Plenary Sessions
Monday Breakfast Plenary
IDEA LAB
IDEA LAB, a conference format first introduced in 2013, has become an inspiring and engaging way to start the conference day. The session will be hosted by Claire Peeps, executive director of The Durfee Foundation, and will feature three short TED-style presentations by artists, innovators, and others who have broken the rules, jumped outside the box, and charted their own paths.
Monday’s Presenters are:
Monday Luncheon Plenary
Rip Rapson in conversation with Maria Rosario Jackson
For the Monday Luncheon Plenary of the GIA 2015 Conference, Rip Rapson, President & CEO, The Kresge Foundation, and Maria Rosario Jackson, Senior Advisor to the Arts and Culture Program, The Kresge Foundation, will discuss the foundation’s transformation from capital support to community building and the role of the arts in that work.
Rip Rapson, President & CEO, The Kresge Foundation
Since 2006, Rapson has led The Kresge Foundation, a $3.5 billion private, national foundation dedicated to expanding opportunities for vulnerable people living in America’s cities through its six defined programs: arts & culture, education, environment, health, human services, and community development in Kresge’s hometown of Detroit. Nationally, Rapson has strengthened the philanthropic sector’s role through convening, collaborating and supplementing community development activities in cities around the country. In Detroit, Rapson and the foundation provided central support to the “Grand Bargain,” an unprecedented partnership between the philanthropic community, city pensioners, the State of Michigan and the Detroit Institute of Arts, to propel the City of Detroit’s successful emergence from municipal bankruptcy in fall 2014.
Rapson began his career as a legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. Don Fraser, D-Minn. Following law school at Columbia University, he represented a number of Minnesota nonprofit organizations as a partner at Leonard, Street & Dienard in the 1980s. He later has served as the deputy mayor of Minneapolis from 1989 to 1993; a consultant to the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore; and in 1999, was appointed president of the McKnight Foundation based in Minneapolis. He is the recipient of dozens of civic and philanthropic awards and has co-authored two books.
Maria Rosario Jackson, Senior Advisor to the Arts and Culture Program, The Kresge Foundation
Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson’s expertise is in community revitalization, dynamics of race and ethnicity, urban inequality, and roles of arts and culture in communities. She is a Senior Advisor to The Kresge Foundation and consults with national and regional foundations and government agencies. In 2013, President Obama appointed Dr. Jackson to the National Council on the Arts. Dr. Jackson has been adjunct faculty at Claremont Graduate University’s arts administration program in the Drucker School of Management. She is adjunct faculty at the University of Southern California where she teaches in the Arts Leadership Program in the Thornton School of Music. She is also the James Irvine Fellow in Residence at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles and has taught in the Urban Planning program. Previously, for almost 20 years, Dr. Jackson was based at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. She earned a doctorate in urban planning from UCLA and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Southern California.
Jason Arimoto, ‘Ukulele
Originally from Hawaii, Los Angeles-based Jason Arimoto is a featured artist on the Na Hoku Hanohano Award winning album, Solo ‘Ukulele: The King of Pop and is a two-time winner of the ‘Ukulele Underground Award for Best Vocal Performance of the Year. His original music blends his island roots with reggae and blues, with soulful vocals combining with a bluesy ‘ukulele tone. Jason has performed across the US including the Bean Blossom Blues Festival in Indiana and the world famous Viper Room in Hollywood as well as internationally at the Cairns ‘Ukulele Festival in Australia. Jason is a founder/collaborator of U-Space at the Japanese American Cultural Community Center in Los Angeles. U-Space is focused on building community through music and ‘ukulele.
Tuesday Breakfast Plenary
IDEA LAB
IDEA LAB, a conference format first introduced in 2013, has become an inspiring and engaging way to start the conference day. The session hosted by Claire Peeps, executive director of The Durfee Foundation, and will feature three short TED-style presentations by artists, innovators, and others who have broken the rules, jumped outside the box, and charted their own paths.
Tuesday’s Presenters are:
Tuesday Luncheon Plenary
Claudia Rankine
The National Book Critics Circle says of Claudia Rankine’s work, “Rankine maps the uneasiness and charged space of living race now, miraculously breaking racism’s intractability down into human-sized installations.”
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; Plot; The End of the Alphabet; and Nothing in Nature is Private. She won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for Citizen, the first book ever to be named a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories. Also for Citizen, she was named a National Book Award Finalist, and received Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize. Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Rankine is the author of the plays, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre and Existing Conditions (co-authored with Casey Llewellyn). Rankine co-edited the anthologies The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind and American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Los Angeles Times, The NAACP, The Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Lannan Foundation, Poets and Writers, and the National Endowments for the Arts. She is currently the Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California. (Photo of Claudia Rankine by John Lucas.)
Wednesday Breakfast Plenary
Quetzal Flores, Martha González, and the band Quetzal
Quetzal Flores and Martha González lead the Grammy® Award-winning East LA Chican@ rock group band Quetzal. This special keynote will be highlighted by the band’s energetic and engaging performance as well as Flores and González discussing their socially engaged work.
Growing up in grassroots movements, as the son of labor union organizers, Quetzal Flores inherited an undying accountability to community struggles. From land struggles with South Central farmers, immigration reform, supermarket workers union strike, and the indigenous Zapatista struggle, to the everyday community struggles in East Los Angeles, he has been active with music in hand. Since 1993, he has been working as the musical director for the East Los Angeles based rock group Quetzal. Martha González was born and raised in East Los Angeles and is a Chicana artivista (artist/activist) musician, feminist music theorist and Assistant Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Scripps College. A 2007-2008 Fulbright and 2012-2013 Ford Fellow, she is the lead singer and composer for Quetzal.
The band Quetzal is a Grammy® Award-winning East LA Chican@ rock group and has just celebrated its twenty-year anniversary. The musical ensemble is influenced by an East LA rock soundscape composed of Mexican ranchera, cumbia, salsa, rock, R&B, folk, and fusions of international musics, and also one whose political vision is based in social activism, feminism, and the belief that there is radical potential in expressive culture. During the past two decades, the musical force of Quetzal has created a unique cultural platform that has sounded against conditions of oppression and marginalization. On the twentieth anniversary of their first flight, Quetzal introduces us to another sphere of being, one that challenges us to reimagine human life in relation to the other forms of life that we are so often connected to and through.