📽️ Show Don't Tell 2024 Symposium Recap & Summer Invitations 💌
Art is the heartbeat of Change!
We did it – together! Our Show Don’t Tell Symposium has just wrapped, and we are so grateful to our expansive community of artists for sharing their work and spirit with us so generously.
The last two weeks were packed full of events, workshops, engagements and presentations across New York City, and we wanted to take a moment to celebrate those moments with you here. Thank you to all who participated in this grassroots celebration of creativity and social change, and to our generous venue partners and collaborators: Hub17, Arts On Site, Francis Kite Club, Creative Time Headquarters (CTHQ), Recess, Interference Archive, Bailey’s Cafe, and Socrates Sculpture Park. A tremendous everlasting thank you to Symposium producer Maya Shah for organizing and coordinating everything, and to production assistant extraordinaire Edwin Almanzar for helping things run smoothly. For photo highlights of the transformative events that we shared last week, check out our previous newsletter issue here.
🌺 more moments from Show Don’t Tell Symposium 2024!
BENCH CHAT at RECESS ART: We met at the incredible abolitionist community and art center Recess Art for Bench Chat with Sara Zielinski (Fellow 2023), working in collaboration with Recess Assembly artists. The night began with an illuminating presentation on the history of policing from before American colonization up to the present day, including statistics on the plans for new jail construction and police facility funding in New York City. Sara and her collaborators then unveiled a number of benches created to resist the city’s hostile architecture, one of which was made from found and repurposed NYPD barricades. The night was truly a testament to resistance as an act of interdependence and community care.
photos by Maya Shah
THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES: SELF-MYTHOLOGY + DREAMING WORKSHOP at BAILEY’S CAFE: Six (Fellow 2023-2024) facilitated a generous and engaging workshop concerning self-mythology. Through guided exercises in embodiment, writing, and meditation, we were all invited to connect with our ancestry and identify the threads that each of us are strung upon. Six re-framed individuality and the self as inextricably connected to and blossoming from the larger communities we belong to.
CP ZINE DAY + POT LUCK at CREATIVE TIME HEADQUARTERS: A sincere thanks to everybody who joined us for our knowledge and experience sharing zine making time together! We shared a delicious potluck, Clarinda Mac Low offered a brief history of CP’s civically engaged making and doing, and the ways that Culture Push Fellows and Associated Artists continue to connect with communities across NYC. And the zines! Our stellar Fellows; six, Nifemi Ogunro, Sara Zielinski, and Nora Almeida, and Associated Artist anna roberts-gevalt led curious and enthusiastic participants in zine-making that wove together the participants’ creativity, thoughts, and lived experiences with the Fellows’ ongoing work.
photos by moira williams
THE BEGINNING OF SWIMMING SEASON AT THE END OF THE WORLD WITH at INTERFERENCE ARCHIVE and GOWANUS DREDGERS BOATHOUSE: Nora Almeida (Climate Justice Fellow 2023) and her collaborators (Olive Toran and Jordan Packer) shared a participatory archival activation that is part of Open Water a research and public art project about swimming, flooding, and water relationships. People stopped by to share their own water stories, feelings, fears, and memories and listen to and look through the archive of water experiences and practices, urban swimming, and coastal ecology that Nora and collaborators have gathered throughout her Fellowship year.
photos by Clarinda Mac Low
MELD at SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK: In collaboration with movement artist Coco Villa, Nifemi Ogunro led a beautiful movement and building workshop. The workshop began with sharing process updates of Nifemi’s project, then moved into an enlivening and delicious movement session led by Coco. The participants worked with the energy and forms of their movement to create drawings and then collaboratively transform those drawings into a group-built object.
photos by Maya Shah
🦢 PUSH/PULL's "Leavings" Awaits You!
If you happened to miss the debut of PUSH/PULL's latest issue, "Leavings," last week, consider this your invitation to catch up.
Curated by Nora Almeida, an artist and activist with a keen eye for urban ecology, this collection takes an unexpected muse: Coney Island Creek. Six artists, including Almeida, have contributed works that span poetry, visual art, and environmental research. Each piece offers perspectives on what we leave behind in our urban landscapes, transforming the overlooked into the thought-provoking. For those who haven't yet dipped into this exploration of urban remnants and environmental traces, you can still access the full issue by clicking the link below.
"Leavings" features works from six artists: Nora Almeida, Willa Goettling, iki nakagawa, Jordan Packer, Olive Toran, and andrea haenggi. Their contributions span poetry, instructional pieces, environmental research, and visual art, each offering a unique perspective on what we leave behind and how it shapes our world.
➕ THIS EVENING : Catch up with Nora Almeida & iki nakagawa 🎟️ at Open Session.
Open Sessions are a series of evenings curated and hosted at Storefront for Art and Architecture by an invited guest during the last week of each month. These informal gatherings will open a space for collective learning where critical issues surrounding the themes of Storefront’s yearly research are shared and discussed.
Thursday, June 27, 2024, 6:30 – 8:00 pm
Note: This program has limited capacity and RSVP is required. [RSVP]
About Open Session #11:
For our eleventh Open Session, artists and activists Nora Almeida and iki nakagawa present Watershed Activation, a movement-based session that engages with and activates a multimedia archive of videos, audio, photography, writing, and ephemera. This material was produced and collected at Coney Island Creek in Brooklyn and Venado Verde on the Pacific coast of Colombia. This activation is the continuation of an ongoing, site-specific project that explores relationships between people, water, and shoreline ecosystems and seeks to understand care practices and transcorporeal embodiment––between human bodies, water bodies, and more-than-human species–in the context of climate crisis. Through this experimental session, the artists hope to learn whether and how an activated archive can provoke conversations, emotional responses, or socio-political actions that extend beyond the geographic and temporal space of a performance.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nora Almeida, Culture Push Climate Justice Fellow 2023 is an urban swimmer, writer, conceptual and performance artist, educator, and activist based in Gowanus, Lenapehoking / Brooklyn. Her art explores intersections of archiving, environmental investigation, and spatial disruption. Recent public artworks including The Last Street End in Gowanus and Land Use Intervention Library have focused on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed, post-industrial waterfront spaces. Since 2022, she’s been working on Open Water, a site-specific research and public art project about swimming, water relationships, and flooding.
iki nakagawa, Culture Push Associated Artist 2021, is an artist who practices videography as a means of witnessing, embodying, processing and translating ideas, actions and situations in which they thrive. She has been working as a professional archival videographer, and worked with numerous cultural institutions in NYC and beyond.
🪄 Culture Push Associated Artist Veronica Agard is back with a new season of Writing with Ancestors.
On July 10th, Culture Push Associated Artist, AIT founder and co-curator Veronica Agard brings us Sacred Connections along with Cynthia Alonzo Perez of Rooted in Reflections up first with Resourcing Our Ancestral Gifts.
While our lineage has much-unprocessed trauma that embodies our cells with sacred rage and grief, we also carry within us the medicine they'd offer us from their most highest loving safety. Veronica switches into host mode to support Cynthia.
All sessions are recorded, but live participation is encouraged. Tickets are available on a sliding scale $25, $40, $55, with discounts and 2 for 1 specials as well. Attendees will receive the recording, slides, and curated resources after the event.
Be sure to save www.ancestorsintraining.org-sacred-connections for more information and to see who will be joining us next.