and the words that they shared—it was just so incredibly powerful. What they had to say gave me the fuel to go that whole entire event. Being there and really going for it and putting their all into their work and having the courage to perform in a space where at other points in time they weren’t even invited. Even if they were in silence, more powerful than what they had to say is the statement that they were willing to cast all of that aside and go for it. I live for that moment. 

Arlene: Any last things to share?

Natalie: After the Imagining a lot of people were beginning to understand, yeah, we have all these different projects and groups working on X, Y, and Z, but it’s just as important to come together in the same space, even if we’re not collaborating, just having discussions around arts and culture. Going forward I want to move the conversation even further and start talking about how to develop a cultural policy agenda in the city. 

We really need to take the arts in a different direction. I think having a USDAC Field Office will propel things in that direction, especially for an arts center or these bigger types of projects people said were needed at the Imagining. We need some backing that’s not necessarily going to come from traditional organizations. So I think utilizing a Field Office as a base to spearhead these projects and create more youth activity, and also plug people into what we’re doing nationally and regionally—a lot of people are interested in what that looks like.

I want to say thank you to everybody who came. It was an incredible experience and I think we have to continue the momentum and work in tandem to really develop, further develop, the cultural sector here.

Where We Are and Where We Could Be: Chicago and St. Louis Imaginings

As Chicago Cultural Agent Dan Godston told interviewer Arlene Goldbard, USDAC Chief Policy Wonk, “each Imagining is a discrete independent event, but then it’s also part of a larger initiative.” This summer and fall, Imaginings are rolling out in 15 different places around the U.S. Each one is different, but whether in small towns or big cities, they all have this in common: arts-based modes of participation and sharing are used to engage neighbors in envisioning their own communities 20 years on, when the transformative power of art and culture have infused everything, changing the face of public and private agencies, neighborhoods, and indeed, civil society. This blog is based on interviews concerning two of them: St. Louis and Chicago. 

On June 8th in the Cherokee neighborhood of St. Louis, Cultural Agent Con Christeson invited her neighbors to an Imagining in the form of a street festival. Cherokee is what is sometimes called a “transitional neighborhood,” with older (many Latino) working-class residents being replaced by artists attracted to cheap storefront rents and live-work space. Like Con, some of the artists are graduates of the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Institute (created by Roseann Weiss, also a St. Louis-based USDAC Cultural Agent); they want to support inclusive community development rather than be used as agents of displacement. 

Arlene Goldbard: You’ve been working in a Cherokee studio for about three years, right? Tell me about that.

Con Christeson: Engaging the neighborhood, having a presence as a studio that has a community focus is something that is interesting to me. I sit at the table in the front room of the studio and it’s right in front of the door, which is open. It’s a big old white linoleum chrome kitchen table and people come in and they’re like, “What are you doing? Oh, my grandmother had a table like that. Can I sit down here with you?” 

Arlene: You’ve also been using your storefront windows to engage local folks in art-based dialogue, haven’t you?

Con: For example, we take a picture of the person. We print two copies, giving the person one copy. Then we ask a question like, “What is your superpower?” Then we write it on a post-it note and that goes on the window with their picture. For some reason it’s a magical thing handing people a picture of themselves.

Arlene: How did your Imagining extend these practices? 

Con: We had a couple of young artists who took off and planned two or three things all on their own. One was a sound booth to collect sounds that people would choose to make or stories that people chose to tell while they were there. He wanted to put together a soundscape of the whole Imagining.” The CHIPs youth team reprised their performance of the USDAC Statement of Values from last year’s St. Louis Imagining. A local group of musicians drummed people to a gathering-point on the street. 

Arlene: Who were your collaborators?

Con: For instance, an organization called Bridge Bread recently got a grant from the Skandalaris Center at Washington University: $30,000 to rent a commercial kitchen and employ people who are homeless to learn to be bakers. They’re going to have a store open by the end of the summer, just a stone’s throw from my studio. They market their products in the Protestant and Catholic churches in the area. They made up really great cinnamon rolls for us to give away and they came and told their story. They were really glad to have an introduction to the neighborhood on the street level and be able to showcase wares and talk to people.

Leslie Scheuler, a retired teacher and consultant, shared her observations of the St. Louis Imagining too: “What really struck me was the range of ages that were in attendance.  Children danced to the drumming with a drum corps that included older adults as well as the younger; teens/youth performed; merchants shared homemade cinnamon rolls.  Black, White, and Brown people all together….a couple of Japanese descent in a car with New York plates stopping to take pictures and ask lots of questions.

“It united us. We were from many different neighborhoods, from many different backgrounds and walks of life, but in those moments, we were family. We celebrated together. This made me want to be a part of more of these moments, in many different forms, in many different places, with many different people.” 

A banner displayed at the Imagining on Cherokee Street in St. Louis

Three hundred miles northeast in Chicago, Dan Godston’s Imagining took place on June 14th in the context of a Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble production of Xtigone at Ebenezer Lutheran Church.  Antigone (Sophocle’s 2500 year-old play), turns on brothers fighting for opposing armies. In Nambi E. Kelley’s version, a retelling of Antigone with hip-hop, poetry and dance, the brothers have been killed in drive-by shootings by rival gangs, and the script collapses time to share enduring truths: “The Amazons of the Dahomey, Jamaica’s Nyabinghi, the queen called Nefertiti. That’s our her story," says the main character. “Before Coretta, Rihanna and Mama of the Obama, we were queens. That’s the herstory I claim for me. Not weakness, not disease.” 

Arlene Goldbard: How did you decide to host your Imagining in the context of a theatrical performance?

Dan Godston: I have worked on projects that involve intergenerational groups, and I find that really exciting and important. There are some themes in the play which I find very interesting. It seemed likely they could be good for pre- and post-performance discussions.

Arlene: How did that work?

Dan: We started at 5:30 and then at about quarter till 7 we moved down into the performance space when the play started at 7. And then there was a robust post-performance discussion which involved people who showed up for the Imagining, audience members, cast members, the director. 

Arlene: Tell us more about who took part.

Dan: There were some very young kids who were probably 8 or 10, and then there were a lot of teenagers there. People were talking about specific opportunities for teens. They also talked about threats towards teens that are still persistent, whether you are talking about police brutality or other walls that prevent teens from getting on track toward their best possible, brightest futures. There were a number of people there who are also practicing artists and they also are involved in other capacities with organizations or arts education programs that do offer positive opportunities for teens. So that was a key theme that was running through the Imagining: how the arts can be used as an essential way to be creative and to provide creative opportunities for teens and people of other ages.

It’s amazing how different interrelated themes such as gang violence, gun violence, or just the complexity of trying to envision the future city can be discussed by such a range of people of different backgrounds through the arts. The arts are like the hub, in my mind, they can provide this opportunity to explore so many aspects of where we are now and where we could be. 

Arlene: What do you see coming from the Imagining?

Dan: One of my interests is working on projects that provide meaningful, and dynamic, and exciting, and creative opportunities for teens. I have been in discussion with some other organizations in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest where we want to try different frameworks, different ways by which teens can come together, like in a teen summit, to creatively respond to problems that are facing them and to creatively imagine how solutions can be brought up. The Imagining connected to that. 

