Edited by Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno, and Elizabeth M. Webb
Duke University Press
2/27/2024, paperback
SKU: 9781478025160
FUTURE/PRESENT brings together a vast collection of writers, artists, activists, and academics working at the forefront of today's most pressing struggles for cultural equity and racial justice in a demographically changing America. The volume builds upon five years of national organizing by Arts in a Changing America, an artist-led initiative that challenges structural racism by centering people of color who are leading innovation at the nexus of arts production, community benefit, and social change. FUTURE/PRESENT includes a range of essays and criticism, visual and performance art, artist manifestos, interviews, poetry, and reflections on community practice. Throughout, contributors examine issues of placekeeping and belonging, migration and diasporas, the carceral state, renegotiating relationships with land, ancestral knowledge as radical futurity, and shifting paradigms of inequity.
Foregrounding the powerful resilience of communities of color, FUTURE/PRESENT advances the role of artists as first responders to injustices, creative stewards in the cohesion and health of communities, and innovative strategists for equity.
Selected contributors. Dahlak Brathwaite, adrienne maree brown, Jeff Chang, Tameca Cole, Ofelia Esparza, Antoine Hunter, Nobuko Miyamoto, Wendy Red Star, Spel, Jose Antonio Vargas, Carrie Mae Weems, Hinaleimoana Kwai Kong Wong-Kalu
Reviews:
"FUTURE/PRESENT maps and captures how art, dance, and creative practice exist in our daily lives and act as mechanisms for anticolonial and antiracist practice. By lifting up the voices of artists and outlining the methods that can produce more inclusive spaces in the art world, this important book demonstrates how art is a constant source of strength for communities."--Mishuana Goeman, author of Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in The New World
"FUTURE/PRESENT so elegantly proposes a clear solution to a complex issue: to resist the monoculture we must work from many interconnected creative centers. The myriad voices in this book express exciting ripples of change in the arts and beautifully insist on culture's vital role in progress. May we all take the call." -- Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem
About the Editors:
Daniela Alvarez is REFRAME editor and Research Manager at Arts in a Changing America, and Public Programs Coordinator at the Getty Museum.
Roberta Uno is a theater director and Founding Director of Arts in a Changing America.
Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker and Senior Creative Producer at Arts in a Changing America.