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//ARTIST RUN SPACES

On February 1, 2019, Linda Goode-Bryant, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Salome Asega, gathered together with moderator Kemi Ilesanmi* to describe the spaces and platforms they have organized. They discussed their successes and the challenges they have faced in organizing labor, their ongoing efforts towards inclusion, fundraising, administrative work, and the importance of collective work. 

*bios below

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Transcription of Event by REV 6196

BFAMFAPhD: Thank you all for joining us tonight. Let's get started with this group of powerful educators and artists.

Kemi: Good evening everyone. I'm excited to be here with each of these amazing women and cultural producers.  We will begin with presentations, starting with Linda, and then we'll move to Q&A so we can have a conversation together.

Linda Goode Bryant: My work probably falls into four projects.The first project is just life. Life is such a work of art. The resourcefulness and creativity that most of us have to use to get through one day to the next, is to me is a work that is ongoing.

The second major project that I was involved in was the creation of what just moved into town, known as JAM Gallery (Just Above Midtown Gallery), back in 1974. JAM was the first gallery which exhibited the work of African American artists in a major gallery district anywhere. Opening that gallery was a move forward, and was a work of art itself that was created by every artist that came into the gallery, every moment they were there. It was family, it was everything. And then we moved on. Well actually, in response to the art market at that time, (1980’s) dealers discovered Wall Street and the whole culture and tone of the art world started to change. This was not what I was interested in, so I left. 

The next project I created was in film, as an independent filmmaker. Holding a camera, doing the editing, just engaging with people in such a deep way was just heaven.

And then the global food crisis happened, and I decided I was going to do this web series that chronicled how people were reacting and responding, how the food crisis-- which was caused by an unexpected rise in food prices around the world-- how people were handling and dealing with that. I first focused on the US and then decided to see what was going on globally. I was looking at footage that covered other countries and I came across some from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It showed that people were forced to eat mud pies, spiked with puddles of honey, to stave off their starvation. The irony was that Haiti, like many countries, gave up their agricultural industry in exchange for World Bank loans, and so they were dependent on imports that  they couldn't afford. I'm sobbing and I'm editing and I'm sobbing and I'm editing, and I'm thinking, what kind of world do we live in? And it was in that moment that I said, we should all be able to grow our own food, even if we grow on concrete. And Project Eats was formed from that. And it's probably the most fulfilling thing I've ever done. Since 2009, we have created 17 farms in New York City. We currently farm on about five acres and four boroughs, and this year, in a matter of months, we're about to open our first rooftop farms. We don't buy land. We grow thousands of pounds of food each year, and we do an enormous amount of programming. And one of my favorites right now is Farmacy, where we have food pharmacies and we work with medical providers in low-income communities who prescribe fresh vegetables as part of a veggie treatment plan.

One of the last things I want to say is that I don't care who we are, I don't care where we're from, I don't care what our gender is, or orientation is, or anything. We're all humans, we're all wise. And we're no more special or worse than the rats that run across the intersection when we go toward Tenth Avenue. Along with that the squirrels in Central Park or the plants that try to make it through concrete on their own in New York City. But what we humans share, I think, again all of us, is a moment in time, if not many moments in time, where we're in something but we're not of it. To be in it and not of it, which I call it-not, in an it-not state.

How do we make things, how do we do things, how do we take actions that actually takes that it-not, and twists it so that we're in it and focused?

How do we make things, how do we do things, how do we take actions that actually takes that it-not, and twists it so that we're in it and focused? Thank you.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: It's such a pleasure and an honor to sit here with such esteemed co-panelists. In 2014, I received an honorary mention for an award from Ars Electronica, which is this renowned media art festival in Austria that has been around for about thirty years. I looked up to it for a really long time and felt honored to receive this award. And then I went on the website to see who else had won the award, in particular, who had won the grand prize. I went to the different categories that were awarded grand prizes, and I realized that every single person who had won a grand prize that year was a man. I started looking back through the 30 years' archive of Ars Electronica and realized that that had essentially been the case for 30 years. And that led to the creation of a social media campaign ... called Kiss My Ars where we called attention to this gender bias in Ars Electronica.