A performance of Xtigone at the Chicago Imagining

Five Ways to Celebrate Interdependence this July

On July 4th 2015, the U.S. celebrates 239 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We know exactly what to expect: fireworks, barbecues, flags, parades, and weekend super-sales. 

Mobile USDAC HQ by Agent Carissa Samaniego.

But what would it look like to celebrate interdependence? What new civic rituals might we create to mark not just the freedom of one group (thirteen colonies of settlers) from another (Great Britain), but the essential truth that—in the words of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer— “nobody's free until everybody's free”? 

To confront the vast challenges of our times—from climate change and planetary degradation to profound economic, racial, and social inequity—we must build a culture of interdependence. We must act from the understanding that we are all inextricably connected to one another and to all of life. 

So, this July, in addition to enjoying a hotdog and a night of fireworks, the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture invites you to help cultivate a culture of interdependence. How will you choose to celebrate?

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Public Declaration of Interdependence. Gather friends and neighbors to write a Declaration of Interdependence for performance in a public space. You could each write and deliver your own or compose and perform a text together. Consider arriving at your performance site via an Interdependence Day parade! (Inspiration: Numerous groups have written Declarations of Interdependence, including Greenpeace and members of the 1976 Congress.)

2. “Where We Come From” Potluck. Acknowledging the rich mix of cultural heritage that defines the U.S., host a potluck where each invitee brings a dish and a story that speaks to “where I come from.” In addition to—or instead of—food, you could have participants bring a song or an object that speaks to where they come from. (Inspiration: Public Show & Tell, StoryCircles, Community Cookbook.)

3. Community Self-Portrait of Interdependence in Action. Invite people to capture images of places and projects in the community that demonstrate interdependence in action and to send them to you with captions. Share the images at an event and then turn them into something afterwards (e.g., poster, zine, online exhibit, PowerPoint to share with other organizations in the community).

4. Solutions Bazaar. Who are the people and the organizations in your community working actively to build a culture of interdependence? What projects are showing the way toward a just and thriving future? Host a solutions bazaar, highlighting  visionary projects just waiting for more people to get involved. Animate the occasion with live performance and art-making. (Inspiration: USDAC Imaginings, Beautiful Solutions, FEAST.)

5. Pop-Up Community Space. Pick a disused space (e.g., vacant lot), come together to make it inhabitable and install temporary seating. Use it as a site for any of the above. (Inspiration: Pop-Up City.)

Name Tag Day submitted to HILI Database by Eric Boromisa

For more ideas on how to cultivate interdependence in your community (or to submit your own!) you can browse the USDAC’s HILI (High-Impact, Low-Infrastructure) Database. If you decide to do one of these projects, we’d love to hear about it! Send documentation of your interdependence celebrations to usdac.us@gmail.com.

Want to meet and connect with other Citizen Artists across the country working to build a culture of interdependence? The USDAC is hosting a video call on July 14th from 6:30-7:30pm EST and you’re invited! Join us as we learn more about featured HILI projects, share ideas and strategies with one another, and get a sneak peek of how to take part in the USDAC’s next national action. For more details and to reserve a spot on the call, drop us a line at usdac.us@gmail.com with the subject line "Interdependence!"

- Adam Horowitz, Chief Instigator

En Plein Air: The Harrisonburg, VA, Imagining

On a sunny May 23rd afternoon at Ralph Samson Park in Harrisonburg, VA, Cultural Agent Jon Henry hosted one of 15 USDAC Imaginings this summer and fall. Harrisonburg, a college town in the Shenandoah Valley, has a population under 50,000, nearly 85% white. About half the local populace comprises students on one of five college campuses. Jon is pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at James Madison University (JMU), the largest of these. He also heads the Old Furnace Artist Residency. 

The Imagining used multiple spaces in the park—a pavilion, a lawn—to engage people from many communities in envisioning a future they want to inhabit. Jon was interviewed by Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard who spoke with him during his residency at Ruth’s Garden in Fjellerup, Denmark. 

Arlene Goldbard: What interested you, Jon? What moments stood out?

Jon Henry: Several did. A grad student, Nate St. Amour, did plein air painting throughout the Imagining. [“Plein air” means “open air” in French; plein air painting takes place outdoors, capturing the moment.] The plan was not to make it an actual plein air painting, painting only what you see. We said, “We want you to take suggestions from everyone at the event about what to paint in the landscape.” 

It was kind of a time-capsule throughout the day, because at the beginning it was kind of standard. But by the end, you can tell that people’s imaginations had opened up because there were floating libraries and water slides in the town. And zeppelins. Since we were in the public park people would come up to Nate and be like, “Oh, what are you doing?” It was a way to get folks involved. I think seven youths got involved in the rest of the day through him. Now the organizers are actually trying to get the painting donated to City Hall so it would be in the art collection of the city.

That connects to another moment that stands out for me. I always get really nervous about when to open an event because you always have those stragglers. We had a group of folks who were doing kind of a traditional African drumming circle. It was inter-generational and interracial. Like the painting, this was something that people could encounter in the park. If people didn’t know what part of the park the Imagining was in, the sound attracted them. We originally said to the drummers, “Oh, do that for ten minutes.” It ended up being like thirty or forty minutes because they were really going well, they were having a lot of fun, everyone was really enjoying it. They brought extra instruments and other people started playing with them; it became a collaborative project. 

And then the closing was amazing. We had Steve B.I.K.O. Thomas, a local hip-hop rap poet. He wrote kind of a rap/slam poetry piece based on the entire chat from that day. It was really, really good. That was a really powerful way to end, with him kind of rounding it all out with his poem. A faculty member from JMU came up to me afterwards and said, “How do I get him to speak at our school?” 

Arlene: I gather the town-gown issue is alive in Harrisonburg, is that right? Conflicts between the university’s and community’s perceived interests seems to be an issue in most university towns.

Jon: Yes. We definitely didn’t solve it, but I saw a good mingling at our event. Even so, I wish more university people had come. 

Arlene: So what did you do with this mixed group of people to spark their social imaginations?

Jon: We did some guided visualizations out on the lawn, like a visual stroll through Harrisonburg. In our own minds, we left our house and walked to the library to return a book and then walked home. 

Arlene: What did people see on their journeys?

Jon: I was really surprised that environmentalism was a guiding commonality throughout all the groups and all the sessions. Everyone talked about the city being pedestrian-friendly. There were all these creative ideas around public transit from zeppelins to water slides to community bikes. A lot of non-university people talked about wanting access to the university: they imagined it being free and having more class offerings, continual learning. That was a really nice moment. It also turned out that a lot of people found the Imagining really relaxing, kind of a self-care activity. We did have a lot of activists and community organizers at the event. I think it was nice for them to dream and lay in the grass on a blanket, to share some chips and do some coloring activities. 

Arlene: Who were your allies in organizing the Imagining?

Jon: Stan Maclin, director of the Harriet Tubman Cultural Center, was our lead co-organizer. He’s been very influential in the town and the state organization on confronting white supremacy and developing culture and connection for the local African American community. Through him I learned about Steve B.I.K.O. Stan was also really instrumental with the drumming, because he has that background as a drummer. He was teaching some youth about the instruments—they’d met Nate doing the plein air painting, so it all came together. And then Steve B.I.K.O. was involved, Larkin Arts—our local arts store/arts organization—helped with advertising and supplies and that’s also where we had all of our meetings, so they were good. And then Southerners On New Ground, a regional LGBTQ organization in the South, helped do a lot of outreach. And the JMU Sculpture Department promoted the Imagining too. 

