This spring, Bard Graduate Center is partnering with Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) to support its activities and actions. As part of this collaboration, BGC presents this conversation, curated and moderated by CAB members to shed light on how cultural collectives have developed new pathways for grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and creative activism, all while celebrating community resilience and resistance. Questions to be explored include how we approach our frameworks and conversations so that they go deeper than mere sustainability, especially in the face of COVID-19, and how collectives are re-evaluating, adapting, and creatively shifting to meet the challenges of this moment. This program will highlight collectives that use cultural organizing practices to address gentrification and structural racism through an intersectional lens.
Meet the Speakers
Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) is an intergenerational, womxn-led collective driven by the fundamental belief that our cultural, material, and aesthetic modes of production have the power to advance social change. CAB is comprised of Asian American and Asian diasporic-identifying visual artists, media makers, writers, educators, and organizers with deep roots in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Together we make work that centers art and culture as a way to support community-led campaigns around issues of gentrification and displacement.
Marlon Dylan Herrera (he/him) is a community organizer with #HumbowsNotHotels, or the Chinatown-International District Coalition* in Seattle, on the unceded land of the Duwamish people. Marlon is a second-generation Filipino-American and a lifelong resident of the Coast Salish territories, with a background in policy & planning.
Pati Rodriguez is a lifelong Bushwick resident of Andean-Ecuadorian descent, is an organizer & cofounder of Mi Casa Resiste, an anti-capitalist collective based in Bushwick that uses art + direct action to fight the displacement and criminalization of low-income Black and Brown families in Brooklyn. Pati is a Collective member of the MayDay Space, a social justice center in Brooklyn, where she develops programming that caters to the POC immigrant community in Bushwick, and where she helps organize the local food distribution through Comida Pal Pueblo. Pati is also a part of the fight against environmental racism in North Brooklyn through the Frack Outta Brooklyn coalition, an afro-indigenous led coalition which has been doing political education and direct actions against the fracked gas pipeline being built by National Grid through predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Yin 英 (she/her) is a community organizer, abolitionist, and system thinker. She is a core member of PARISOL, Pacific Rim Solidarity Network, CID Coalition* aka Humbows Not Hotels, and Seattle Peoples Party. She is an immigrant from Taipei, Taiwan, and grew up where Treaty of Point Elliott was signed bəqɬtiyuʔ / Buk-wil-tee-wh (Mukilteo) of Snohomish people — 30min north of the Duwamish, first people of Seattle.
*Chinatown-International District Coalition, or simply, the CID Coalition builds intergenerational, intercultural, and community-based organizing for neighborhood resilience and community power.
Other Presentations in the Series:
Collectively Imagining De-Gentrified and Abolitionist Futures
June 17, 2021
6 pm
