Daily Schedule 

Events are all held on Eastern Standard Time (EST).

To ensure our fellows’ privacy and security during these private sessions, please use your full name when logging in. Fellows will first be placed in the waiting room and granted access by CCCADI Staff.  Please enter the waiting room at least 5 minutes before the session starts. 

 

July 25, 2022 | 6pm to 9pm

Grounding & Orientation:

Roots of Cultural Resistance & Exchange (The Institute)

Guest Presenter: Melody Capote, Executive Director of CCCADI

This year's think tank is a reunion of sorts and we want to hear about where you’ve been, what you’ve been up to and how the concept of roots and resistance continue to resonate in your personal and professional lives as cultural workers. To kick this conversation off, we will hear from Melody Capote about the launch of the Expressions Festival and Caribe publication in the 1970’s, what inspired her work back then, and what motivates her work in the present. We will also learn about CCCADI’s newest development, the Institute for Racial and Social Justice in Arts and Culture. In many ways, the Caribbean is a rich conceptual framework from which to talk about these themes, since it has been the crucible of modern liberation movements that spread globally from Haiti to Cuba pushing against capitalist regimes of labor and time, yet a region often configured by outsiders as rootless and without history. What can we learn from this legacy of resistance and diversity offered to us by both the Caribbean and our very own Caribbean Cultural Center here in New York? What kind of models do they offer to the world and cultural workers at a time of intense global social change and demand for basic human rights? What role can the arts and culture flowing forth from this crucible play in our movements for justice?

READINGS

Selected Readings from The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, pp. 12-13, 20-30

  • “Infinite Consciousness: From a Coast North of the Caribbean”, Maria Elena Ortiz

  • “Black Futurities Past and Present: Thinking through Reparations,” David Scott 

  • “Dancing through the Apocalypse: Considering the Future through the Caribbean's Past”, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers 

“Edouard Glissant, In Conversation with Manthia Diawara”, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 28, 2011, pp. 4-19 ***

***Note: We would like you to acquaint yourselves with Glissants Poetics of Relations, however given the density of this work and considerations of time, we have instead included this article as an overview of his thinking. We have also attached the full text, if you would like to dig deeper into his intellectual work and legacy, and the concept of "Relation".

July 26, 2022 | 6pm to 9pm

Tools For Our Collective Work

Imagining Cultural Equity

Guest Presenter: Jerron Herman, Choreographer & Performance Artist, National Dance Institute

READINGS

“Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time", Ellen Samuels, Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 3 (2017): Summer 2017 (about 5 pages long)

“Access Intimacy: The Missing Link”, Mia Mingus (blog post)Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (excerpt)

July 27, 2022 | 6pm to 9pm

Tools For Our Collective Work

Sharing Your "Story of Self”: Community Engagement & Advocacy

Guest Presenter: Candace Fortin, Political Organizer + Producer, Associate Director of Experiential Events @wearesoze. Co-Founder of Haven @weare_haven

Common tools in grassroots organizing and how they have been impacted by various oppressive systems, the challenge, the choice, and the outcome. We see these structures with Camp Obama. They trained people from the beginning to share their stories, to get them involved in the campaign, and the movement. If people are interested in getting into this work, getting people involved in the causes you care about. This is an accessible way of getting people involved in the work. 

READINGS

"Why Stories Matter", Marshall Ganz

"The Power of Story in Social Movement", Marshall Ganz

July 28, 2022 | 6pm to 9pm

Tool for Our Collective Work

Equitable Cultural Placemaking in Practice & Policy

Guest Presenter: Dr. Jabani Bennett, Ed.D., MAT

As diverse arts professionals, how can we integrate a cultural equity lens into our work in a sustainable way? Are you on the right track in co-creating environments in your community that are accessible, affirming, and empowering? If so, come and share your expertise with your colleagues and uplift equity-centered leadership approaches in the arts. If you are not confident about how you can nurture systemic change in your current role, join us in collaborative experiences that consider power and infrastructure. 

READINGS:

Actor’s Equity Association (2021). Actor's Equity Association Report 2021: How can state and local arts agencies be a force for change? Actor’s Equity Association.

Bogle, Mary & Torres Rodríguez, Sonia (2021). Advancing cultural equity through equitable development: A Discussion paper for year 4 of the 11th Street Bridge Park Equitable Development Evaluation. Urban Institute.

July 29, 2022 | 6pm to 9pm

Moving Forward:

Caribe Publication & The Institute for Racial and Social Justice in Arts and Culture

In the 1970’s, CCCADI began curating a series of mini festivals titled Expressions, that included panel discussions, curated art shows, and live performances. The ideas, colors, and sounds of these activities were chronicled in a print publication entitled Caribe, which had a healthy run before going out of print. One of the proposals for CCCADI’s Institute for Racial and Social Justice in Arts and Culture and the continued ICA Fellowship is to revive this publication in a digital format as well as the Expressions panel discussion/conference event as a vehicle for chronicling the work of this generation’s cultural workers, thinkers, and community artists. We hope to revive/relaunch the Caribe publication in some way as an advocacy tool and platform for information exchange. For this module, we ask that you come prepared to discuss your interest in participating in this type of effort and how you envision such a revitalization unfolding such that it could support the growth and development of our collective work and CCCADI’s new Institute. Who would the audience for a Caribe publication be? Should it be accompanied by an annual or biannual conference event? How could the publication honor the roots of Caribbean revolutionary resistance and impact the current state of the field, helping to advance our racial and social justice objectives? Or perhaps you have modified suggestions of how we can collectively carry this work forward! Let’s talk!

READINGS

  • Sample of Caribe publication