“I remember stepping off the plane and thinking, I've made it. This is the promised land. A utopia. A place where dreams come true. Unfortunately over the last decade, I've watched this vision of what America claims to be, fall apart right in front of my very eyes. This utopia is a dystopia in disguise.”
Read More“The bathroom is a space where people can be completely themselves. This is a sacred and safe space because there is no one else around to tell them otherwise, unless it were to be interrupted or intruded. There are an endless number of events that can take place in this setting throughout our lives, whether positive, negative, or neutral.”
Read MoreOn June 14th, Rainy M., Lee Emma Running, and Lauren Simpson sat down for a conversation about positioning creative practice as an investigative tool to explore the relationships between power, touch, consent, and control.
Read More“The World Health Organization (WHO) defines 55dB to be the threshold at which noise becomes harmful to human health. Noise and air pollution are interlinked, as both are typically birthed from machines, transportation, and propagation systems.”
Read MoreOn April 12th, Amanda Huckins, Carolyn Erickson and Eden Erickson, Maritza N. Estrada, and Kelly Seacrest sat down for a conversation about mutual caregiving and its potential as an embodied practice to build solidarity within creative communities.
Read More“Horseplay is fooling around. Horseplay workshop is organized fooling around. We are serious about practicing but not always serious within the practice.”
Read More“There is one nurse,
One doctor,
One psychiatric specialist per 100,000 residents in a single district.”
On February 7th, members of Amplify’s 2023-24 Alternate Currents cohort sat down to celebrate the launch of We Free Us, their collaborative publication, and talk about working together over the past year to to build relationships and shore up regenerative modes of mutual exchange.
Read More“Providing care is not profitable because the value assigned to providing care is low, while the actual human cost to provide care is incredibly high.”
Read MoreOn November 29th, Manne Cook and SaRena Freet sat down with Amanda Huckins, to consider ‘the commons’ more deeply and discuss the terms and social charters that help artists negotiate the often messy process of collectively managing shared resources for the wellbeing of the many, rather than the few.
Read MoreOn September 27th, Annika Johnson, Diana Martinez, and Alajia McKizia joined Jared Packard to consider how critical and evaluative frameworks might change to more fully embrace the uncertainties, indecipherable rewards, and generative failures inherent in socially and politically engaged work.
Read More“These communities helped me find my own value in art making, which is a rare and precious thing. But even in these spaces, the revolutionary spark can get lost.”
Read MoreOn July 26th, Cass Eddington, Alex O’Hanlon, and Valerie St. Pierre Smith sat down with Amanda Huckins, to talk about the ways in which artists and organizers cultivate common spaces for learning in response to shifting paradigms of “value” and “worth” in higher education.
Read MoreOn May 17th, Mary Elizabeth Lawson and Anna McClellan sat down with Dereck Higgins, Jacoby, Keiria Marsha, and Ameen Wahba to talk about how collaborative performance practices build communities and model new paradigms of “value” and “worth.”
Read More“I remember when it didn't matter as much.
I know it doesn’t matter as much.
It shouldn't matter as much.
But it does.“
On March 29th Dawaune Lamont Hayes, Parker Krieg, Bilgesu Sisman, and Jared Packard sat down for a conversation that examines how artists are aligning their practices with anti-capitalist orientations, and the movement lineages they come from, to cultivate relationships, rest, and regenerative economies.
Read More“Queers move away, like I did, to ‘escape’ these conditions. I think that queer ontologies, and increasingly, the intersectional LGBTQIA2S+ political struggles in areas with conservative governments, show us a mode of becoming that is crucial in 2023.“
Read More“At the dinner table, we have the privilege of challenging where we have been and questioning how we plan to show up. In this environment, it is generative to gather with love and create small patterns of healing with conscious ripples of spiritual connectedness.“
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