We got a lot of traction, so we did this in 2014 and again in 2015. We wrote a piece in the Guardian bringing attention to it that was widely shared. Of course Ars Electronica didn't respond at all, totally ignoring the whole thing. The only thing that they did was to stop answering my emails.

And so at that point, after two years of calling attention to the problem, we felt like it's time to take action. We formed a collective called Refresh, a collaborative and politically engaged platform working at the intersection of art, science, and technology, that looks at the space between all of these fields, bringing attention to artists who are women, people of color, queer artists, disabled artists, and  people who have not generally been represented in the field. We bring them attention, recognition, and try to generate sustainable artistic practices in an inclusive way.

When we started with this idea we didn't have any money. So, we went through a couple of years trying to get funding to actually make something happen. We were lucky and we ended up getting about a 300,000 dollar grant to make an exhibition and conference, which is opening on February 8th at Hunter College Gallery downtown called Refiguring the Future. The conference will take place over February 9th and 10th. All the details are up at RefreshArt.tech, that's our website.

Refiguring the Future, is really looking at how to tear apart patriarchal, white concepts of science fiction and envision a new future, an inclusive future that uses science and technology, but does it in a different way. The artists that are showing their work and participating in the conference are all getting at this from different points of view. Some of the incredible artists included are Barack Ade Soleil, who works with disability, blackness and queerness. They will be doing a site-specific work and performance around language and mark-making. Morehshin Allahyari in She who sees the Unknown series is looking at dark goddesses and mythologies and her experience growing up in Iran. Lee Blalock, a performance artist, will also be premiering new work. She's particularly looking at extensions of the body and envisioning a kind of post-human, in a way than we've probably never seen before. 

Salome Asega: Good evening. I'm so excited to have this conversation with folks that I've worked with, studied under, and that I have admired for so long. So thank you for organizing this event.

I'm going to talk about two projects. The first is POWRPLNT, a digital art in tech collaboratory, meaning it's an artist-driven shared space where all the programming is interest-driven. Angelina Dreem, Anibal Luque and I started this project in 2013. Before having a brick and mortar space, it was a popup educational gallery at Redbull Studios in Chelsea and at Hunter College, in their Harlem space. Then we got some seed funding to start a brick and mortar space, and we found a space in Bushwick. It was a hair salon that we found on Craigslist, and the rent was cheap. We tiled the floor and got free paint, turning the salon into a gallery and educational space. Shawna X, who is a beautiful muralist based in New York, painted the façade for us. 

In the space we do a couple of different things. It's an open computer lab from three to six and from six to nine we host sliding-scale workshops. Everything from music production, virtual reality to basic coding classes and how to build a website. We also host performance nights for musicians, especially teenagers, and have an artist in residency program, where every two months there's a new exhibition.

The second project I'm part of is called Iyapo Repository, and it’s a speculative space. I started it in 2016 through an Eyebeam residency with my collaborator Ayodamola Okunseinde. The Iyapo Repository is a resource library that exists in a nondescript future with four main divisions, each of which requires some level of participation to create. How this works is that we create a collection that sits in the repository. We have a workshop series in partnership with different community organizations, mostly on the East Coast. We play a game where you're given cards in order to come up with a future object. Players have to come up with a revolutionary political tool that somehow incorporates changing color. You draw this object on a very official document that we take, preserve, and catalog. That sits in our manuscript division. You know when you pick up a seashell and you press it against your ear, you hear the sound of the ocean? What if instead you were tuned into some ancestral radio station where you could hear songs made by women across the diaspora? And so then we physically built it: there is a speaker inside, there is a radio station that we can update remotely and add songs that we're listening to, and, with all the finished artifacts we make films, and those sit in our films division. In final installation we have artifacts, films and manuscripts. 

Volunteering is not free labor, you have to be considerate and thoughtful about levels of engagement and what you're asking people to do with you. So I think that's something to fold into this conversation.

