Visibility Project Director, Mia Nakano, is speaking in Philadelphia on October 5th at the Leeway Foundation’s “Revolve: Art and Social Change Symposium“.

Join us on Saturday, October 5, for a day-long event that will convene artists, activists, cultural workers, organizers, scholars, and community leaders to celebrate examples from the past two decades where artists and cultural producers have connected their practice to social change movements.

The day will consist of a keynote presentation, three plenary sessions, and pop-up performances. Session topics include: “Claiming Space: Community to Museum”, “Embedded in Community: What Is Social Practice?” and “Hybridism: Artists as Activists”.

Panelist Bios

anonymous bodies art collective is an interdisciplinary performance company co-directed by Kate Watson-Wallace and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, based in New York and Philadelphia. As a collective, the two co-directors create work independently and collaboratively, creating an array of art projects, that range from solo performances in gallery settings, to larger performance installations on-site. It is a project-based company that collaborates with a diverse group of dancers, visual artists, musicians, stylists, and DJs. It draws upon the traditions of visual art, post-modern dance, site-specific study, conceptual and performance art, audience participation and public spectacle. Known for their creative use of ordinary space, anonymous bodies “has a gift for making pockets of space feel infinite. Wild imagination ruled.” (The New York Times)

Bayeté Ross Smith is an artist, photographer, and educator living in New York City. He is represented by beta pictoris gallery/Maus Contemporary. He began his career as a photojournalist with the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation. Bayeté has exhibited with organizations and institutions such as the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Brooklyn Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, MoMA P.S.1, Duetsche Bank, Rush Arts Gallery, the Leica Gallery, the Utah MOCA, the Patricia Sweetow Gallery, the Goethe Institute (Ghana), and Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland). His collaborative projects Along The Way and Question Bridge: Black Males have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. His work has also been featured at the Sheffield Doc Fest in Sheffield England and the L.A. Film Festival. Bayeté is currently the Associate Program Director for Kings against Violence Initiative, a violence prevention non-profit organization in New York that has a partnership with Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn.

Detroit based artist and activist Invincible’s spitfire wordplay has received acclaim from fans all across the world, while their active involvement in progressive social change has taken their music beyond entertainment toward actualizing the change they wish to see. As a co-founder of EMERGENCE Media, they released their debut album ShapeShifters (2008) and produced award winning videos like The Revival (2009) about women in hip-hop, and Locusts (2008) exploring displacement and gentrification in Detroit. In addition to their work as a performing artist, for the last decade Invincible has worked with Detroit Summer, they were also the co-coordinator and co-founder of the Detroit Future Youth Network to support. Invincible is currently working with renown producer Waajeed (Bling47/DIRT TECH RECK), multimedia artist and creative technologist Carlos Garcia, and visual artist Wesley Taylor on Complex Movements, an interactive multimedia installation based hip-hop collective exploring the relationship between complex sciences and social justice movements.

Jeff Chang is the author of the forthcoming book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, and the American Book Award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He serves at the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. He has been a co-founder of ColorLines, The Culture Group, and CultureStr/ke.

Jesus Barraza is an activist printmaker based in San Leandro, California. Using bold colors and high contrast images, his prints reflect both his local and global community and their resistance in a struggle to create a new world. Jesus has worked closely with numerous community organizations to create prints that visualize struggles for immigration rights, housing, education, and international solidarity. Printmaking has allowed Jesus to produce relevant images that can be put back into the hands of his community and spread throughout the world. He believes that through this work and the work of Dignidad Rebelde, he is playing a role in keeping the history of graphic art activism alive.

L.J. Roberts is a textile artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Their studio practice consists of large-scale knitted installations created with children’s toy knitting machines, jacquard weavings, and incredibly detailed embroideries. L.J’s work explores the intersections of feminism, queer and trans politics, activism, on-going AIDS, community, and protest. Most recently their work was included in 40 Under 40: Craft Futures at The Renwick Gallery of The Smithsonian Museum of American Art and Not Over: 25 Years of Visual AIDS at La Mama Galleria in New York City. Currently, L.J.’s work is on view in the exhibition Alien She at The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. Alien She will travel to Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. Their work will also be included in the forthcoming show Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2014. L.J. maintains a critical writing practice that bridges craft and queer theory. Their writing can be found in the anthology Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture in Contemporary Art published by Duke University Press. They have a forthcoming essay that discusses the on-going AIDS epidemic and craft tactics in an anthology on Craftivism to be published by Arsenal Press in the Spring of 2014