Arlene: What do you see coming after the Imagining?

Jon: I know people were talking about what happens after this event. That’s what led to the Twitter conversation on art and ecology on June 17th. (You can read a recap here.) I’m really excited by the idea of opening up a USDAC Field Office. I’m hoping to have some meetings in July and August about firming up the Field Office.

Arlene: Harrisonburg would be a super place for a field office with the work that you’ve been doing there. We’re ready to help! 

Meditating on Gentrification: A Personal View of the NYC Imagining

Liliana Ashman, who serves on the USDAC Action Squad as “Story Hunter-Gatherer,” attended the New York City Imagining on June 2nd (follow the link to learn about others happening across the U.S. this summer). Here she writes about the feelings, ideas, and associations evoked by an Imagining billed this way: “#Imagining: Creative Strategies to Fight Gentrification in New York City.”  For more on the ideas thinking behind this Imagining, see Alexis Stephens interview in Next City with Betty Yu, the Cultural Agent  who organized it.

It’s an unseasonably cold, rainy Tuesday evening in June and I find myself wearing a tweed jacket, making my way through the midtown 5 o’clock rush to get to St. Peter’s Lutheran Church to attend the first NYC Imagining organized by the USDAC. Stepping off a crowded train I emerge on Lexington Avenue, surrounded by the country’s largest investment banks and consulting firms. I am immediately made aware of the stark class differences that  exemplify Manhattan. It seems strange to be gathering in a church, yet the setting offers a sanctuary, a place to speak openly and honestly. 

The history of this church is interesting, a poignant glimpse into the many fascinating stories that make up New York City. On June 2, 1862, a group of German immigrants partnered with a local Irish Roman Catholic businessman to gather in a small, borrowed loft above a grocery and animal- feed store on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 49th Street. It seems fitting that more than one hundred and fifty years later we were gathering to discuss the future of New York, and whether there is a future without gentrification.

The USDAC has been rolling out fifteen Imaginings across the country this month. The focus of the NYC Imagining, organized by 2015 Cultural Agent Betty Yu, is creative strategies to fight gentrification. This is an ambitious task to accomplish in the three and a half hours we have scheduled. There is a noticeable tension in the room as Adam Horowitz, USDAC Chief Instigator, asks us all to take a deep breath,, saying, “We are in it together.”

Artist Priscilla Stadler’s piece, Fragile City, hangs in the window. This colorful cheese-cloth tapestry depicting scaffolding and skyline. It is indeed fragile and seems impermanent. To me, this piece represents the current state of the city and at the same time offers a creative, imaginative glimpse of the ever- shifting landscape.

So where do you live? [installation from the Fragile City series] Dyed cheesecloth, monofilament Priscilla Stadler 2014

As I listened to people’s stories of their experiences with gentrification—intense dealings with corrupt landlords, a genuine lack of affordable housing, being pushed out of their homes—it was clear that though housing should be a human right, many New Yorkers are not being afforded this right. A lack of resources and information on affordable housing and tenants’ rights is overwhelmingly frustrating.

Ed Goldman, an active member of the Fort Greene community, has lived there for the past twenty years and has a strong presence every Saturday at the farmer’s market.  Despite this, he told me he didn’t know what else he could do to keep fighting for his neighborhood. A woman living in Williamsburg felt that she was simultaneously affected by gentrification and also, perhaps, a part of gentrification, leaving her to grapple with how she can also be a part of the solution. Ravi Ragbir with the New Sanctuary Movement spoke of the organization’s work to protect those at risk of being deported. Michelle Carlo, a native New Yorker and performer, summed up, “People come to New York to be out of the box, not [put] into a box.” How is it that New York City, known as a cultural hub for artists, a second chance for immigrants, is pushing away everything that makes it so great?

I was struck by how many New Yorkers feel displaced, whether directly from their homes, their neighborhoods, or their communities. I live in Prospect Heights, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. There is a new restaurant popping up on my street every few months and I know that it won’t be long before my landlord decides to raise the rent. Unlike Carlo or Goldman, I am a fairly new resident to New York, having lived in Ireland for three years (where in fact, I was almost deported). I have struggled with the way in which we as a society define our homes, our land, and our rights to what should be basic elements of humanity. There were many amazing projects represented at the Imagining, for instance, Take Back the Land, a national network of organizations dedicated to elevating housing to the level of a human right, is. It’s an incredible project, but the very fact that it exists is an eye-opening example of how critical the state of housing is in this country. Our homes and communities are a part of our identities, they define who we are and shape our future. 

As we envision a future New York without gentrification, where no one is displaced or without a home, I find myself imagining what the role of an actual government agency with the aims of the USDAC would play. What if we took the same  measures to ensure that our communities felt whole and inclusive and applied this nationwide and even globally? In the wake of catastrophic events like the earthquake in Nepal, I wonder if in the future, were there a government organization with a similar mission to the USDAC, could it implement the work of artists and have a role in providing relief beyond food and shelter? Closer to home Rachel Falcone created Sandy Storyline to share people’s stories in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. I felt that the NYC Imagining is only the beginning, a spark of something more to come, a catalyst. There is certainly a lot of potential. But as Italo Calvino wrote, it is hard to say what will emerge:

“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Imagining Philadelphia: An Interview with Cultural Agent Julia Katz Terry

On May 31st, Cultural Agent Julia Katz Terry and a great group of volunteers held “Imagining Philadelphia” (one of 15 Imaginings the USDAC is rolling out this summer) smack dab in the middle of the ArtWell Festival at Oxford Mills, a renovated textile mill complex in the South Kensington neighborhood. USDAC Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard interviewed Julia about how she and partners from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, University Community Collaborative, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, Art Sanctuary, and other groups organized the Imagining around its stated purpose: “With youth voices at the center, we will use art, collaboration and dialogue to explore and imagine where, what, and how they will learn....and most importantly how we will achieve equitable and creative solutions that serve our youth and honor our diverse cultures and communities.” What emerged from imagining education twenty years on?

Arlene Goldbard: You wrote, “with youth at the center.” How did that work? Where did the young people come from? Who were they?

Julia Katz Terry: Through all of the Cultural Agents’ USDAC training, each week I wrote down a whole new agenda for the Imagining! But I held off on making anything definite till we had our committee meeting. And as much as I thought we had it planned, it changed once we got the students’ energy in the room. We had high school students through the Upward Bound program at the University of Pennsylvania and from an ArtWell program with the Children’s Hospital’s Violence Prevention Initiative. Most were African American, both boys and girls. They really stepped up and they took their roles seriously and they worked really hard.

We told them about the USDAC and how important it was to have their voices leading the conversation, how this was a really unique opportunity to do something different that felt really hopeful and could have some lasting outcomes. We brainstormed activities and themes and people signed up to take a role. They suggested a carnival theme. We talked about superheroes. And then everyone got excited about this fantasy first day of school 20 years from now. There were so many great ideas, it was hard to eliminate, but we also had to come up with what would be feasible in a limited amount of time. They wanted people to be sent through a metal detector like when you enter most middle and high schools; but this would be a creativity detector, an imagination detector. Someone would get a reading like, “You’re off the charts! Come on in!”