Volunteering is not free labor, you have to be considerate and thoughtful about levels of engagement and what you're asking people to do with you. So I think that's something to fold into this conversationResources are tight, and I know that everyone is working on the low. So I'll leave it there I think.

Kemi: Thank you all so much. I would like to start by going over some of the things that immediately resonated with me. First of all, thinking of the idea of speculative space. When we met before the event Salome talked about the importance of artists who create new futures and visions. So visionary space is important in each of the projects you described. Linda, I love the idea of life as art, and also the notion of family and collective rights, so collectivity comes through. I’m wondering how that connects to our emotional and relational spaces? How do we make visible what the power can be of exchange and  global interconnectedness?

One of the quotes from Linda that resonated, ‘Use what you have to create what you need.’ That idea of moving towards necessity came through. You each felt that something was missing and that led to what each of you have done and created. I'm going to start with you, Linda. Such an incredible legacy and gift that you built for us in so many different directions. Describing JAM, film, and Project Eats was really beautiful. To think about that journey and all the different things that one learns in putting that together. What did you learn by creating a space like Jam that showed up in making a film about politics, or showed up in creating an organization that feeds and nurtures us in that way?

Linda Goode Bryant: That's a very good question. I would say there's a theme that's been consistent throughout. I love human beings, and as much as I am disappointed by us, I am so hopeful. You know the glass is always half full. And one of the things that I don't understand about us is that we allow ourselves to be socialized in ways that are utterly self-destructive. We do not exercise our ability to use what we have to create what we need. There is not another form of life on this planet that doesn't do that. I mean if you just go out to a park or just sit on the street and just watch the city wildlife, you will see how a plant figures out that it needs sun.  It will twist its stem and find a way to reach the closest little shred of sunlight it can find, because it needs it. 

JAM started because there were no spaces for African American and other artists of color to show their work. At some point, I thought let's just start our own. There's so much talk about no access to food that's affordable where you live, well just grow it! Make it accessible and affordable. 

Kemi: Salome, how do you make a connection between self-organized spaces, self-determination and making good with what's available?  

Salome Asega: I want to echo exactly what Linda said towards the end: if something isn't there, then we have to figure out a way to create it, right? So I think with POWRPLNT in particular, I was part of a community of people who had some technical skills and were trying to strengthen them for job opportunities. We were at the time just creative and playing with the technology we knew, but we also wanted to be able to market ourselves. So we came together and skill-shared. Then, we wanted to know how we could scale this up, and how we could donate our time to teach other people?

So it was just like friends teaching classes to other friends, and then that turned into people donating their old laptops, and then that turned into, ‘Let's start a fundraiser!’ and ‘Let's throw a party!’ and see who donates money.  We raised $2,000 that enabled us to go on eBay to buy iMacs. Then we were invited to do different gallery popups. It just slowly grew, because people were willing to donate their time. We all believed in helping each other. When there's a gap, and people see the gap collectively, you work together to figure out, to strengthen ourselves.

Kemi: Heather, does collectivity resonate with you in creating Refresh?  

Dewey-Hagborg: Definitely. I don't know if I mentioned that Salome is also part of the Refresh collective? I was just remembering the two-year struggle we had to get funding. We knocked on many doors and were told ‘No’ so many times. Some people said ‘We'll think about it maybe, we'll let you know.’ We really felt exhausted and that we can't keep trying. I was certainly ready to give up. The funding came at the last possible moment just as we were going to totally give up. This made the whole thing possible and incentivized the growth over the last year and a half of really organizing the exhibition and the conference.

Kemi: I actually want to lean into this idea of exhaustion because I think that plays such a big role for artists and for folks in New York who are always doing too many things. There have been moments where there wasn't this thing that inserted itself, or how do you bounce back from that moment when it feels so tiring that you cannot figure out how you're going to keep going, even though you know what it is you're doing is needed? I think that's very real, that's the way we live and experience this.

Salome Asega: I think a lot of that exhaustion comes from people not understanding what you're doing. For me, it's been a good exercise-- even though it’s absolutely exhausting-- to find the language to explain what we’re doing.  Especially when we're working with technology. Telling the story of what we're doing and why we care about it, especially for POWRPLNT, is really important. People didn't understand why we wanted to put up a tech lab in that neighborhood, and it wasn't until we did it that we started getting grant funding. People saw it.