Marlène Ramírez-Cancio is an interdisciplinary artist from Puerto Rico who co-founded and co-directs Fulana, a Latina video collective based in New York City. Using parody and satire as a critical tool, Fulana’s mock television commercials, music videos and print pieces respond to the ways ideologies and identities are marketed through the mass media. The collective’s works have been shown internationally at film festivals, museums, universities and online at fulana.org. Marlène is also Associate Director, Arts & Media, at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a transnational network of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists across the Americas. Housed at NYU, the Institute promotes interdisciplinary collaborations at the level of artistic practice and pedagogy, builds collections of artistic and academic materials for research across borders, and aims to train the next generation of performance-based political artists.

Melanie Cervantes aims to translate the hopes and dreams of justice movements into images that are life affirming and inspire people to take action. She is best known for her prolific production of political screen prints and posters. Employing vibrant colors and hand-drawn illustrations, her work moves those viewed as marginal to the center – featuring powerful youth, elders, women, and queer and indigenous peoples. With her partner and fellow printmaker Jesus Barraza, she formed Dignidad Rebelde, a collaborative graphic arts project. Dignidad Rebelde produces art intended to transform people’s stories into a radical visual language, which is then returned to those who initially inspired it. Working primarily as poster artists, Dignidad Rebelde continues an important artistic tradition deeply rooted in popular social movements throughout the Americas.

As Executive Director, Michelle Coffey designs, implements and furthers the strategic agenda, leadership and vision of Lambent Foundation. Through innovative grant making and projects, Lambent Foundation supports the intersections of contemporary arts and culture as critical strategies for social change. Lambent’s global grant making provides critical general operating support for artist-centered organizations in the visual, performance and alternative media fields in New York, New Orleans and Nairobi.

Ryann Makenzi Holmes is a black-feminist, and self identified boi. Born in the nations capital, and raised in nearby PG county, Maryland, she’s called Brooklyn home for the last decade. In 2009, she founded the bklyn boihood and she is currently the Director of Community Programming at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), in Brooklyn. She completed undergrad at George Mason University, and graduated from Baruch College’s MBA Entrepreneurship program in 2011. Ryann has been featured in numerous publications, was named one of Go Magazine’s ‘Top 100 Women We Love’, and ranked as Velvet Park’s ‘Top 25 Significant Queer Women of the Year’.

Roya Rastegar is a scholar, artist and curator living between Philadelphia and L.A. She has served as the co-director of the Santa Cruz Women of Color Film & Video Festival, worked at Sundance, Tribeca, and the L.A. Film Festivals, and held a curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Museum ISP. She recently received a Creative Capital grant in the Emerging Fields, and is the co-writer of Wildness (2012), which premiered at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight Film Festival and won a Grand Jury Prize at Outfest. Her articles on film culture have appeared in The Nation, The Huffington Post, ColorLines Magazine, and The Feminist Wire. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow and visiting professor at Bryn Mawr College.

Shelley Spector is an artist, curator and teacher. Her multidisciplinary works that explore common themes like money, relationships, tools of measurement and the environment are part of many private and public collections. She founded SPECTOR Gallery/Projects in 1999, working to champion emerging talent and new concepts. An offshoot of the program is Artjaw.com, an online anthology of first person stories from the Philadelphia art community.

Dr. Yaba Blay is a researcher and scholar of Africana Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies. She received a BA in Psychology (Cum Laude) from Salisbury State University, a M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology from the University of New Orleans, an M.A. and Ph.D. in African American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from Temple University. Among her many publications, Yaba’s ethnographic case study entitled Pretty Color and Good Hair: Creole Women of New Orleans and the Politics of Identity is featured in the Hampton Press anthology Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities (2011). She is currently editing her first book-length manuscript, Yellow Fever: Skin Bleaching and the Politics of Skin Color, which investigates the social practice of skin bleaching in Ghana. Dr. Blay is the recipient of a 2010 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant through which she embarked upon (1)ne Drop: Conversations on Skin Color, Race, and Identity, a portrait documentary exploring the intersection of skin color politics and negotiations of Black identity.