In the context of many, many other organizing activities happening—a lot led by youth—what was unique about this one was that it was really planned by the students. They were so excited and that made it fun. They made people really ready for a different dialogue.

Arlene: Tell me about one of the activities you did.

Julia: In brainstorming the first day of school theme, we talked about the rituals of the first day of school. To our surprise, the students were saying “We still have to say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, maybe we can rewrite that.”

We had a few big pieces of paper on the wall. One said, “I pledge allegiance to…” Another said, “and to…,” and then, “with…”—like how the Pledge is at the end. We had people write different lines on Post-its. Two poets who are ArtWell teaching artists and the students put them in order. They had planned to perform it. I suggested making it call-and-response, because when people do the Pledge of Allegiance everyone takes part. We read a line and then the audience said, “I pledge allegiance.”

Here’s the text:

I pledge allegiance
to one planet in the cosmos
to all beings in the universe
to the people of the people of this beautiful melting pot of colors
to my sisters and my brothers
to myself and others
to love
to the freedom to be me
to the belief that everyone can succeed
to the earth, to the sky, and the seas
to show the world the things we can achieve
to accepting differences, courage, equality
to families growing with joy and support
to open minds and open hearts

And to
confidence
determination
to the unyielding pursuit of peace
to the freedom of others who are different from me
to going for broke
to everlasting hope
to the children, our seeds of the future

With all the love & empathy I can conjure in my heart.

Arlene: How did this work in the middle of a festival?

Julia: In some ways the festival was great because the spirit of the day was so exciting and joyous. The momentum of music led so many people to the Imagining. ArtWell events in general attract an intergenerational and diverse audience. It was beautiful! And this whole new audience came, partly because of the Imaging and also because of our outreach efforts to the neighborhood. So in that sense it was really effective to have it in a festival.

 But I couldn’t keep half of the festival guests in the Imagining through the whole festival, and it couldn’t have an opening, middle, closing, which I would have liked if it were an independent event. Because it was open to the festival, people would trickle in and add their piece. It was cool to see all the different phases of it. At one point I went into this huge conference space and there was just a family—a mother, father and their five year-old daughter—and they were all adding things to a list. They had so much to add and they were this family working together: it was awesome.

Arlene: When you consider the Imagining as a whole, what emerged overall in terms of the future of education? Were there qualities that would make it different? Or new things that would happen?

Julia: People wanted our schools to be like their fantasy first day of school: open and interactive and experimental and kids have a say. Somebody said they want students to be empowered and entitled to create a safe space for all, to have schools that are supporting students to make their own culture and kind of space.

A lot of people wrote about safety and sanctuary in relation to the arts. On the sanctuary flags we made in another activity, there was a lot about safety, courage, poetry, leadership. Outlets for expression through arts and culture are really tied to making people feel safe, that they can belong and be themselves in schools.

People also brought up basic resources, like, “I wish that all schools had books, videos, and computers, to help students learn.” Basic needs, like college counselors, guidance counselors, nurses.

Arlene: Any final words?

Julia: I’m excited about the potential for youth leadership across arts, culture and youth-serving organizations. It was an advantage to have this event in Philadelphia because there’s such a collaborative spirit and interest in collective impact across fields and organizations. This would be a really exciting way to harness that energy: to bring youth together across organizations and have arts and culture be a vehicle for that.

Dispatch from the Ministry of Endangered Languages: An Interview with Daniel Kaufman

New Yorkers walking down Stanton Street on the Lower East Side on Saturday, May 30th stumbled across an unusual sight: a van painted with poetry written in dozens of languages and a tent announcing an “All You Can Speak Buffet” offered by the “Ministry of Endangered Languages.” A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, the Endangered Language Alliance, CityLore, and Bowery Arts and Science, this pop-up Ministry was part of the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival, offering passers-by hour-long classes with native speakers of endangered languages. Afterwards, USDAC Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz caught up with Daniel Kaufman, Executive Director of the Endangered Language Alliance,  to learn more about this urgent cultural issue and what we can do to preserve linguistic diversity.

 Adam: Let's start with the basics. Roughly how many languages are there in the world? How many are endangered and what are the criteria for getting on that list?

Daniel: There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world today. More than half are considered endangered. We can define “endangered” by the probability of a language surviving this century. UNESCO has created a set of criteria for evaluating the “health” of a language. The number one factor on this list is transmission from the parental generation to the young children. A language can have many thousands of speakers but if it is not being passed on to children it can disappear within a single generation.

The second factor is the sheer size of the speaker population. Other factors include the status of the language, the community's opinion of the language, the percentage of the country's population that speaks that language, and others. These factors give us a picture of a language's chances for thriving or declining over the coming decades. 

Why is language preservation important? What do we lose when we lose a language?

With the death of each language, we lose a unique identity and history as well as a wealth of knowledge about how human language works. We also lose knowledge about the environment and a body of oral literature. 

What languages were taught at the All You Can Speak Buffet at the pop-up Ministry of Endangered Languages? Who did you find to teach them?

Marie-Reine Jezequel teaching Breton to an attentive audience.

The languages taught at the Buffet were K'iche', Kurdish, Ikota, Mixteco, Breton, and Yiddish. (Kurdish is not an endangered language in Iraq but we included it because we had a great teacher.) All the teachers are collaborators who we've been working with in some capacity over the last five years. Some of them, like Isaac Bleaman (Yiddish) and Daniel Barry (Kurdish), are graduate students. Our K'iche' teacher, Leobardo Ajtzalam is our director of radio and is starting a K'iche' class later this month for the first time. It will be a rare opportunity for New Yorkers to learn a Mayan language from a native speaker over the course of several weeks.

Our Ikota teacher, Safiyatou Dvorak, got in touch with us after an article came out about our organization in the New York Times in 2010. We've been working on documenting her language ever since. Our Mixteco teacher, Maximiliano Bazan, is a maintenance man at a prestigious New York City private school, and he's also an excellent storyteller and translator. He does most of the court translations for Mixteco speakers in New York who don't speak Spanish. Finally, Marie-Reine Jezequel, our Breton teacher, was one of the founding members of the Diwan bilingual school which, more than anything else, was responsible for the resurgence of the Breton language in France. ELA's unique contribution to New York City is bringing individuals like these together to strengthen each others' languages and share them with the public. 

 What's something that you learned or that surprised you during Saturday’s event?

I'm always surprised and delighted at people's enthusiasm for languages they've never heard of. There was a classic advertisement throughout the subway stations of my youth that read: “You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Rye Bread.” We're trying to show that you don't have to be Mixteco to love the Mixteco language or Ikota to love the Ikota language. Languages, like good rye bread, are meant to be shared with everyone and I think that was clearly on display at the language Buffet. 

If someone reading this gets inspired by the cause and wants to help protect language diversity, what would you encourage that person to do?

I tell people to start local. You don't have to fly to the Amazon to do important work. New York has become one of the most—if not the most—linguistically diverse spots in the world. Many of the new immigrants who are routinely ignored in this city— the busboys, the food delivery folks, the taxi drivers, the nannies— possess tremendously rich linguistic knowledge that is not being transmitted to the younger generations. Go forth and meet them. Find out about their languages. Find out if they would be interested in making recordings and translating them with you. Talk to us about how you could produce high-quality recordings and archive them. Saving a language requires a communal effort but almost anyone can contribute to the conservation of endangered linguistic knowledge. 