Linda Goode Bryant: 2018 was that year for me. It was a really, really tough year. It just seemed like everything was not going the way it was intended to. I think as painful as those times are, they are so rewarding, because it requires that you reassess and decide to really commit. It's like, I could be doing this, I could be doing that. Actually, I'm doing this because this is not just my passion. There is something else that is driving me to do it. But I can't even describe it, I don't know what it is. Once you get to that place, windows start to open, and you start to realize things. I don't know if I would have come to, had I not gone through a rough time.

2018 was the year that I said, ‘What we're doing today should exist a hundred years from now.’

2018 was the year that I said, ‘What we're doing today should exist a hundred years from now.’ People should be growing food in their communities and creating an economic engine that provides jobs to the residents in the community, food, to the residents. And up to that point, I wasn't thinking. And the moment I thought, ‘a hundred years,’ I had to question a whole bunch of shit because I have always been inspired by anger. Anger is an amazing motivator. I realized once I had this notion that Project Eats should exist a hundred years from now, I realized you can't grow something with anger. You can start it with anger, it will motivate you and get you to levels of creativity, resourcefulness and imagination, but you can't grow it with that.

And then the next level of, ‘Wow. I've got to grow this thing.’ I've got some shortcomings. I hate to ask people for anything. And so if you're going to grow it, you have to grow it with resources. And we, for the most part, have used the most valuable resources that we all have, which is the ones we have. Well, we can't really grow for a hundred years with that. How do you build that? And building that requires you to ask them that. And so I have these battles that I'm having in my head and out loud, I'm not asking that. And then having to resolve that, you know as uncomfortable as that may be, you know, if you want this thing bad enough, then embrace asking. Figure out how to love asking.

And now I am really kind of psyched about fundraising. I'm really into it, I'm going to raise a whole lot of money. And I'm going to do it on my terms. So how do I do it and what do I do? You can always do it the way that is right for you to do it. And I think we get, again, socialized out of thinking that we can, that we have to follow through it again.

The most profound thing for me has been how I view approaching art. And that evolved from the end of 2018. I believe art should be discovered. I believe we should engage the cause we discover. The notion is this, this stuff makes no sense to me, that we have to schedule time to see art. That's not how art feeds our soul. I actually want people to engage with whatever I make on their own. Get rid of those text labels for Christ's sake. Don't bombard me with how I'm supposed to see something. 'Cause when you do that, you disrupt the very reason that we are creating this conversation, and it’s a conversation, it’s not a mediated moment where I have to bow to your schedules and bow to the way to say it. And in that, my notions of what I create now have expanded.

Dewey-Hagborg: Since we got the funding, we've been going through the logistical and administrative work of answering emails.  We're working with a couple of different institutions. There's just a lot of communication, there's just a lot of work, and it's not easy or fun.

Basically what has kept me going is working with the artists. Every time I had a studio or virtual check-in with the collaborating artists it was totally inspiring. Just a reminder of why we're doing it because we want to get this out there, because we want to see this incredible work. It's so sustaining to get acknowledgement from other people. They hear you and they bring their own stories. Their encouragement has meant so much to me.

Salome Asega: Debriefing at every stage, especially when you're working collectively, is the recharge that you need. It's what reinvigorates the calling, that you were called to do this work. So yes, conversations, debriefings.

Kemi: I had a number of questions about working in a collective, so I'm happy you've brought that up. In some of our conversations prior to this, there was a desire to talk about collective and administrative labor. How do you navigate that? 

Linda Goode Bryant: I mean, you do it. There's no other answer to that. You do it. And there are rewards. I mean, I can't tell you the number of days it took to keep JAM moving. I had to give everything. It was calling on artists and asking if they could sit at JAM for three days. It’s hiring office temps to type notes and charts. So you just do it. And each skill that you pick up can be used, becomes part of what you're able to.

