The Shift: Art and Activism
Please view the event here.
This event is a live discussion that will be live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter. Guests can pose questions via Twitter.
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Civic Signals, The Social Science Research Council, and The Knight Foundation invite you to a discussion on Art and Activism in the series on “The Shift,” featuring Alicia Grullon, Luis Rincón Alba, Ernest A. Bryant III, and moderated by Gianpaolo Baiocchi. This third episode of “The Shift” will to consider how art and activism can inform policies that strengthen and heal communities opening up a space for considering alternative and more just socio-ecological anti-racist futures. It will focus on how the pandemic has shifted, and continues to shift, the ways in which we perceive and enact change. Art and activism have always formed powerful alliances for critiquing the harmful status quo and for finding new ontologies for alternative futures.
The conversation will be illustrated live by Rosa Colón Guerra.
Alicia Grullon is an Afro-Taino Caribbean descendant on Lenne-Lenape land, Grullón has been featured in a number of group exhibitions including The 8th Floor; The Bronx Museum of the Arts; BRIC House for Arts and Media; School of Visual Arts; El Museo del Barrio; Columbia University; Socrates Sculpture Park; Performa 11; and Old Stone House and Art in Odd Places. She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation; Bronx Council on the Arts; the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York; and Franklin Furnace Archives. Grullón has participated in residencies at the Hemispheric Institute for Politics and Performance at New York University; the Center for Book Arts; the Bronx Museum of Arts Block Gallery; AIM Alum; and the Shandanken Project on Governors island. She has presented at the 2015 Creative Time Summit; The Royal College of Art; and the United States Association for Art Educators. Her work has been reviewed in many prominent journals, including Hyperallergic, ArtNet News, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Grullón is a recipient of BRIC’s inaugural Colene Brown Art Prize for 2019 and awarded the 2020-2022 Walentas Fellowship at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.
Luis Rincón Alba is a Colombian artist and scholar based in New York City since 2010. He has taught at the departments of Art and Public Policy and Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Performance Studies Department at New York University. As an actor, performer, and oral narrator, he has collaborated with different artistic collectives in his home country and also in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Italy. His creative and academic work centers on the performativity of festive and carnival performance. His scholarship traces the aesthetic and political genealogy of carnival practices in contemporary literature, performance art, and music and how this emergence troubles historical understandings of race, gender, and class. His academic research areas include Caribbean studies, critical race theory, contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, experimental ethnography, and the history of Latin American and Caribbean theater and performance art.
Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., is an artist and critic from the USA. He has a background in interdisciplinary art. He earned an MFA from Yale University, School of Art, where he focused on critical theory, new media, and printmaking; and earned a second MFA in Art Writing & Criticism from the New York School of Visual arts, where his focus was art and society’s relationship to nature, molestation, conservation, and homelessness. In his work he uses nature, video, image-making, history, positionality, theory and humor to examine the ontological conflicts that arise between different aesthetic and cultural values. Currently, Bryant has been developing a method of augmented drawing that he describes as “a form of drawing that uses line to explore value, labor and its displacement.” Over the years he has taught mural painting, and studio art to teens. He worked for a non-profit Black art organization as an independent exhibition curator. Most recently he taught a class in prison, for Yale Prison Education Initiative, served as a resident critic and teaching fellow at the Yale Norfolk School of Art, and as a guest critic, in Graphic Design, at Pratt Institute. He was in residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, did a self-designed residency in Santiago, Cuba, and was in residency at the Shangyuan Art Scene in Beijing, China, after which he taught in China for 4 years. He has received fellowships for his work from the Jerome Foundation, and the Bush Foundation, and published the book, “Surviving the next four to Eight Years in the United States of America 2017-2025, For Sufferers of a Recrudescent Ideological KRISIS” in 2017.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi is a sociologist and activist interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He directs the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU and works closely with organizations such as Right To The City. He has written about and continues to research instances of civic life both in his native Brazil and in the US. As one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project, he has worked with city officials in several US cities, and has presented his work to the World Bank, to the UNDP, HUD, and to both the World and US Social Forums.
Rosa Colón Guerra has been self-publishing comics with her friend Carla Rodríguez for over ten years in San Juan, Puerto Rico as Soda Pop Comics. She’s been published in The Nib, The Believer, The Lily and the Eisner winner Puerto Rico Strong Anthology from Lion Forge as well as the Ignatz Winner Be Gay, Do Comics!