Now, if you'll indulge a little imaginative act: let's pretend there was an actual federal agency prepared to spend a vast amount resources on this critical issue. They call you up and ask you to propose one massive new program or policy. What do you tell them?

I do not have to imagine very hard here as I had the opportunity to advocate for such a program to the Smithsonian, which is part of the federal government. What I told them was—in a nutshell—if we're serious about keeping languages alive and not just pickling them for posterity, we have to be in the business of creating environments for language transmission. Just as in the UNESCO criteria, transmission is paramount, everything else is secondary. I would create facilities for a summer camp that could immerse children in a different language and culture for two months a year. Let them not only live in their ancestral language but use it in traditional settings. Let them absorb the knowledge that's in danger of being obliterated and ensure the longevity of the world's languages, crafts, songs, literature and approaches to nature.

These things are more important than volleyball. Summer camps can save the languages and cultures of the world if only we were more willing to take a chance with them. Among others, the Latvians set up such a camp here in New York State when they thought the Soviets were going to erase Latvia from the map. It seems to have worked wonderfully and with outside support and some resource sharing we could make a massive impact on truly preserving diversity, not just pickling it. 

The POEMobile, brainchild of USDAC Cabinet Members Bob Holman (Minister of Poetry and Endangered Language Protection) and Steve Zeitlin (Minister of Art in Everyday Life). 

Boston Imagining: Cultural Agent Chrislene DeJean and Sci-Fi Social Justice

“We believe it is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.”

With these words, visionary art-activists Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown introduce readers to one of the nation’s most talked-about anthologies of 2015.

Like the USDAC’s Imaginings, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements is a people-powered clarion bell for social justice, rooted not in what we oppose but in the world we want to build. Imarisha and Brown write, “The stories in Octavia’s Brood…represent a global quest for social transformation, for justice. They are about people from different backgrounds and worlds, expanding the notions of solidarity and community, redefining service, and exploring and rediscovering the human spirit in baffling times, under challenging circumstances.”

Imarisha continues, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction….We want organizers and movement builders to be able to claim the vast space of possibility, to be birthing visionary stories. Using their everyday realities and experiences of changing the world, they can form the foundation for the fantastic and, we hope, build a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane.”

                     Cultural Agent Chrislene DeJean

USDAC Cultural Agent Chrislene DeJean, inspired by the vision of Octavia’s Brood (which was sparked by the work of Black feminist sci-fi writer Octavia E. Butler), is using the book’s wisdom to shape the USDAC’s upcoming Boston Imagining on June 6th.

 In this interview, DeJean talks about Octavia’s Brood, the upcoming Imagining, and the power to dream.

You hack social justice issues at Intelligent Mischief. You’re involved with Boston’s Mattapan United Steering Committee, Mattapan Cultural Arts Development, African Repertory Theater, and you’re a dancer and community organizer…whew! Why get involved with USDAC?

 I first heard about it through Jax Gil, who was doing the Sparkitect role at USDAC. They said it was grassroots and people-led. That got me excited, that it was for the people, by the people. I got excited because it’s not a real U.S. government department. It’s really pretentious to work for the State; it’s bureaucratic and not fun to be a part of, and I’m in huge disagreement with the government because they’re killing Black people. So at USDAC, we’re imagining a future where we can be participatory, democratic, and not abide by white  supremacy. That vision can actually be built collectively. That’s exciting.

How did the Boston Imagining come about?

 At our first meeting, we dived right in with brainstorming. I was hoping to set ground rules, ways of being, how we work together…but we all got excited about the idea of us teleporting to 2034 and experimenting with a lot of tech and art. We wanted to geek out with sci-fi.

Next week, Intelligent Mischief is bringing the Octavia’s Brood tour. So it would be dope to keep that theme going. The tour can introduce it; the Imagining can keep it going.

Boston is rapidly gentrifying—as in a new building every week kind of thing. So our Imagining is held in Dorchester, the largest neighborhood in Boston and a mostly Black neighborhood, with a new incoming white population. We’re imagining that this base will be a secret spot where we can stay in Boston and not be displaced.

One of the people in my team is a space design expert. The way she’s seeing the space is: the outside greeters are playing the role of asking questions to give a speakeasy feel but a playful vibe, not an exclusionary vibe. But once folks enter the space, they feel like they entered 2034. There are dividers in the room, so we’re using those to play with colors and make it look futuristic. We have a call for artists who have artwork about what they envision the future to be. We also thought about having projections of sci-fi films. We’re bringing in Sweetyie’s Radio, an artist collective that has a monthly radio show. They’re bringing their radio show to the Imagining and featuring an artist there. The USDAC Imagining template is very broad, so we’re using our sci-fi hack. A person in our group works with folks to build a sci-fi workshop, so we’re working with them on the Imagining. We’re working with folks to imagine future food and drink. We’re asking folks to dress up like the future.

Why Octavia’s Brood?

 The co-editors believe social justice is sci-fi; that the work is to build the visionary future. They call the writings visionary fiction. They ask things like “What would things look like if we removed all prisons? That doesn’t eradicate racism, so how do we hold accountability in another way?” It helps people go to an imaginary space, to dream it. Octavia Butler wrote Black women as main characters, as leaders.

[Butler’s series] Lilith’s Brood began with Lilith waking up 200 years after aliens came, “after the war.” These are benevolent colonizers who needed to come to Earth because they needed to trade. For them to survive as a species, they needed to genetically code with another species. So it poses the question, “How do you hold the fact that your species will never be the same? What would you do if you woke up 200 years later, the Earth as you knew it is gone, and you don’t know what to expect?” She picks up where Lilith left off: with white men sabotaging relationships and undermining Lilith’s leadership role, etc.

I wanted to be conscious about that in the Imagining. This city is known to be racially segregated. They’re doing a lot of talks about city planning—Imagine Boston—but it makes me wary because the last city plan was redlining. Is it a great thing when cities plan? Not so much. They’re planning for the white people who hold capital. This Imagining is about something different.

 Anything else?

Octavia Butler said, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” Intelligent Mischief is launching New Suns Summer. It’s part of #BlackSpring, to go with building Black radical imagination. This Imagining is part of the new suns.

 By Manish Vaidya, USDAC Social Justice ArtReach Coordinator

Poster for upcoming Boston Imagining.

Imaginings Roll Out!

Over the next six weeks, U.S. Department of Arts and Culture Cultural Agents will host Imaginings in 15 different towns and cities across the nation. Most of these vibrant, art-infused, highly participatory community dialogues have their own event pages on Facebook or other sites; click the links to learn more. (And scroll down to read about the 2014 Imaginings to whet your appetite for more).

As a new people-powered department, we knew we had to begin by engaging a broad public in dreaming out-loud, collectively envisioning the work of culture shift. In 2013, when we dreamed up Imaginings as the centerpiece of the USDAC’s local community work, we tapped into a powerful shared realization: everything created must first be imagined. It’s a radical and essential act to imagine a more just, vibrant, and creative society; and even more so to act together, making our shared dreams real.

Across the cultural landscape, powerful dreamers everywhere are tapping into this same deep truth. Just two quick examples: the young organizers who formed Dream Defenders in 2013 to “develop the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power” chose a fierce and evocative name for their work. Earlier this spring, when Black Lives Matter called for voices to “help imagine a world where black life is valued by everyone, our rights are upheld, and the beauty and power that is our blackness is celebrated,” they called their action “In a world where Black Lives Matter, I imagine…..”

In every part of the country, in every condition and culture, countless people are imagining the world we want to inhabit. Here , at the nation’s first people-powered department, we are doing our part. The Harrisonburg, VA, and Fort Lauderdale, FL Imaginings have already taken place. Look for-on-the ground accounts as Imaginings unfold in the USDAC blog.

Here’s a preview of just a few of the upcoming Imaginings:

On June 2nd in Brooklyn, Cultural Agent Betty Yu and her team are hosting an Imagining that brings together “community members, organizers, artists, cultural workers, and other stakeholders to imagine the creative approaches, organizing strategy and bold vision we need to win anti-gentrification and anti-displacement fights in NYC now and into the future.” The Imagining’s Facebook page attracted a flood of RSVPs, indicating just how much people want new visions of possibility, how strongly the connect to the question Betty posed: “What the year 2034 might look like when art’s transformative power has been fully integrated into all aspects of public and community organizing life, such as housing as a human right?”

In Decatur, GA, on June 6th, Cultural Agent Mattice Haynes and her team are planning art exhibits, artmaking, World Café conversations, and more, founded on this invitation to share: “Each and every one of us has a creative power even if you don't consider yourself an artist. Come learn more about your unique power and how to share it with others for the benefit of all. If you are someone who cares about creative, inclusive, thriving neighborhoods and communities then this event is for you.”

On May 31st in Philadelphia, the Citywide Imagining planned by Cultural Agent Julia Terry and her team takes place in the midst of the ArtWell Festival. It focuses on imagining the future of education. “We will use art, performance and dialogue to create a collective vision for what education in Philadelphia could look like in our most hopeful future, and map ways to get there.”

On June 6th in Miami, Cultural Agent Naomi Ross and her team invite people “to think in fresh ways about how we can address economic inequality, climate change, education, criminal justice or other issues that are impacting the people in greater Miami. You don’t have to be an artist; just care about our future quality of life here in Miami-Dade County.” 

The following weekend, on June 14th, Cultural Agent Dan Godston and his team will wrap the Chicago Imagining around a performance of Xtigone by Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble, reimagining Sophocles’ play Antigone as a dance- and music-infused story of gun and gang violence in that city. In pre- and post-performance interactions, theater-goers will reimagine Chicago.

“Visioning” has become a common verb in organizational and community planning processes. Imaginings are visioning plus, grounded in four principles:

• The timeframe for Imaginings is long—20 years into the future—giving people the freedom to envision a destination without having to first slog through journey that gets them there. Once you set a course that excites people, taking steps gets easier.
• Imaginings aim to take what we know about the transformative power of art and culture—their capacity to stimulate imagination, nourish empathy, and strengthen resilience—and envision our communities completely infused with that power. What if we used theater to act out possible scenarios for community development? What if music and drawing were an integral part of schools’ science classes? What if all recycling centers were art materials depots?
• A key value for Imaginings is inclusion. Each event embodies equality and openness, such that everyone feels a meaningful invitation to take part. Consider an event where kids and their grandparents feel equally that their contributions are welcome, where people of all races, religions, genders, and abilities meet and engage as equals: that’s an Imagining.
• Finally, in an Imagining, form follows function. People share stories, make art, dance and make music together, using the art-based methods that are the strongest ways to generate full presence and jumpstart powerful dreams. Feeding their own imaginations, they demonstrate what is possible for everyone.

Imaginings are always free, but most of them require RSVPs on account of space limitations. If you haven’t already enlisted as a Citizen Artist, sign up now to receive updates. And be sure to check the links on the Imaginings page for information—you still haven’t heard about Passaic, Cleveland, Boston, St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Seattle, or Stockton, and you don’t want to miss them!

Baltimore Imagining Planning Team 

Field Office Annals Part II: Engagement, Vision, and Play

Jess Solomon in Washington, DC, and Dave Loewenstein in Lawrence, KS, are the first two USDAC Cultural Agents to open Field Offices, USDAC outposts that serve as focal points for local cultural organizing and connecting-points for participation in National Actions. (See part one of this series to learn why they started Field Offices and what they’ve been up to ever since.)

One of the USDAC’s foundational ideas is that the local and national feed and support each other. For example, through local Imaginings, communities generate visions of the futures they desire, and those help to shape policy and program ideas emerging from the National Cabinet. Those can then be tested at the community level, with local experiences making national policy stronger, and vice versa. In this model, policy is rooted in lived local knowledge, not abstract ideas or expert credentials.

Obviously, this works best with a strong local network. Imaginings are part of that, and so are National Actions like the People’s State of The Union, with thousands of community members across the nation taking part. The network of Field Offices is just starting to add a layer, with Dave and Jess showing the way. They’ve already learned a great deal about how to engage people, how to self-organize, and what not to do, and they are happy to share.

When we spoke last month, I asked them what drew people in their communities to the USDAC.

The USDAC’s tone of serious play has been key. “It’s really accessible,” Jess explained, “the idea of collective imagination, everybody is an artist, we need to be creative about social change. These are themes that people can easily plug into. The playfulness and the very deliberate seriousness about the kind of world we want to see are really compelling.” Speaking personally, she said, “The USDAC has definitely expanded the work that I was already doing and has given me legitimacy to be able to show up to a hearing and be ridiculous! People see it in a different way, which has created opportunity for me to be in spaces in a different way, to bring out the larger issues at play.”

Dave laughed: “The Grays never would have showed up if the USDAC hadn’t been there. That wouldn’t have happened.” The Grays were a cadre of drably dressed demonstrators who invaded the Lawrence farmer’s market one morning last June, urging people to boycott the upcoming Imagining. Shouting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, we all love the status quo!” and bearing signs saying things like “Imagining? Hoping? Dreaming? Look where they got Dorothy and her pals,” the performers created quite a stir—and as hoped, had a paradoxical effect, attracting people to the Imagining.

Connection to a national movement was also critical for Dave. When they formed the Lawrence Field Office last September, he told me “we were already organizing, trying to figure out what form we would take. For us here, the Field Office fit as close to perfectly as you could imagine, because I was able to bring to the group this opportunity that was going to connect them more to the national movement. That is for us essential, connections to a larger movement, to folks like Jess, to other practitioners, to other ideas. It was the thing that was going to help sustain it for us in Lawrence.”

Jess agreed, and her advice on that question is being put into practice right now, as we plan to connect with Field Offices through video calls: “In retrospect it would have been great if once we had officially signed the charter we had some Zoom hangout with national folks and the D.C. Field Office. It’s a different level of engagement to hear the national folks talk about the work: then it’s not just me facilitating a visioning around what you want to be—maybe I’m not even a part of that conversation.”