Kemi: I think in the interest of time I'm going to open it up. If you have questions that you want to engage. 

BFAMFAPhD: Hi, thank you all so much for being here. This is an amazing group of people. I'm just thinking about modeling and replication. So Linda, you provided such a good model and I think so many young artists and cultural producers try to mimic your model. So I'm thinking, for Salome or Heather: how are you thinking when you're creating your work? How might it be replicated? Especially in the context of funding, people ask, ‘How are you going to scale this?’ And that's not in the interest of your work, but you might want to replicate it in other places. How do you think about that?

Dewey-Hagborg: So, we're just learning as we're going. I think that with Refresh we're really hoping to expand it, to have Refiguring the Future happen in New York, but we're really hoping that it will happen all over, and that we won't necessarily have to lead that. We can hand it off to other folks and they can become part of it and take it on and make it their own local thing.

So, we're just learning as we're going.

We'll see if we succeed in that, it's just one step at a time. I think after the conference is over and we have a little downtime, we'll come together and talk about what worked and what didn't work, and what the trade-offs were. Getting a big grant is a great thing, but it brings a lot of other challenges with it, so we'll process some of those things and think about what our next steps are.

Salome Asega: Yeah, similarly with POWRPLNT we take meticulous notes monthly as a group when we meet about where we are, what we've accomplished in the last month, and what our goals are for the next month, and sometimes even the year. People always ask us, ‘This is great! Would you want to open a second POWRPLNT in a different city?’ We're like, nah, no. We're at capacity, no way. But the goal is to one day. When we get to a place where we feel really good about how this organization is running, we want to take those notes and turn it into some kind of book so people can take it and model and create their own POWRPLNTs or whatever community organization in their neighborhood that is tech-related.

Audience: You just perfectly touched on something I wanted to ask, which was about the archive. So of course, not only is the work to get the thing moving and to do the thing, but then how does the thing live on and provide a sort of template for other people? Do you think about it as archiving, or how do you deal with the documentation of the thing itself?

Linda Goode Bryant: JAM closed in 1986, and I've been carrying boxes around since 1986. Seriously, 500 dollars a month for storage, it's ridiculous. But anyway, my point is, I didn't think of it in terms of archiving, and I don't think I'm a hoarder, but maybe I am. But too much energy went into what's in these boxes, and at some point, I've got to do something with it as I explore other things. So it's just moving from one storage place to the other because once you have one, they start jacking up the rent, and then you move, start lower and then they jack up the rent. But anyway. I've been doing this since 1986, so, that's my experience with archives.

Kemi: For those of you who are possibly connected to institutions that might take such an incredible archive, if that's something that you're interested in, just putting that out there. But please tell us.

Linda Goode Bryant: I have certainly been approached about the JAM archive, and this is great stuff I've started to discover. But what does that mean? I don't know what "archival" means. Can you discover an archive? I don't know. So until I figure out what that is for me, how I feel this work should be engaged, I'm not ready to just jump in something.

Kemi: Other questions?

Audience 2: I just wanted to thank you personally, and ask a little bit about the fundamentals about starting, and the importance of actual space and what that means in terms of growing becoming something actual?

Salome Asega: I want to say it's not that important to have a space. There are all these internal systems that you realize early on in having the space once you've signed a lease that you're like, ‘Oh I didn't account for all these things that I needed to set up.’ Like buying toilet paper, whose job is it going to be to buy toilet paper, you know? There are all these little things like that that add up, and the responsibility becomes so much greater. So for me, I think moving forward in all my projects, I'm thinking about not space, but partnership. Who has a space that we can then partner with and do interesting things in?

Dewey-Hagborg: Yeah, exactly. Refresh doesn't have a space. We meet online. The main thing about that is if you are tied to a space then it has to be so local. We're all over, and that's really the beautiful thing. We can be on different continents and be able to still meet and share ideas and thoughts. If you think of what it would even mean to have a space in New York City now. But I think that that is such a high bar. Just get started and meet and don't worry about having a space, because if you get worried about that, then, think of how much money you have to get and I don't think it's worth it.

