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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.