Can Art Save Democracy? Imagining Radical Visions into Reality with taylor brock and Autumn Breon

Wednesday October 16, 2024, 5-6:30pm PT

Hello friends,

Last fall when Anjelika Deogirikar Grossman, Marta Hanson, and I sat scheming a potential 2024 series devoted to creativity and civic engagement, we didn’t really know what things would look like or how the year would evolve.

We still have no idea what will happen in November, but one thing running the Create+Engage series these past few months has proved to us: there is power in creating, there is power in art, there is power in connecting.

Thank you to everyone who has attended a Create+Engage workshop this year. Over 1,000 different people have signed up to attend these free workshops, and it has been inspiring to see how all of you take the lessons from the featured artists and incorporate them in your own ways.

We have two more workshops this year. The October workshop will be our last one before the U.S. election on November 5th, so we wanted to be sure we infused you with as much creative energy as possible. We’re so excited to have taylor brock and Autumn Breon with us for this one.

taylor is the Associate Director at For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that centers art as a catalyst for creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action. This summer at the Democratic National Convention, For Freedoms partnered with Autumn to install her piece “Care Machine,” a hot pink vending machine with objects that Black women requested in response to the following question: “What items represent and provide care?”

“Care Machine,” Autumn Breon, 2023, installed in Washington D.C.

In our initial call with taylor, the term “imagination crisis” was mentioned. I kept thinking about this: the idea that if we can’t imagine different futures, we can’t build them. It’s why we need creativity. Not just to keep us joyful, to keep us hopeful, to keep us engaged, but to keep us imagining. Because it’s only through imagining something different that we can build something different.

In that sense, imagination is essential to hope. Let’s work at cultivating more of it.

Join us on October 16th to dive in!

-Anna

Can Art Save Democracy? Imagining Radical Visions into Reality with taylor brock and Autumn Breon, October 16, 5-6:30pm PT. Hosted on Zoom.

How do we build a future if we can't imagine it? How can artists create new ideas of what’s possible—ideas that invite us to build new futures that center care, community, and liberation?

Come explore the role of art in shaping civic futures with cultural producer & creative strategist taylor brock, associate director at For Freedoms, and multidisciplinary artist Autumn Breon, who investigates the visual vocabulary of liberation through a queer Black feminist lens.

Suggested materials for this workshop:

• Pen or pencil

• Paper

As always this workshop is free to attend, and all attendees have access to the recording after the workshop. SIGN UP HERE.

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All of these Create+Engage sessions are free to attend. It’s really important for me to be able to offer programming like this, while still paying the guest artists an honorarium. Creative labor is labor and deserves to be compensated. Thank you to so many of you who help to make this happen.

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