Kemi: I'm going to take moderator privilege for a second here, so one of the questions we started to talk about that I think relates to these kinds of ways of thinking about space, et cetera, is 501(c)3 and LLC. How do you guys think about entity structure and how that fits into what you can do? 

Kemi: Salome, you guys are a 501(c)3?

Salome Asega: Yeah, we're a 501(c)3. We made that decision only two years into the project when we got the brick and mortar space. We thought it would open doors for certain kinds of larger grants we would need to build out the space. This has happened, but then you also need a development person, so that's a role you have to pay someone to do, to write the grants. None of us can do that work. We can but... 

Dewey-Hagborg: Exactly. So we are just an affiliation of people, but the trade-off of course is that if you get a grant, you have to work with an institution. Every institution comes with their own things, their own form of communication and their own agendas. So every institution you partner with, you also have to think about what they want. What are they getting out of it? And I think we've had a lot of discussions within the collective about not being used. In particular this kind of diversity watching, not being used in that way by institutions.

Every institution comes with their own things, their own form of communication and their own agendas. So every institution you partner with, you also have to think about what they want. What are they getting out of it? And I think we've had a lot of discussions within the collective about not being used.

That's definitely an ongoing conversation for us. We don't have those kinds of administrative chains we have to deal with but we're having to be very thoughtful and cautious about who we work with and how, and trying to develop communication strategies.

Audience 3: Hello, could you talk a little bit about the food crisis of 2008, because I guess I wasn't aware of that, so I'm curious if you could talk a bit about that?

Linda Goode Bryant: So what I can remember it was about the spring of 2008. Unexpectedly, food prices were raised and were rising. In the US, it was dealt with on the news a lot, but the focus was on the middle class. They talked about the middle class driving to big bulk stores and buying 100 pounds of flour and 50 pounds of sugar. Active Citizen Project was doing a project examining why people don't vote. So we had created relationships with everything from schools to immigrant advocacy groups to prisons to detention centers --- places where people might be disenfranchised and who chose not to vote. We set up this network throughout the country and facilitated workshops where people created their own platforms. They decided whether issues were a public problem and they campaigned for them in their communities. We had an online election in 2006: people in those cities were voting for issues and solutions that were bound to address them. So that was going on.

There was this network, and I was curious about how often we were working with people living on low incomes and saying, ‘Okay, how has this affected you?’ Back then there were flip cameras. We sent out flip cameras everywhere, and we had them doing that. It was wonderful. We had been shooting for the presidential hopeful campaign, shooting Obama and Clinton and everybody. Anyway, with these cameras, we asked, ‘Why don't you do stories about what's going on in your community around this food?’ So we started getting food stories in. And mothers were not eating so they could feed their babies or buy Pampers. That was happening in the US. 

Audience 4: Thank you for such a generative panel. I have a question about how we think about growing organizations, and so often we hear "scaling up." I wanted to ask each of the panelists, do you feel that way of thinking is useful? Would it be useful to consider scaling laterally? Sometimes organizations who are funding ambitious work are nudging us to think in this way that could be seen as very corporatized. We're going to scale up, we're gonna use more of the thing that is recognized as valuable, which is money. What I'm hearing in different moments in this panel is about scaling laterally. I’d like to hear your thoughts about the language we use as we set in place these organizations.

Dewey-Hagborg: We're definitely thinking of exactly what you're saying. Doing this sideways shifting. Collective members took the main role in curating this exhibition and then Maandeeq Mohammed and Lola Martinez, our curatorial fellow, organized the conference. We're imagining shifting responsibilities: handing these roles off to others, moving things around, bringing more people in, finding other people, other places in the world that want to get involved. It's definitely not about scaling up in terms of getting more money in. I think if anything, how can we do multiple smaller-scale things in the next round to regroup and gather more information and learn more? The whole process of working on this has been about learning for ourselves, learning about what inclusion means, and continuing that process of being open and reaching out and learning more.

