Alternative Futures: Community-based Practice in New York
When: June 3 @ 6:30 - 8:00PM
Where: The Clemente
Participants: Elena Ketelsen González , Azikiwe Mohammed, Cinthya Santos Briones, Sienna Fekete
Join ICI and The Clemente for a public conversation that explores the evolving landscape of alternative, community-based curatorial practices in New York today. Amid the current climate of political and financial uncertainty, artists, curators, and organizers are reimagining what it means to engage in projects that are not just created for communities, but emerge from them.
The panel discussion brings together four cultural workers—Elena Ketelsen González (Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1), Azikiwe Mohammed (teacher and maker), Cinthya Santos-Briones (interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker), and Sienna Fekete (Senior Arts Manager, The Lower Eastside Girls Club)—who have each developed models that center kinship and belonging. They will discuss how their practices are reorienting curatorial and artistic work away from traditional methodologies and outcomes (such as the art object or the exhibition) and toward meeting material needs and building infrastructures of support, visibility, and resistance. Through youth programs, food banks, healing spaces, and other initiatives, the panelists’ work asks us to expand our understanding of what curatorial practice is and who it can serve.
The program is hosted at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, a model organization for collective and knowledge justice practices in the Lower East Side for over 30 years. It is presented in partnership with the Historias Initiative, a multi-year program led by The Clemente in collaboration with LxNY and supported by the Rauschenberg Foundation. Historias celebrates the transformative impact of Latinx communities in New York City through research, artistic interpretation, and public engagement.