Fostering a Healthy Art World Ecosystem
Panel with Shawn Escarciga, Alicia Grullón, and Antonio Serna, moderated by Christina Freeman
December 3 at 7:00pm EST via Zoom
Register at Eventbrite
ABC No Rio in Exile hosts a virtual panel discussion with artists whose work as activists and organizers shifts the culture of our larger arts community – towards one that is more inclusive, supportive, and sustainable. The program will include short presentations by Shawn Escarciga who recently organized the NYC Low Income Artist and Freelancer Relief Fund; Antonio Serna, co-organizer of Museum Workers’ Happy Hour; and Alicia Grullón one of the initial and current organizers of The People’s Cultural Plan (The PCP). Q+A with open discussion will follow.
This event is a free public program, part of ABC No Rio’s exhibition Take What You Can’t Get.
ASL interpretation will be provided
Panelist Bios
Alicia Grullón is from and based in New York City. Grullón’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC House for Arts and Media, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University, Socrates Sculpture Park, Performa 11, Old Stone House and Art in Odd Places. Her art activist work led her to be one of the initial and current organizers for The People’s Cultural Plan (The PCP), a collection of artists and cultural workers addressing inadequacies with the city’s first proposed cultural plan. The PCP’s 17-page plan is divided into 3 planks: Equitable Housing, Land & Development Policies; Labor Equity; and Public Funding Equity. It launched in July 2017 at Artists Space and in September, The PCP’s response to the city’s plan was published in Hyperallergic.
Shawn Escarciga (he/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, arts administrator, and organizer exploring the intersection of performance, design, and activism. Shawn’s work examines labor, class, and queerness, while speculating on what non-oppressive, anti-capitalistic structures of art-making/valuing might look like. Shawn uses objects and technologies that are readily accessible and low-fi to make work about access, monotony, and struggle. Shawn thinks a lot about classism, queer visibility, mutual aid, the internet, intimacy amongst faggots, and what it would be like to live in a country that supports non-commercial artists and the working class.
Antonio Serna is a Mexican-American artist, activist, and educator living in New York. His current artistic visual research project, Documents of Resistance: Artists of Color Protest (1960-2016), is an extension of his real life anti-racist politics, pedagogy, and activism. This project and others have recently been included in Making and Being: Embodiment, Collaboration, & Circulation in the Visual Arts, 2020. Art As Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art, 2018. Reflecting on Reconstructing Practice: Toward an Anti-racist Art & Design Field, 2018. He is currently co-organizer of Museum Workers’ Happy Hour/BIPOC Workers Working group, a by-and-for worker empowerment and solidarity group.
Moderator Bio
Christina Freeman is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in New York City. Her practice employs pause and interruption as a method for contemplative looking. Freeman’s recent projects have been supported by Creative Time (2019), Queens Museum (2018-2019), Culture Push (2018-2019), National Coalition Against Censorship (2018-2019), and Danish Arts Foundation (2018). By creating breaks in routine temporal systems, she investigates social justice themes such as visibility and censorship, data privacy, cultural value systems, and structural power. Community-building through transformative conversation motivates all of her work, regardless of whether she is performing, curating, or teaching. Intervening in systems often taken for granted, she approaches culture as something we actively shape together.
Funded in part by the New York State Council on Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs