Over the next six weeks, U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (where I have the honor of serving as Chief Policy Wonk) Cultural Agents will host Imaginings in 15 different towns and cities across the nation. Most of these vibrant, art-infused, highly participatory community dialogues have their own event pages on Facebook other or other sites; …
This is the second in a two-part series based on interviews with two founding Cultural Agents in the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (where I hold the title of Chief Policy Wonk). (To stay current on everything this great project is doing, enlist as a Citizen Artist: it’s fun and free.) Jess Solomon in Washington, DC, and Dave Loewenstein …
When I applied to be a Cultural Agent and read the fine print about hosting an Imagining, I was already thinking about what was next because often times we have these events, they feel good, you get people excited—and then what? I really didn’t want to perpetuate that pattern. Jess Solomon, Cultural Agent, Washington, DC …
My favorite epigram is from Voltaire: the perfect is the enemy of the good. I like the way it encapsulates a deep truth, that nothing is perfect, that fault can always be found, that often doing one’s imperfect best is what matters. Sometimes I feel really discouraged that so much of the U.S. progressive movement …
SELMA. A few days ago, an estimated 40,000 people descended on Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (and recently portrayed in Ava DuVernay’s film) and of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil rights legislation passed in its …
Let us forge a state of union A place where every child is A child Where you see me and I see you I mean really see each other as extensions one of one another From People’s State of the Union commentary by Makani Themba, Minister of Revolutionary Imagination, U.S. Department of Arts and Culture …
It’s easy to think of spiritual practice as something separate from ordinary life: the time one spends on a meditation cushion or chanting prayers or sending praisesongs into the world. But for me these days, the most powerful spiritual practices are things I seldom put in that category. Is facilitating a discussion a spiritual practice? …
Today’s my birthday. When my husband asked what I wanted, I told him I wanted to feel young for a day. Spending the day in bed would have been one way to get my wish, but this is not what I had in mind: here we both are, in the grip of hacking colds. As …
I spent decades denying I was an optimist before copping to it, and now—instead of trying to live the label down, I find myself trying to live up to it. I’d say this year has left me with an acute case of whiplash. Turn my head one way, and I see activism at a height …
The demonstrators who are stopping traffic, occupying public spaces, and marching through busy shopping streets want to disrupt business-as-usual in the hope of awakening conscience and action. The tags on every demonstration notice at Ferguson Response tell the story: #WeCantBreathe, #ThisStopsToday, #JusticeforEricGarner, #JusticeforMikeBrown. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area—specifically in Berkeley and Oakland, two …