Activism

Evan Bissell

2015 ARC Fellow

Evan Bissell (he/him, white) facilitates participatory art and research projects that support equitable systems and liberatory processes. With groups around the country, he has supported the development of curriculum, public art, laws, books, and convenings that build imagination, power and capacity around the just transition, anti-prison and police efforts, housing justice, and health equity, among others. Most recently Evan created the Arts & Cultural Strategy program at the Othering & Belonging Institute and helped found Richmond LAND, the first community land...

Kevin Bott

Community-Based Theater Artist, Scholar

Kevin Bott is a community-based theater artist and scholar whose interests lie at the intersection of healing, freedom, justice, and movement-building, as well as in the mutually supportive relationship between individual excellence and collective creation. Bott is the founder and artistic director of Ritual4Return, which he began developing in 2008. His 2010 doctoral dissertation is entitled “A Ritual for Return: Investigating the Process of Creating an Original Rite of Passage with Formerly Incarcerated Men.” The study examines the artist’s own ethical decision making...

Kim Anno

The influence of abstraction and abstracting something remains prominent in Kim Anno’s practice, with resulting work that remains “open, playful, and engaged with a difficult ephemeral beauty.” Anno collaborates with other artists and musicians, integrating video, sculpture, sound, and interactivity in performative installations such as Jose Navarrete, Debby Kajiyama. The spectrum of Anno’s work ranges from evocative abstract physical paint, to a rearrangement of 19th century steel engravings lavishly painted on metal and wood. Her paintings imagine the landscape as a...

John Perry Barlow

Poet, Essayist, Cattle Rancher, Cyberlibertarian Political Activist; Former Lyricist for the Grateful Dead
In 1990, John Perry Barlow co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit based in the U.S. that provides legal aid to defend individuals and new technologies from what it considers to be misdirected legal threats. His writing about the impact of the Internet has influenced people’s thinking since the network’s earliest days. His essays for Wired, The New York Times, Communications of the ACM and other publications have been vital to the public discourse. He was probably best-known as a lyricist, essayist and cyberlibertarian, but he was also a...

Anyka Barber

Artist, Activist, Curator, Entrepreneur

Born and raised in Oakland, California Anyka Barber is a mother, an artist/activist, curator and entrepreneur. In 2010 Anyka founded Betti Ono, a creative social enterprise and center for arts, culture, and community committed to the cultural, social, political and economic emancipation and development of low-income, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities of color. In her role as director and curator of Betti Ono, she has curated and produced more than 60 exhibitions and public programs, as well as designed and integrated art, enterprise and social impact strategy to...

Iván Arenas

2010 ARC Fellow

Iván Arenas is an Associate Director at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy where he works to support engaged research that aims to increase society’s understanding of the root causes of racial and ethnic inequality and create research-based policy solutions and collective action. Trained as an anthropologist and architect, his research focuses on how social movements use creative art practices to establish solidarities beyond the state. Dr. Arenas is a practicing artist and has curated three yearlong exhibits at UIC that have mobilized and extended his...

Creative Time: Cheryl Meeker

October 12, 2013
Keyword: Equity | Choosing a term buried within one of the summit themes, inequity, I choose to isolate part of that word for the keyword “equity.” In light of the current massive world debt bomb, preceded and/or partially precipitated by the financial meltdown, derivatives explosion and off budget U.S. war spending, the term equity creates an association first with financial equities (stock equities,) home equity (depleted,) and secondarily to the concept of equity in human terms: fairness. Associations with the term extends to the British actors’ labor union, Equity, and...

Creative Time: Hentyle Yapp

October 12, 2013
Keyword: Occupation | Occupation connotes not only space, but also work. The Occupy “Movement” reminds us of the former, where groups enter a public space and live, exist, eat, celebrate, agitate, and protest. Occupation also reminds us of work, vocation, and an identity – what’s your occupation? what do you do? I’m curious how these two connotations intertwine. Of course, class disparities between different vocations or the have/have nots of an occupation lead to the current iterations of the Occupation of space. However, how does the movement itself become an occupation...

Creative Time: Dee Hibbert-Jones

October 12, 2013

On Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactic | As the anniversary of the start of the Occupy movement rolls around and becomes historicized in exhibitions (at least at YBCA, San Francisco) a feeling of overwhelm overcomes me, which is almost, but not quite hopelessness. There is something overwhelming about the idea of shifting past the initial enthusiasm of utopian possibilities, the desires to increase freedoms. And I start to wonder as a good idea gets older how do we push on through inertia, the uphill struggle to sustain, establish and forge possibilities? How...

Mother Language Day

February 21, 2024
Mother Language Day Celebration Wed Feb 21, 2024
10 – 11am
Hearst Field Annex D23