Arts and Social Justice

This Podcast was recorded on January 3, 2020. The full transcript of this podcast is published below.
Explore the full GIA podcast.

Project Reset, a program in New York City, allows people arrested for low-level offenses like fare beating and painting graffiti, among others, to avoid jail or court appearance by taking a two-hour course at the Brooklyn Museum, Hyperallergic reports.

James “Yaya” Hough, an accomplished artist who was formerly incarcerated, will be the first artist-in-residence in a Philadelphia government agency, the District Attorney’s Office.

Solange Knowles has been announced as the recipient of the Lena Horne Prize for Artists Creating Social Impact, The Root reported.

A couple of days ago, men and women marched 26 miles through New Orleans, dressed as participants from a slave rebellion that happened there two centuries ago, as The Guardian and The New York Times reported. The re-enactment, led by New York artist Dread Scott, retraced the route of one of the largest -and overlooked- slave rebellions in US history: the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which 500 enslaved people of African descent marched toward New Orleans from the surrounding sugar plantations.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded recently $750,000 to the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law to support its work in investigating and archiving acts of racial terror in the South between 1930 and the 1970s, explains the announcement.

The Open Society Foundations announced recently the launch of its Culture and Art program, which "seeks to advance diverse artistic practices and strengthen locally-led cultural spaces around the world through grantmaking, capacity building, and convening power."

The Arts and Activism (A&A) ColLABoration, a pilot project funded jointly by The CrossCurrents and Compton Foundations to support the work of artists in partnership with organizers and activist organizations, announced five projects that were awarded $30,000 to engage in arts-integrated organizing through themes of democracy, power, and freedom in the United States.

Films like Roma, A Fantastic Woman, and Spotlight and Ava DuVernay’s scripted series When They See Us were produced by Participant Media, a production company founded "on the mission of using visual storytelling to amplify social issues and to spur equitable social change," as a recent article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review points out.