Solidarity Economy in the Performing Arts: What’s Reparations Got to Do With It?

About the event

Watch the video of this event below:

Please join us for an evening of exploring historical and current examples of solidarity economy (co-ops, collectives, barter, timebanks, land trusts, credit unions, community financing, and more) as strategies capable of disrupting the status quo of ongoing racial inequity through reparative redistribution of resources and investment in self-determination strategies by people of color. We will envision how we might implement solidarity economy within the realm of the performing arts in New York City. This event will showcase the programming and organizing work that the performance space JACK has undertaken through their Reparations365 Series. After hearing brief presentations from a variety of scholars, cultural organizers, arts professionals, and artists, JACK’s former Co-Director and current board member DeeArah Wright will lead us in a community conversation.

Speakers include: DeeArah Wright, an artist, educator, strategist, and mover based in Brooklyn, NY; Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, Chair of the Africana Studies Department, Director of the McNair Program at John Jay College, and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice; Lauren Hudson, a Doctoral Candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center and member of SolidarityNYC, who will provide historical and contemporary contexts for solidarity economy; Meropi Peponides, a theater maker, artistic producer/dramaturg, podcast producer, member of Artists Co-Creating Real Equity (ACRE) and co-founder of Radical Evolution, and a Reparations365 commissioned writer; Moira Brennan, the Program Director for the MAP Fund at Creative Capital; Benedict Nguyen, a dancer, writer, and arts advocate; Melanie Greene, a movement-based artist, writer, and co-host of The Dance Union podcast; J. Bouey, dance artist, educator, and co-host of The Dance Union podcast; and Jaime Shearn Coan, Digital Publics Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and Doctoral Candidate in English at the Graduate Center, writer, editor, and collaborator with JACK’s Reparations365 Series.

Co-organized by Jaime Shearn Coan and DeeArah Wright.

As part of Jaime Shearn Coan's collaboration with JACK's Reparations365 project, DeeArah Wright and Coan commissioned writers to write longform pieces that take up the idea of reparations and the arts from a particular vantage point, presenting their research in a manner that is both embodied and personal. Each writer offers up recommendations and new visions for the redistribution of resources and relationships. Click below to read their writings:

• "The In-Between Space: Grappling with Reparations as a Model Minority" by Meropi Peponides

• "Giving back by giving it up: on gentrification, reparations, dance,and probably too many other things" (Part 1) by Benedict Nguyen

• "Giving back by giving it up: on gentrification, reparations, dance, and probably too many other things" (Part 2) by Benedict Nguyen

• "Good Morning, Whiteness" by Aisha "Li" Cousins

• "Debt Is Exhausting" by Jamara Wakefield.

Read Approaching Reparations PDF

Co-sponsored by JACK, made possible in part by a Humanities New York Action Grant; the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY; the Earth and Environmental Sciences Ph.D. Program; the English Ph.D. Program; the Africana Studies Certificate Program; and the American Studies Certificate Program.