One of the main challenges has been building local leadership teams. For both Jess and Dave, this has been an organic process. “There are definitely people who have been present, excited, and eager since the very beginning,” Jess said. “In many ways I’ve said, ‘I want you to take a leadership role.’ They have in their own way, but it hasn’t been a formal, ‘I know I can go to you for X.’ I’m excited to affirm again for those people who have been around that they can really play to their strengths. I also want to invite people who may have just heard about us, who have a lot of energy and want to get involved. That’s a process that I’m still trying to figure out, how you engage new people and support the ongoing awesomeness of folks who have been around for a while.”

“When we were getting fifteen names to sign the Field Office charter,” Dave explained, “the folks that we got were in a pretty narrow band of our community here in Lawrence. It’s always been a tension: how to bring in new folks after that initial excitement and Imagining, while at the same time we’re trying to build what we have here. The work that we’ve been doing has seemed so important in the moment that a lot of extending it out—bringing in new voices, new perspectives, new parts of even our own small community—has been tabled. The group that came together, they don’t all know each other but they all are within the same networks. To extend that out and overlap with other networks is a challenge with the capacity we have.”

Jess agreed. “A challenge for me has been articulating a vision beyond my network and connecting the local work to what’s happened nationally so that they’re not two separate things. The folks who signed the founding document, even if they aren’t all at events they’re still pretty active in the digital realm. But we’re having a meeting tomorrow about a potential opportunity. There will be people in the room who have never come to a meeting. So how do we keep engaging new people, what’s the umbrella?”

I closed the interview by asking Dave and Jess if starting Field Offices had been worth it.

“Yes,” said Jess. “I think about how much I’ve grown personally and have clarified my personal values and vision around art and culture as a tool, as a connector. So is it worth it? Yes. I want to be even more deliberate as we approach the one-year anniversary of the first Imagining.”

“Here in Lawrence, definitely,” Dave told me. “It’s been a solace to me personally in a difficult time. It’s given us a structure to work within and some level of support. Although we’re always looking for more connection. Seeing you folks on Zoom is one thing, but my immediate thought was get all the Cultural Agents and all the organizational support staff here in Lawrence for a big parade and then a weekend of action. But yeah, definitely worth it. We met yesterday and it’s as live now as it was six or eight months ago.”

By Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

Field Office Annals, Part I: Filling A Need

When I applied to be a Cultural Agent and read the fine print about hosting an Imagining, I was already thinking about what was next because often times we have these events, they feel good, you get people excited—and then what? I really didn’t want to perpetuate that pattern.

Jess Solomon, Cultural Agent, Washington, DC

I couldn’t imagine here in Lawrence bringing these folks together, getting them all riled up and then saying, “Thank you for your input.” That’s not my style. It’s a small enough town that I think people expected more.

Dave Loewenstein, Cultural Agent, Lawrence, KS

In April, I had the pleasure of interviewing two of the USDAC’s founding Cultural Agents, Jess Solomon from Washington, DC, and Dave Loewenstein from Lawrence, KS. Both signed on with the USDAC early in 2014 and organized inaugural Imaginings last summer. On her website, Jess describes herself as Chief Alchemist at Art in Praxis, “Art + Culture At The Center of Strategy, Design and Community.” Dave’s website describes him as a “a muralist, writer, and printmaker.” And I will just say that everyone who knows either of them admires their energy, warmth, and prodigious abilities.

Dave and Jess opened the USDAC’s first two Field Offices—ongoing USDAC focal points for local cultural organizing and connecting-points for participation in USDAC National Actions such as this past January’s People’s State of The Union. “Field Office” is an adaptable concept. In one place, it might be an actual physical space where people meet and collaborate (check out this photo of the Lawrence Field Office).

In another, it’s a Facebook group and a moveable feast of gatherings, work sessions, and presentations. As Jess told me, “A lot of the shape it takes is dependent on who the Agent is, because they start with the Imagining. It’s almost as if the Imagining is the soil and whatever happens in that space is ultimately going to be reflected in a Field Office.”

Washington and Lawrence are about as different as two places can be. The nation’s capital is marked by stark contrasts, seats of power coexisting with the country’s second-highest poverty level, with a population of 660,000, half African American. Lawrence is a largely white university town of 90,000, 45 minutes west of Kansas City, ranked by the National Endowment for the Arts 12th among U.S. cities with the largest percentage of professional artists.

Both are home to large numbers of activists, and in that respect, Jess and Dave have a lot in common: creativity, persistence, and dedication to positive social change. Both are long-term thinkers, which is one reason why they jumped on the Field Office idea: it gave each of them a way to nourish and continue what was already emerging in their communities.

Dave told me he could see that “there was a demand for it to happen from the people who had attended the Imagining. That was because we saw right in front of us the need, the vision struck home, the values struck home, the process was something that people felt good about. No other group, no other gathering was doing this in this way here. There was work to do immediately.”

Jess also saw a local need that connection to the USDAC could fill: people wanted information on culture as the ground for social transformation, and for ways to apply that knowledge. She explained that the DC Field Office has been a learning community as well as a center for action.

“We’re in this interesting space where we’re not an activist group per se and we’re not necessarily all artists that have been trained in the fine arts,” Jess said. “There’s this interesting space in this city where we want to talk about equity and imagination and local and social justice in a way that’s not being talked about in either of those spaces. So part of our work has been finding ways to equip local USDAC folks with the language. There’s this energy around and they know it, they feel it, but some folks might not always feel equipped to give a definition of what cultural activity means in this city. So my work has also been educating myself so that I can take that back to the group. It’s become this really cool process where I’m not the only one chiming in, other people are bringing up other resources as well.”

Each Field Office has been distinct in how people respond to local issues and opportunities. The Lawrence Field Office has been “meeting regularly since last July. We get about ten or twelve per monthly meeting. The most interesting thing that we’ve been doing—and this is a direct result of the Imagining—is that we’ve been invited to facilitate conversations around arts and culture issues and neighborhood issues not just in Lawrence but across the state. We’ve been in Salina and we’ve been in Topeka and we just got an invitation yesterday to facilitate a national co-op housing group’s meeting that’s going to happen here.”

Dave continued: “We also collaborated with folks during the People’s Climate March and helped put on a sort of last-minute but wonderful event in a downtown park with folks from the Cowboy-Indian Alliance and Haskell Indian Nations University. We’ve had a presence at City Hall: we’re showing up, we’re speaking from the perspective of the Field Office. We’ve written a bunch of letters that we’ve put together as a group, commenting on issues that are happening. We worked on The People’s State of the Union, did a couple of those sessions that went really well. Most recently we’ve been meeting with the cultural planning team that’s been here to do Lawrence’s first-ever Cultural Plan. So there’s a lot. I think our next thing coming up is we’ll be on the annual Art Car parade, we’re going to have our own Field Office entry.”

The DC Field Office has produced two Imagining-type events after the initial Imagining last July 12th. “Between those events we’ve also started to think about how we want to work,” Jess told me. “We want to do several large-scale events a year and between them, support organizations that are already working at this intersection of art and change. We want to partner, to be kind of an amplifier and point out opportunities for more engagement, more imagination, to be more deliberate in our connection to art, specifically around economic development and social justice in D.C. For example, we were visible at a lot of public hearings when the Mayor was first coming into office. Now we’re submitting a proposal to take over a vacant space for three months as a Field Office and work with other partners to program around it.” The DC Field Office has also been madly creative online: check out this dynamic Twitter chat on the topic, “What is a Citizen Artist?”

