Talk

To whom are artists and art institutions accountable? What role can artists, and especially art students, play in political organizing and anti-capitalist, anti-colonial political action? The International Women's Strike Campus Coordinating Committee presents "Art & Direct Action." Members of MTL+ collective, Chinatown Art Brigade, and others will speak on their experiences combining research, aesthetics, organizing and action, followed by a Q&A. Presented by BFA Visual & Critical Studies. Chinatown Art Brigade consists of artists, media makers and activists creating art and media to advance social justice, based on the belief that accountability to communities that are directly impacted by racial, social and economic inequities must be central to our culture, art or media making process. They collaborate with the Chinatown Tenants Union of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, a grassroots non-profit that organizes low-income, pan-Asian communities around tenant rights, fighting evictions and displacement. Members of MTL+ collective created Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy magazine, Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), the direct action arm of Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee, Direct Action Front for Palestine (DAFP), Decolonial Cultural Front, and most recently, Decolonize This Place, a movement space and decolonial formation in New York City that combines analysis, organizing, art and action around five strands of struggle: Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Free Palestine, Global Wage Worker and De-Gentrification.