Join me at Manifest Differently on February 17th 2024

I will be in conversation with Mari Tapia, sociologist and educator, on February 17th from 12pm-2 at the Minnesota Street Project (1271 Minnestoa Street, SF) as part of the Clarion Alley Mural Project’s Manifest Differently programming. Come for our conversation on the Origins and Persistence of Manifest Destiny, check out the amazing art exhibition mounted by the project after and stay for the panel On Sovereignty at 3pm. This is a free event.

Make Art Make Justice: A Training Series on Art and Organizing starting July 25th

In collaboration with Margaret Ernst and Kristen Snow with the national Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Cultural Workers, and creators of the White Artists for Racial Justice website, Alexis Macnab and I, from SURJ at Sacred Heart/San José, are co-facilitating this workshop series is for artists and organizers who want to gain skills and experience using art as a way to practice courage, commitment, and leadership in social justice work. SURJ believes that it is white people’s responsibility to organize other white people to dismantle white supremacy, because it is white people who historically and still today benefit from white supremacy. The Art and Culture Work working group at SURJ at Sacred Heart has been facilitating creative skills workshops since 2017 as part of our organizing.

By the end of the three part series, participants will have both designed and implemented their own Make Art Make Justice workshop in their communities. This intensive will share all the tools you need to develop, plan, and run your workshop, and discuss ways that practicing art with your members strengthens and uplifts organizing work for the long haul. Register HERE.

This workshop series is for you if:

• You are an artist interested in engaging with, or sparking, justice work in your community

• You are new to organizing and want to learn about it from the point of view of artistic process

• You are an experienced organizer and want to develop more leaders in your organization, and find ways to strengthen engagement, retention, and relationships in your org

All workshops online! Accessible from anywhere!

Part 1 - Sunday, July 25 1-3pm PT
In this session we will give an introduction to the Make Art Make Justice model of art-based workshops for white anti-racist organizers, and share some recent case studies and resources developed by our chapter’s Art & Culture Working Group. Participants will get to know each other and start to build cohorts of support in order to start planning your art-based social-justice event.

Part 2 - Sunday, August 8 1-3pm PT
This will be primarily a working session where participants will have a chance to try out techniques, share tips and successes, and work through questions in the process of developing their Make Art Make Justice workshops. Drop-ins welcome, but this session is intended as a time to address specific ideas generated by work from the previous meeting. There will also be discussion and tool-sharing around turn-out, information gathering, and follow-up for your event. Following this session, you will have everything you need to run your own workshop in your community or organization!

Part 3 - Sunday, August 22 1-3pm PT
The final session will be a showcase of your Make Art Make Justice event. Participants will share “plusses and deltas” on what you learned in the process, and the impact it had on you, your community, and your work. There will be further discussion and resource sharing, and a chance to learn from everyone in the workshop on how to make all of our organizing more (he)artful!

If you want to share about this event in your networks, here is the landing page for it: https://www.whiteartistsforracialjustice.org/events.html

Grand Re-Opening for the website/interactive archive for my 1500 Stories project

1500 Stories is a digital storytelling and collaborative art project about economic inequality in the U.S. I first conceived of the project back in 2015 and in the last 5 years, over 700 stories have been contributed to the project. Thank to support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and beautiful work by the Design Action Cooperative, a worker owned design and communications firm, the project has a gorgeous new website designed to give you a sense of widening economic inequality and to humanize that gap through stories. The website features just a few of those 700 stories, in audio, video, text and visual arts formats (with many more to come!) and is a wonderful resource for exploring what it’s like to live at different economic positions in the U.S. In this time of isolation and polarization, this is an opportunity to connect with lives very different than your own!

1500 Stories makes an appearance at the Euphrat Museum of Art

Come see the first artwork to result from the 1500 Stories project on exhibit in the Justice for All? show this winter at the Euphrat Museum of Art from February 1-March 23rd.   For more information about the show, visit http://www.deanza.edu/euphrat/inthemuseum.html. This piece is a collaborative work designed by me using photographs contributed to 1500 Stories by De Anza students as part of a documentary photography project called Visualizing Economic Inequality.  Each pair of images documents an aspect of contemporary economic inequality while the overall design mimics the distribution of population and wealth in the U.S.  Feel free to join us at the reception on February 16 from 5:30-7:30pm.  Learn more about 1500 Stories, or make a donation, at https://1500stories.org/