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Curated by Urbano scholar-in-residence Raquel Jimenez and hosted by seven trailblazing, transdisciplinary artist-educators, Create, Connect, Catalyze (CCC) is a series of five community discussions that aims to create space to understand, reflect on, and chart new courses of civic change through the arts. Sessions are March 31 - May 25 and examine a wide array of community-driven artistic practices through the lenses of cultural work, grassroots activism, and socially-engaged art practices.

 

P A S T C O N V E R S A T I O N S

 
 
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CCC#5: Creative Youth Development with Cierra Kaler-Jones

Tuesday, May 25th, 6:00-7:30PM ET

How can we support youth creative expression? What do young people want and need in their artmaking experiences?

In this conversation, we’ll learn from Dr. Cierra Kaler-Jones and youth artist-researchers involved in Black Girls SOAR—a youth participatory action research collaborative that combines oral history and imaginative storytelling to envision the future. Together, we’ll discuss the role of imagination in movements for social change and consider how we can work together to support the next generation of artists, creators, and thinkers.

Cierra Kaler-Jones is a social justice educator, writer, scholar, and artist based in Washington, DC. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at University of Maryland - College Park studying minority and urban education. Her writing is featured in Education Post, Nia Magazine, Midnight and Indigo, Medium, and EBONY. She is the founder of Unlock Your Story, a coaching and consulting business aimed at helping people tap into the stories that they are bravely meant to share with the world.

 
Sketchnotes for “Restorying Public Space” by CCC Sketch Artist Alexa Kutler

Sketchnotes for “Restorying Public Space” by CCC Sketch Artist Alexa Kutler

 

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CCC#4: Restorying Public Life with Gabriel Sosa and Sara Rivera

Tuesday, May 11th, 6:00-7:30PM ET

How does language condition our experience of public space? In what ways does language prompt us to encounter hope, doubt, or resilience?

We invite you to explore these questions through an evening of writing and conversation with guest artists Gabriel Sosa and Sara Rivera. During this event, we’ll draw from Gabriel and Sara’s public art practices to consider connections between personal experiences and public narratives; the politics of public space; and the role of language and expression in helping us stretch beyond political discourses that limit our imaginations. In addition, Gabriel and Sara will help us stage our own interventions in public space. No prior artmaking experience is necessary, but curiosity and creativity are required!

Gabriel Sosa is an artist, educator, curator, and linguist. He draws from legal proceedings, personal archives, and contemporary visual culture to explore the mutability of language, the imperfection of memory, and the misinterpretation of both. Born and raised in Miami, he is based in Boston, where he is a lecturer at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban/Peruvian artist, writer, translator, and educator from Albuquerque. Her poetry and fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies. She was awarded a 2017 St. Botolph's Emerging Artist Award and won the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry. Her drawings, sculptures, and community-based installations focus on text-in-space as social intervention, and her public art projects are often developed in collaboration with youth.

 

Sketchnotes for “Restorying Public Space” by CCC Sketch Artist Alexa Kutler

 

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CCC #3: Identity and Solidarity with Sam Richardson and V. Haddad

Wednesday, April 28th, 6:00-7:30PM ET

How can creative practices help us unpack our personal stories and community connections? How can artists support new modes of solidarity through collaborative creative expression? In this conversation, we’ll draw from Sam and V.'s Self Portrait Service, a collaborative photo project that rethinks individualistic ideas about authorship and ownership in the arts. Together, we’ll consider the role of images in affirming our sense of self; the power and responsibility that image-makers hold; and the role of images in reshaping ideas about who "we" are and can be.

Sam Richardson is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, educator, and advocate currently based in L.A. Their work in photography interrogates the acts of collaboration, representation, and inclusion, tirelessly questioning and pushing the meaning and practice of collaboration between artist, subject, and the community at large. As an image-maker working in a documentary-informed practice, Richardson strives to unlearn, break open and find new ways of creating images that interrogate collaboration and photographic relationships in the context of the body, trauma, and care.

