Launch & Discussion
July 18, 2017, 7pm
On Tuesday, July 18, Mychal Johnson, a community activist and member of South Bronx Unite, will be in conversation with artist Chloë Bass to mark the launch of The People's Cultural Plan, a comprehensive set of policy recommendations for equitable cultural funding, labor fairness in the cultural sector, and anti-displacement demands created by a diverse coalition of working artists and cultural workers in New York City.
The People's Cultural Plan is a robust, community-led alternative to the Department of Cultural Affairs' CreateNYC cultural plan (which is due to be launched to the public during the week of July 17), and is structured according to three guiding planks: de-gentrification, cultural equity, and labor equity. By combining these distinct and interrelated frameworks, the plan demands that cultural policy prefigure a truly fair system of civic representation.
This launch event will provide a forum for strategizing ways beyond the current bind of cultural production, extractive hyper-development, and displacement in New York City. Grounded in a presentation of The People's Cultural Plan, it will build on the growing imperative for broad, grassroots organizing within the arts, and demand that the needs of people of color are put first—inclusive of tribally-enrolled Indigenous people, Black, Asian, Latinx, and Arab peoples, and the LGBTQ, disabled, and elder members of our communities.
Chloë Bass is a multi-form conceptual artist working in performance, situation, publication, and installation. Chloë is a 2017 – 2018 Workspace resident at the Center for Book Arts, and a 2017 studio resident at Triangle Arts Association. Her projects have appeared in recent exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, The James Gallery, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book will be published by The Operating System in December 2017; her writing is most often found on Hyperallergic. A lifelong New Yorker, she lives and works in Brooklyn, and is an Assistant Professor in Art with a focus on Social Practice and Performance at Queens College, CUNY. You can learn more about her at chloebass.com.
Mychal Johnson has a long-standing track record in community-based advocacy for environmental and economic justice. He is a co-founder of South Bronx Unite and a member of the Board of Directors of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, the Board of Directors of the NYC Community Land Initiative, the Watershed Advisory Committee of the Park’s Department Harlem River Watershed and Natural Resources Management Plan and the Community Advisory Board of Columbia University’s NIEHS Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan. Mychal was appointed as a civil society voting member of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Open Space Committee, selected by the United Nations to serve as one of 38 global civil society appointees to the historic UN Climate Summit in 2014 and invited by the Bolivian government to participate in the World People's Conference on Climate Change.
