Show Don’t Tell: A Symposium
with The Fellowship for Utopian Practice
Presented by Culture Push
In Common: Making Space for Collective Transformation
Sunday, April 28, 2019
3:30 to 5pm
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow performance. Photo by Shawn Escarciga. [Image description: Two women stand in front of a large projected image of a clock. The woman to the left wears black pants and a gray jacket with a black bag on her left shoulder. On her head is a cardboard box with two sides visible; one painted to resemble a building’s facade and the other an aerial view of Manhattan with the word “BELIEVE” written in red and superimposed on the sky. The woman to the right holds a red stick while wearing a blue vest, a white blouse, and black pants. On her head, on top of a square white base, is a replica of a house with the front facade visible.]
The workshops were followed by a panel discussion between the workshop leaders entitled "In Common: Making Space for Collective Transformation," including Adelaide Matthew Dicken & Mel McIntyre, Claudia Prado, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, and Clarivel Ruiz. Moderated by Jerron Herman, the conversation focused on the ways in which the panelists artistic and activist practices are intertwined to promote greater visibility and equity for communities that have been historically othered.
Bios
Adelaide Matthew Dicken (Workshop Leader and Panelist) is a fat, Euro-descended white, non-binary transwoman. Mel McIntyre (Workshop Leader and Panelist) is a fat, queer, crip, femme, white Brazilian-American latinx. Mel & Adelaide are artist-organizers in the early stages of working cooperatively to create a worker-owned green gym that is accessible to all bodies, with particular focus on supporting liberated healing & movement space for people with disabilities and trans people.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow (Workshop Leader and Panelist) is on the faculty at School of Visual Arts MFA and has received a Rema Hort Mann ACE (Artist in Community Engagement) Award (2017), NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art (2012), among other grants and presented work internationally. She has received support through Culture Push’s Fellowship for Utopian Practice (2018-19), Franklin Furnace (2017-18), and Queens Arts Fund New Works Grant (2019).
Jerron Herman (Moderator) is an interdisciplinary artist with a passion for combining disparate disciplines. He’s been featured with Heidi Latsky Dance at Lincoln Center, ADF, the Whitney Museum, and abroad in Athens. He’s been a principal member of HLD since 2011. Jerron now serves on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA as Secretary on the Executive Committee. Herman has also shot for Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive, consulted for a Nike-sponsored project, and was profiled in Great Big Story. In 2018, he was a Snug Harbor PASS artist, a finalist for the inaugural Apothetae/Lark Play Development Lab Fellowship, and was nominated for a Fellowship in Dance from United States Artists. His latest solos include Phys. Ed. (premiere, Gibney Dance Center, Nov 2018), and Relative – a crip dance party (Performance Space, April 2019). He is also investigating body as source through his HEMI workshop that draws from his diagnosis “hemiplegia cerebral palsy.” Herman studied at Tisch School of the Arts and graduated from The King’s College. The New York Times has called him, "...the inexhaustible Mr. Herman."
Claudia Prado (Workshop Leader and Panelist) was born in Puerto Madryn, Argentina. She is the author of three books of poetry: El interior de la ballena (Nusud, 2000), Aprendemos de los padres (Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, 2002) and Viajar de noche (Limón, 2007). She co-directed the documentaries Oro nestas piedras, about the poet Jorge Leonidas Escudero, and El jardín secreto, about the poet Diana Bellessi. In 2011, she was the recipient of a Fondo Nacional de las Artes grant, and in 2015, a Queens Council on the Arts grant. From 2006 to 2011, she was one of the teachers in the poetry workshop Yo no fui at a women’s penitentiary in Ezeiza, Argentina. Since 2003, she has run poetry and prose workshops for adults and adolescents. She now lives in Jersey City and organizes creative writing workshops in New York and New Jersey, working independently and also with some organizations including Hour Working Women Re-Entry Program, Word Up Community Bookshop, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Project Luz, and La colmena, among others, some of them with the support of Poets & Writers.
Clarivel Ruiz (Workshop Leader and Panelist): We, daughter from Kiskeya Ayiti (aka Hispaniola aka Dominican Republic and Haiti), a land colonized but never conquered, raised in New York City on the ancestral bones and covered shrines of the Lenape people. In 2016, we initiated Dominicans Love Haitians Movement bringing together Dominican and Haitians to celebrate our commonalities through poetry and music at The Nuyorican and Wow Theatre Café. Through Dominicans Love Haitians Movement we were accepted into Culture Push’s Utopian Fellowship and the 2017 cohort of Hemispheric Institute’s EmergeNYC program to further develop ourselves as an artist’s activist. We have raised over $2,000 in donated black dolls that have been sent to Haiti and handcrafted dolls sent to The Mariposa Foundation, Dominican Republic. Currently, participating in the Civic Practice Seminar at the Metropolitan Museum, recently accepted into the 7th season of The Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship at Caribbean Cultural Centers' for African Diaspora Institute and a 2019 Brooklyn Arts Council awardee.
Culture Push is an artist-run organization that creates programs to nurture artists and other creative people who are approaching common problems through hands-on civic participation and imaginative problem-solving. The mission of Culture Push is to create a home for ideas based in curiosity and interaction that have a positive impact on the world, and to create a lively exchange of ideas between many different communities; artists and non-artists, professional practitioners and laypeople, across generations, neighborhoods, and cultures. Culture Push supports the process of creating new modes of thinking and doing and serves a diverse community of creative people. The programs of Culture Push focus on collaboration and group learning through active, participatory experiences. Culture Push created the Fellowship for Utopian Practice in 2012 to nurture artists and lend institutional support to ideas that are in the development stage and/or may fall outside the purview of mainstream support. The Fellows work on projects that collaborate with the public to find new modes of civic engagement, and are encouraged to think big and engage deeply with their local communities as they take on issues such as sustainability, social justice, and the historical record, working with imaginative forms of social and political activism. Culture Push was founded in 2009 as the shared vision of three multidisciplinary artists, and is celebrating its tenth anniversary with events and publications throughout 2019.