Wednesday, December 15th Update:
Due to inclement weather forecasted for Wednesday, December 15th, Given All This: Panel Discussion and Book Launch has been postponed. We're working to reschedule and will have a new date to share soon!
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Throughout 2021, Alternate Currents worked to address issues surrounding the future of for- and non-profit arts and cultural institutions broadly conceived, their position within the communities that support them, and the shared cultural logic from which colonialism and museums emerged. The Alternate Currents Working Group, a cohort of arts workers and cultural practitioners, collaboratively shaped and influenced those discussions by examining arts economies, organizational hierarchies, cultural labor, museum collections and archives more deeply.
Group members stretched the boundaries of their practices to create work in response that interrogates institutional frameworks by proposing a shared set of values around artists’ relationships with institutions, cultural labor as care, and reorienting settler narratives to better understand Omaha as an Indigenous place. We collected their projects in a forthcoming publication titled, Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures to encapsulate where we’ve been, how we’ve changed, and what the future might hold.
To celebrate its publication and launch, Alternate Currents Working Group members will be in conversation with one another at OutrSpaces on (New Date TBD). They’ll talk about their experiences working collaboratively over the course of the year and make space to discuss how our cultural institutions might adapt to the future, given the pandemic, calls for racial equity and justice, and a changing climate--all this.
Please register through Eventbrite to join us for this in-person event. To maintain social distancing, attendance will be limited to 30 people. Face masks required. Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures will be available after the event through Amplify and at stockists in Omaha, New York, and Los Angeles. Email peter@amplifyarts.org to reserve your copy.
Free and open to all. Alternate Currents programming is presented with the support of the Hitchcock Foundation and the Nebraska Arts Council.
Alternate Currents opens space for conversation, ideation, and action around national and international discussions in the arts that have a profound impact at the local level. Alternate Currents exists both on- and off-line in the form of a dedicated online resource, conversation series, and working group.
www.amplifyarts.org/alternate-currents
About the Panelists:
Corson Androski is a researcher, conservationist, software developer, and photographer/filmmaker from Hutchinson, Kansas. Their work uses the concept of care—as labor, affect, and ethic, given/received by humans and other-than-humans, individuals and systems—to consider subjects like institutional medicine alongside state ecological regulation, and beyond their respective margins, emergent communities of illness alongside informal conservation of the small, overlooked ecosystems of weeds and fungi that spring up in the seams of our patchwork flyover states.
Katie Bettin was born and raised in Omaha. She studied at Colorado State University and received a Bachelors of Science for Food Science and Human Nutrition and a Bachelors of Liberal Arts for Environmental Sociology in 2018. Immediately after she began participating and working within nonprofits that centered around addressing food insecurity around the country and just this last year back in Omaha. In doing so she has been able to recognize aspects of food systems that continuously fall short of serving people and land. It is an ongoing pursuit to better understand her role in helping to transition food systems to something that is rooted in cultural and environmental accountability. She seeks to listen, learn, and understand how her hands, with others, can make this a reality.
Jody Boyer is an artist and educator who tries to make art everyday. In her studio practice she explores the broad interdisciplinary possibilities of traditional and new media with specific interests in personal and collective memory, domesticity, climate change, care and the natural world. Her artwork has been shown in over 85 exhibitions across the country. She received her BA in Studio Arts from Reed College, an MA in Intermedia and Video Art from the University of Iowa and a MS in Secondary Education from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She teaches in the School of the Arts at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and at Norris Middle School. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Allegra Hangen is a multidisciplinary artist who works in video installations, photography, found footage, and archives. Her projects are research-heavy and usually focus on topics like collective and cultural memory, nostalgia, a romanticized idea of home and family, language, and the infiltration of politics into intimate—or seemingly-apolitical—spaces. She actively collaborates with friends and fellow artists between Omaha, NE and Mexico City, namely through Fortuna, a border-crossing residency program that she founded to provide Omahan and Mexico City-based artists time in residence in the other city.
Lex JonAe is an Organic Healing Artist, Certified Peer Educator, Holistic Nutritionist & Health Coach with a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Communication. Lex has studied worldwide with herbalists, shamanic healers, and traditional medicinal healers, learning and growing in the spirit of healing. She is a Product Formulator of Balance Botanica - an Organic Apothecary & Self Care Collection. She has studied throughout Europe, The Caribbean, North & Central America. Lex mindfully handcrafts balms, creams, oils, salts, with a focus on holistic healing of the mind, body, & soul and to enhance self-care, self-love & self awareness using the power of the elements.
Jared Packard is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Packard currently is the Exhibitions Manager at the Bemis Center and has curated exhibitions including Sissi, Generator Space; the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown his work at Superduchess, NYC; ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Gallery, Detroit, MI; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C.; Shiltkamp Gallery, Worcester, MA.
Ilaamen Pelshaw is a Latina artist and illustrator living in the United States since 2015. With a Bachelor’s in Graphic Design she worked for nearly two decades on the commercial and corporate side of creativity. She is known to express her vibrant culture by her use of bold colors and happy themes. Since relocating she has been in more than 25 exhibitions including some Solo-shows. She was selected as one of the winners of the Latin American Illustrators curated by AI-AP for her painting Frida. Selected by Singulart Gallery in Paris, as one of “7 Illustrators to Watch” and featured in several collections curated by Singulart and SaatchiArt Online. Her art can be found in private collections in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Sarah Rowe is a multimedia artist based in Omaha, NE. Her work opens cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. She is of Lakota and Ponca descent.
Lillian Snortland, originally from Eugene, Oregon, is a writer of fiction, poetry, and cultural essays. She has explored themes of fantasy, surrealism, and the imaginative feminine from a young age. At Carleton College, she studied storytelling and material culture of the past—Classical Studies, French literature and media, and art history, and continues to play with a multidisciplinary perspective in her analysis today. She currently works in the nonprofit arts sector. Lillian was accepted into the 2021 Virtual Collaborative Program for Emerging Artists, hosted by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company and Postscript Magazine. Further writing can be found at chaimihai.wordpress.com/, and on her instagram @perfectbleh and @chaimihai.