Learning Session: Arts. Culture. Civics.
How creativity deepens civic engagement -- and why we need arts & culture to catalyze a culture of voting across New York City.
Friday, November 19, 2021
This panel of artists and cultural organizers showcases current work in New York and nationwide, to help us reimagine innovative approaches to voter engagement. Tom Finkelpearl leads a discussion on the ways in which socially engaged art practices, visual and social media campaigns, and community-based co-creation can strengthen civic participation.
Moderator Tom Finkelpearl is a writer, curator, and arts administrator. He is the former director of The Queens Museum, and from 2014 to 2019, served as Commissioner of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. He is the author of What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Duke University Press, 2013) and Dialogues in Public Art (MIT Press, 2001).
Panelists
Yazmany Arboleda is a Colombian American artist based in New York City. As the current Public Artist in Residence at the NYC Civic Engagement Commission, he created The People’s Bus, a community center on wheels designed to engage New Yorkers in civic life through beauty and joy. An architect by training, Yazmany has created public art projects with communities from around the world. He has collaborated with Carnegie Hall, the Yale School of Management, and BRIC; and has lectured at UNC, MIT, and LPAC about the power of art in public space.
Marco A. Carrión is Executive Director of El Puente, a community human rights institution that nurtures and inspires leadership for peace and justice through the engagement of members in the arts, education, scientific research, wellness, and environmental action. He previously served as the Commissioner of New York City’s Community Affairs Unit, serving as a direct link between the mayor and our city’s neighborhoods.
Eric Gottesman studies nationalism, migration, representation, structural violence, history, and intimate relations through his collaborative art practice. His work has been shown at health conferences, on the televised opening of the NFL season, inside government buildings, on indigenous reserves, inside post-war rubble and in museums like MoMA/PS1, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, MFA Boston, Houston Center of Photography, MoCA Cleveland, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. Gottesman is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Creative Capital Artist, a Fulbright Fellow, an Artadia awardee, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Artist and a co-founder of For Freedoms, an initiative for art and civic engagement that won the ICP-Infinity Award and was named the "largest creative collaboration in United States history" by TIME Magazine. He teaches at SUNY Purchase and in the Arab Documentary Photography Program in Beirut, Lebanon.
Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist, activist, and educator. She is the current Fine Arts Fellow in Civic Engagement at Pratt Institute. Her practice pushes the formal and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to foster progressive social change through performance, social practice, video, rap music, teaching and writing. She has shown at The Whitney Museum of American Art The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, Artpace, The High Line, Socrates Sculpture Park, BRIC Arts, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest.
Shaun Leonardo is an artist and Co-Director of Recess, where he co-founded Assembly, an arts-based diversion program for court-involved youth. His work as an artist negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. In his work as an educator, Leonardo promotes the political potential of attention and discomfort as a means to disrupt meaning and shift perspective. He has worked as an educator at the New Museum, the Fortune Society, Cooper Union, and the Point CDC. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and MASS MoCA.
Diya Vij is the Associate Curator at Creative Time who is committed to critically investigating the evolving role of public art in politics and civic life. Over the past decade, she has held programming, curatorial, and communications positions at the High Line, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), and the Queens Museum. At DCLA, Vij launched and co-directed the Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) program, a municipal residency program that embeds artists into city agencies to address New York City’s most pressing issues. Additionally, she was a project lead for the Agency’s citywide Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative, and played an active role in public monument efforts, and CreateNYC — New York City’s first cultural plan.