Arts and Social Justice
"When I think of the phrase 'You’re always a day late and a dollar short,' I also think about resilience—the ability to recover from or adjust easily to, despite hard luck or change," writes Helanius J. Wilkins in a poignant essay published in the National Performance Network (NPN) blog. "One of my earliest lessons about resilience came through observing my father."
Read More..."I’ve witnessed how public art can draw attention to issues of community safety, awaken empathy, mobilize a community, and even generate dialogue between people holding differing opinions," writes Mallory Rukhsana Nezam, guest editor for Issue 3 of FORWARD, focused on community safety.
Read More...“Our work here in Chinatown,” Yin Kong, director and co-founder of Think!Chinatown, says, “Is about place-keeping. It’s about celebrating, strengthening and amplifying,” in an interview with NextCity. The article continues, "For a neighborhood relatively compact in size — Chinatown covers roughly two square miles in Lower Manhattan — it boasts an impressive and dedicated collective of cultural organizers," and more than $200 million announced in public dollars just in the past two years, after decades of "pigeon-holing" and insufficient funding.
Read More..."Color Congress, a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color in the US, has launched in advance of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival," Filmmaker magazine reported this January leading up to the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. "Founded by documentary impact and field-building strategists Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, the collective will invite POC-led doc-serving organizations to apply for unrestricted two-year funding from a $1.35 million fund, and later in the year, they’ll be invited to join the Congress and direct over $1 million in grants aimed at addressing field challenges."
Read More...In a recent review in Elle Decor, art critic Kimberly Drew surveys the first-of-its-kind period room that presents an imagined Black home in New York City. "The exercise coined by [Saidiya Hartman, Ph.D.] is the work of overlaying historical gaps with imaginative narrative building," Drew writes. "This practice stems from the reality that the everyday lives of Black people have often been underdocumented or plainly ignored."
Read More...A recent episode of When We Fight, We Win!: The Podcast, centers on "Sam Jacobs and a network of donors who use lessons and inspiration from social movements to reclaim a new narrative around philanthropy."
Read More...Instead of fundraising for its own budget, this year's Laundromat Project’s annual “People-Powered Challenge” campaign "will 'pay it forward,' distributing $50,000 to support the work of other orgs led by people of color," states a recent article in Hyperallergic.
Read More...3Arts, the Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, recently expanded funding in response to increasingly stringent times for women artists, artists of color, and Deaf and disabled artists.
Read More...This is the fifth session of a series of presentations held in 2021 by art.coop as a "study into-action cohort."
This session took place on Friday, October 1.
Read More...The Center for Story-Based Strategy (CSS) recently published a piece by Lenina Nadal with a question for artists, rebels, activists, nonprofit workers, propagandists, creators, makers, innovators, practitioners, organizers and trainers: "How did you wake up your radical imagination today?"
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