The AC blog offers new perspectives around how justice in the arts is interpreted, documented, and enacted.
The Alternate Currents blog is home to an extensive archive of articles, interviews, critical writing, and creative research that bring issues around justice in the arts into clearer focus.
“The struggles of artists and cultural workers for fair compensation and financial stability/sustainability cannot and should not exist independent of struggles for housing, healthcare, education, and protections led by people from all walks of life.”
“The composition layers keyboard played by Mary Elizabeth Jo Dixen Pelenaise Kapi’olani Lawson, her vocals (chanting, reading, humming), sounds inside a kitchen, and the voice of Paul Stephen Benjamin singing ‘Black Is the Color.’”
“Indigenous people of this continent have ancestral responsibilities and rights that others do not. Each of us is born with the opportunity to serve our community in a way that fulfills a need. My energy goes towards forging relationships with the plants from this region that remain.”
“Taking the project from its inception to completion helped us deepen our respective creative practices and our relationships with each other and our collaborators. It’s also a process that we invite others to copy freely and use as a blueprint for making similar work in different social and geographic contexts.”
“East, West, North, South, each occupy equal weight on the compass, and all regions enjoy autonomy and self-determination to their fullest possible expressions. Poverty is a memory and prosperity is promised to all. We have achieved Utopia. Now, where do you want to eat?”
“I remember stepping off the plane and thinking, I've made it. This is the promised land. A utopia. A place where dreams come true. Unfortunately over the last decade, I've watched this vision of what America claims to be, fall apart right in front of my very eyes. This utopia is a dystopia in disguise.”
“The bathroom is a space where people can be completely themselves. This is a sacred and safe space because there is no one else around to tell them otherwise, unless it were to be interrupted or intruded. There are an endless number of events that can take place in this setting throughout our lives, whether positive, negative, or neutral.”
On June 14th, Rainy M., Lee Emma Running, and Lauren Simpson sat down for a conversation about positioning creative practice as an investigative tool to explore the relationships between power, touch, consent, and control.
“The World Health Organization (WHO) defines 55dB to be the threshold at which noise becomes harmful to human health. Noise and air pollution are interlinked, as both are typically birthed from machines, transportation, and propagation systems.”
On April 12th, Amanda Huckins, Carolyn Erickson and Eden Erickson, Maritza N. Estrada, and Kelly Seacrest sat down for a conversation about mutual caregiving and its potential as an embodied practice to build solidarity within creative communities.
“Horseplay is fooling around. Horseplay workshop is organized fooling around. We are serious about practicing but not always serious within the practice.”
“There is one nurse,
One doctor,
One psychiatric specialist per 100,000 residents in a single district.”
On February 7th, members of Amplify’s 2023-24 Alternate Currents cohort sat down to celebrate the launch of We Free Us, their collaborative publication, and talk about working together over the past year to to build relationships and shore up regenerative modes of mutual exchange.
“Providing care is not profitable because the value assigned to providing care is low, while the actual human cost to provide care is incredibly high.”
On November 29th, Manne Cook and SaRena Freet sat down with Amanda Huckins, to consider ‘the commons’ more deeply and discuss the terms and social charters that help artists negotiate the often messy process of collectively managing shared resources for the wellbeing of the many, rather than the few.
On September 27th, Annika Johnson, Diana Martinez, and Alajia McKizia joined Jared Packard to consider how critical and evaluative frameworks might change to more fully embrace the uncertainties, indecipherable rewards, and generative failures inherent in socially and politically engaged work.
“These communities helped me find my own value in art making, which is a rare and precious thing. But even in these spaces, the revolutionary spark can get lost.”
On July 26th, Cass Eddington, Alex O’Hanlon, and Valerie St. Pierre Smith sat down with Amanda Huckins, to talk about the ways in which artists and organizers cultivate common spaces for learning in response to shifting paradigms of “value” and “worth” in higher education.
On May 17th, Mary Elizabeth Lawson and Anna McClellan sat down with Dereck Higgins, Jacoby, Keiria Marsha, and Ameen Wahba to talk about how collaborative performance practices build communities and model new paradigms of “value” and “worth.”
“I remember when it didn't matter as much.
I know it doesn’t matter as much.
It shouldn't matter as much.
But it does.“
On March 29th Dawaune Lamont Hayes, Parker Krieg, Bilgesu Sisman, and Jared Packard sat down for a conversation that examines how artists are aligning their practices with anti-capitalist orientations, and the movement lineages they come from, to cultivate relationships, rest, and regenerative economies.
“Queers move away, like I did, to ‘escape’ these conditions. I think that queer ontologies, and increasingly, the intersectional LGBTQIA2S+ political struggles in areas with conservative governments, show us a mode of becoming that is crucial in 2023.“
“At the dinner table, we have the privilege of challenging where we have been and questioning how we plan to show up. In this environment, it is generative to gather with love and create small patterns of healing with conscious ripples of spiritual connectedness.“
On January 25th, Amplify’s 2022 Alternate Currents Working Group came together to celebrate the launch of their collaborative publication, This Place and to talk more about where we’ve been, how we’ve changed, and what the future might hold.
“I believe laughter and play are central to our healing and our connection. If we lose that sense of playfulness, if we lose our sense of humor, we've lost the battle. I feel like laughter is resilience, especially in Native culture.”
“When I am working in the verge, alongside the screech of the road, the urgency, and the energy of the wild world courses through me. In the verge I think about the imperative of safe passage. I think about the possibilities of what wild spaces can be. I think about how connected we all are. “
On October 18th, Mi’oux Stabler and Lydia Cheshewalla sat down with Casey Welsch for a conversation about food sovereignty’s role in confronting generations of colonial dispossession and revitalizing community health and cultural autonomy.