That’s what these Field Offices have done so far: what did they learn doing it? Check this space next week for part two, sharing Jess’s and Dave’s experiences of local organizing around USDAC values and the challenges and opportunities of shared leadership.

By Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

USDAC STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF PRESERVING SACRED APACHE LANDS

Cultural rights are human rights. When they are threatened by public or private action, we are obliged to speak out.

In this, as in so many questions of culture, we are inspired by the words of indigenous peoples:

As Indigenous Peoples, our fundamental cultural belief systems and world views based on our sacred relationships to each other and Mother Earth have sustained our peoples through time. We recognize the contributions and participation of our traditional knowledge holders, indigenous women and youth.

Cultures are ways of being and living with nature, underpinning our values, moral and ethical choices and our actions. Indigenous peoples’ abiding survival is supported by our cultures, providing us with social, material, and spiritual strength….

We will reject and firmly oppose States policies and programs that negatively impact Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories, ecosystems and livelihoods, or which permit corporations or any other third parties to do so.[i]

And by Article 11, part 1 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007:

Indigenous peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.[ii]

Today, we stand with many allies in support of  the San Carlos Apache tribe in Arizona, which is defending sacred lands against the imposition of a copper mine that would destroy them, considered an act of cultural genocide. These lands are threatened because in December 2014,  a land-swap rider was attached to federal legislation passed the “National Defense and Authorization Act”[iii] funding the Defense Department. The “Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act” gives 2,400 acres sacred to the Apache people to Resolution Copper Mining, a joint venture of two multinational multi-billion dollar mining corporations created expressly to develop this underground copper mine. Resolution Copper has plans for a deep mine intended to extract copper ore 7,000 feet below ground level. Excavating and extracting so deeply is likely to turn this sacred land into a “cave zone” as the surface collapses over time.

Protests throughout Arizona, including representatives from the USDAC’s Tucson Field Office, alerted us to this legislatively sanctioned threat to cultural rights. Resolution Copper claims the mine will create job and tax revenue. But the issue is much greater than dollars and centers. In the words of Tribal Chair Terry Rambler, “This issue is among the many challenges the Apache people face in trying to protect their way of life. At the heart of it is freedom of religion, the ability to pray within an environment created for the Apache. Not a manmade church, but like our ancestors have believed since time immemorial, praying in an environment that our creator god gave us. At the heart of this is where Apaches go to pray—and the best way for that to continue to happen is to keep this place from becoming private land.”

Policies exist that mandate and enable the preservation of sacred tribal sites, and they should be applied to this situation, putting an end of mining on sacred lands. The National Historic Preservation Act contains provisions whereby “properties of traditional religious and cultural importance” may be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and indeed, provides funding for tribes undertaking this work of cultural preservation.

In 2009 testimony before the 8th Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Michael Paul Hill of the San Carlos Apache Tribe asked for “The federal government to proceed with a full administrative review through an environmental impact statement so that we can more fully analyze the serious impacts that this proposed mine will have on our people. Existing cultural resource legislation has been ignored by the absence of government-to-government free, prior, informed consent consultation and the absence of responsible efforts to manage lands important to indigenous populations, not to mention the public at large. At that time we will be happy to discuss in detail these impacts and the ways they may or may not be mitigated. We would like to work with our local, state, national, and international governments in identifying long term to develop economic development strategies for all of us that are both consistent with traditional Apache values and scientifically informed, environmentally sustainable practices.

We support a halt to this land-swap and a careful, respectful government-to-government process that respects cultural rights, refusing to transgress them for private profits. We call on our fellow artists, cultural organizers, on elected officials and policy-makers, on all people of goodwill to stand in support of the movement to preserve sacred Apache lands, in the name of the first principle of cultural values establishing the USDAC:

Culture is a human right. As expressed in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community.” It is our sacred duty to remove impediments to the exercise of this right and to ensure that the means to exercise this right are available to all. In a cultural democracy, we are obliged to monitor the impact of public and private actions with these duties in mind.  

Signed:

Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

Adam Horowitz, Chief Instigator

 Dana Edell, Secretary of Creative Sparks, New York, NY

Jacklyn Gil, Sparkitect, Providence, RI

Hayden Gilbert, Cultural Agent, Cleveland, OH

Beth Grossman, Cultural Agent, Brisbane, CA

Lynden Harris, Cultural Agent, Cedar Grove, NC

Dave Loewenstein, Cultural Agent, Lawrence, KS

Liz Maxwell, Chief Dot Connector, New York, NY

Kara Roschi, Cultural Agent, Phoenix, AZ

Michael Schwartz, Cultural Agent, Tucson, AZ

Jess Solomon, Cultural Agent, Washington, DC

Duncan Wall, New York, NY

Amy Walsh, Cultural Agent, Providence, RI

Roseann Weiss, Cultural Agent, St. Louis, MO

Yolanda Wisher, Cultural Agent, Philadelphia, PA

_______________________________________________

[i] State of the Rio+20 International Conference of Indigenous Peoples on Self-Determination and Sustainable Development, 19 June, 2012, Rio De Janeiro

[ii] “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” available at http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf

[iii] Passed December 2, 2014. Section 3003 covers the land-swap. Available at http://armedservices.house.gov/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=926D63B6-5E50-49FC-99EF-A59B98825265

Local PSOTU Press, Nationwide

From January 23-30, 2015, the nation came together to tell its own stories of the state of the union, those not included in President Obama’s address, which were “then woven into new poetry by notable poets at a performance,” broadcast live on February 1 from New York [via The Des Moines Register].

“Crafted in part as a response to recent tensions in communities across America,” these story circles, happening across 150 communities, gave everyone who had a story to tell the platform to do so, and to ensure that others heard their story as well [via American Theatre].

Megan Carney, director of the Gender and Sexuality Center at University of Illinois, “feel[s] like there aren’t a lot of spaces in our culture where we get to process the experiences we’re having...certainly not with other people, and not with people who are different from us” [via UIC News Center]. These story circles provide that very same safe space to have these conversations.

For Shannon Davies Mancus of dog & pony dc, the main thrust for hosting a story circle is to “ask questions of ourselves and our neighbors about how we as artists can be better allies to those for whom the state of the nation is not so great” [via DCTheatreScene.com].

“There won’t be any strict guidelines as to what people should talk about,” Dave Loewenstein, Cultural Agent, says, “the goal is simply to get people talking” [via Lawrence].

The way they are structured is equally as important as the end result in order to “to cultivate empathy, compassion, and a sense of equality...Once everyone has shared, participants are steered away from embellishing or contradicting other people’s stories. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’” [via openDemocracy].

Finally, it’s that voice, unheeded and allowed to run free, is what the hope of the story circles are. “Structural and institutional oppression still exists, and in order to put our legislators in check, we have to be present and we have to be a voice,” Beth “Root” Schermerhorn, a Harrisonburg resident and a participant in a story circle at Duke Hall, said [via The Breeze].

“Because,” Godfrey Simmons, an organizer of an Ithaca story circle and and actor and director with Civic Ensemble, said, “it’s not just about coming up with answers, it’s also sharing ourselves with each other” [via Tompkins Weekly].

By Storyteller-in-Chief Lauren Zanedis