Linda Goode Bryant: There really are a lot of lazy opportunities. We grab these little snappy phrases and don't think about what they convey. Often, especially if we're working to create change within a standard language convention, we're actually emboldening the very thing we're trying to take down. So why am I coming at your question that way? Because I think it's important to think ... differently. How do I deal with it personally when I hear that phrase "scaling up?" Certainly donors do it a lot. They can be the most amazing progressive foundations, and one way or another they say, "We need to scale this up! You did 2,000 public schools this year, can you do ten thousand next year?" You see the best-intentioned smiles on their faces. But that's motivated by something. How can that be motivated in another way that gives the sense of value, the sense of significance? Part of that is thinking about the language, thinking of different ways of doing it and thinking in a different language, because if I think in the language that I hear every day, all day, I'm gonna keep gravitating toward [it].

I was on another panel today, and I'm still disturbed by it, so I'm loopier tonight. Folks who are really working hard to make things better were using language like “food desert.” It makes me go, ‘Ugh!’ to say the phrase. First off, what is the lens you're using to see these communities? If there's opportunity to grow food, it certainly isn't on the Upper West Side even though we're doing Refresh in those houses. But you can do it in Brownsville. You can do it in Crown Heights. You can do it in the very communities that actually need food, and you can grow a small plot, high yields of food. I look at these communities as nothing but oases for potential opportunities, but everybody refers to them as "food deserts" or "ghost towns," and now the swamp thing I heard today: what the fuck is the swamp?

How do you do that? How do you set that in motion in the minds of people, and use that in all kinds of ways to make them believe they're the reason. And they're not. They're absolutely not. When we own that we're living this way because we let it be. The world we're living in is this way because we have just said, ‘Yeah I don't like it.’ We talk about it for a living. We might go to marches. We do a lot of crazy stuff but we really don't act in a way to change it. I think it's because there's a dearth in imagination and creativity in language. Let's live in the active, and walk arm to arm.

Salome Asega: Very quickly I'll say that POWRPLNT wouldn't want to scale up. I don't even think we would know what that means, we feel beholden to our neighbors and the space is what it is because of who shows up every day. For me, scaling up would mean strengthening the ecosystem of organizations who are also working in the ways that we do. If someone wanted to really strengthen the ties between all the organizations that do this work in New York City, that, to me, would be successful scaling up. But our space itself doesn't need to be the art-tech collaboratory.

Kemi: A huge thank you for all the wisdom you've each shared. I learned a lot and am really grateful to spend this Friday evening together. I want to bring this back to the quote I brought up earlier: use what you have to create what you need. Let’s use that as our guide.

Presenter Bios

Salome Asega is an artist and researcher based in New York. She is the technology fellow and the Ford Foundations Creativity and Free Expression program area, and a director of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory in Bushwick. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with High Beam, New Museum, the Laundromat Project, and Recess Art. She has exhibited and given presentations at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Performer IEO, and the Brooklyn Museum. Salome received her MFA from Parsons at the New School of Design and Technology, where she also teaches.

Linda Goode Bryant is the founder and president of Active Citizen Project and Project Eats. She developed Active Citizen Project while filming 2004 presidential elections and developed Project Eats during the 2008 global food crisis. She's also the founder and director of Just Above Midtown, Inc. JAM for short, a New York City nonprofit artist space. Linda believes art is as organic as food and life, that it is a conversation anyone can enter. She has a Master's of Business Administration from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting from Spelman College, and is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Peabody Award.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections at the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the New York Historical Society, and has been widely discussed in the media, from The New York Times to Art Forum. Heather is also a co-founder of REFRESH, an inclusive and politically engaged collaborate platform at the intersection of art, science, and technology.

Kemi Ilesanmi is the executive director of The Laundromat Project, which advances artists and neighbors as change agents in their own communities. She has previously worked at Creative Capital Foundation at the Walker Arts Center. In 2015 she was appointed by the mayor to the NYC Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission. She is on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and The Broad Room. A graduate of Smith College, NYU, and Coro Leadership, NY, she is currently a Sterling Network Fellow. And I highly recommend the Create Change fellowship at The Laundromat Project.

Audio of panel discussion on Bad at Sports here

Transcription, REV.com