V Haddad is a filmmaker and visual artist working in experimental and documentary filmmaking often in concert with drawing, installation and printmaking. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, she currently lives and works in New York. Much of her work functions as a portrait practice: accounting for her position as she creates expressive documentations of people, and their surrounding contexts, histories and visions. Examining and interpreting the nature of communions, divides and self-determinations is at the crux of her practice. Through an assortment of visual approaches she works to map out topographies of power and shed light on relationship dynamics. She studied at L'´Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, The New School and received a BFA from The Cooper Union. She is an MFA Candidate at UCLA in the New Genres department.

 

Sketchnotes for “Identity and Solidarity” by CCC Sketch Artist Alexa Kutler

 

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CCC #2: Representation, Power, and Joy with Paloma Valenzuela

Wednesday, April 14, 6:00-7:30PM ET via Zoom

Whose stories do we consistently tell? What possibilities emerge when we reframe and tell new stories? Join Paloma Valenzuela for an evening of conversation on the power, politics, and possibilities of storytelling. We’ll discuss TV & movies; mainstream media narratives; the need to tell broader stories about communities of color; and the role of storytelling in cultivating a more just, robust, and joyful public discourse.

Paloma Valenzuela is a Dominican-American writer, director and actress originally from the city of Boston. In 2010, she started La Gringa Loca Productions, a multi-media production operation which has since produced stage plays and audiovisual projects both in Boston and the Dominican Republic.

 

Sketchnotes for “Representation, Power, and Joy” by CCC Sketch Artist Alexa Kutler

 

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CCC #1: Radical Care and Healing with Emeka Ekwelum and Noor Jones-Bey

Wednesday, March 31, 6:00-7:30PM ET via Zoom

How can our creative practices hold space for rest, reflection, and affirmation? In this participatory workshop with guest artists Emeka Ekwelum and Noor Jones-Bey, we will draw on traditions in Black feminist praxis to help us address this question through discussion and a workshop involving poetry and collage. We will use our reflections to consider how community-centered artmaking practices can create space for radical care, healing, and justice. No prior artmaking experience is necessary, but curiosity is required.

Emeka Ekwelum is a transnational, multidisciplinary researcher, educator, artist, and curator from Boston, MA. He currently lives in Chicago, IL, where he is pursuing a PhD in Black Studies (African American Studies) at Northwestern University. Emeka’s scholarly and creative interests converge at the intersection of history, critical theory, creative expression, comparative ethnography, and curatorial practice. His current research project examines the role of wonderment in contemporary and craft art collaborations between and amongst Black creatives.

Noor Jones-Bey is a trans-disciplinary educator, researcher and artist from the Bay Area, CA. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a PhD candidate in Urban Education at the Steinhardt School and holds fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Urban Doctoral Research Initiative at NYU. Her dissertation work examines intergenerational knowing of Black womxn and girls navigating in and out of schools.

 

Sketchnotes for “Radical Care and Healing” by CCC Sketch Artist Alexa Kutler

 

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Meet the Curator:

Raquel Jimenez is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, Boston-based educator, and scholar-in-residence at Urbano Project. Raquel’s work focuses on young artists and the creative learning communities that support them. This interest is reflected in her dissertation research, a multi-year investigation that examines how youth engage with public artmaking practices to reimagine the post-industrial forces undermining their community, and how community arts education structures this process. Raquel teaches courses on art and culture at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, collaborates with local artists on public art initiatives, and has held a variety of positions in nonprofit arts organizations. Her work is supported by the Ford Foundation and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

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Meet the Sketch Artist:

Alexa Kutler

At the heart of my work is a desire to support adults in feeling confident, curious, and compassionate in the face of creative learning, personal reflection, and everyday life. I have spent many years learning how to build a career in the made-up field of Creativity, Design, and Adult Learning. A highlight from my journey includes my role as a Designer and Project Manager for the Creative Computing Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I organized and facilitated creative learning experiences for adults through the ScratchEd Meetups Network and T550: Designing for Learning by Creating. I gleefully joined the CreativeMornings team in July 2019 where I am now the Head of FieldTrips.

I live in Brooklyn with my dog Jack Charles. I love sparkles and I draw cartoons with a non-binary character named bean.