ArtAction/Resilience/CareforAll — Day 2

Start: Thursday, April 23, 2020 5:00 PM

End: Thursday, April 23, 2020 7:00 PM

This is Day 2 of artists and advocates who are coming together for online conversations, how-to workshops, and on the ground activities! Please check back for details! RSVP for Day 1 and Day 3 programs as well.

Check out our online ArtAction | Resilience | CareForAll ToolKIT with how-tos that complement the day's discussions and workshops

Day 2

RESILIENCE!

5:00 p.m. — Introduction

Alexandra Chang, Rutgers University-Newark and Climate Working Group

5:10 p.m. — Tree Dreams Writing Workshop and Readings with Kristin Kaye

Tree Dreams book cover

Author Kristin Kaye will read from her YA novel Tree Dreams, which follows the dawning of entangled environmental awareness with a seventeen year old girl who finds herself at the crossroads between a logging community where she has spent her life and a group of environmentalists fighting to save the future of the forest. Kaye will read from Tree Dreams and lead a writing workshop, where participants can learn to write their own Tree Dreams. Participants will be invited to read their work, which will be edited into a short video after the workshop.




6:00 p.m. — EcoFiction for Youth and Adult Audiences
Discussion and Q&A with Kristin Kaye, Amy Brady, and Tod Emko, moderated by Stephanie Lane

Discussion and Q&A — Author Kristen Kaye (Tree Dreams), author and editor Amy Brady (Guernica, Deputy Editor; Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books; and a columnist for Catapult magazine), and creator of A Piggy's Tale comic series and founder of Darwin Animal Doctors Tod Emko will be in discussion with editor of the bestselling Warriors series Stephanie Elliott to talk about their craft, writing for youth and adult audiences on environmental themes, as well as Cli-Fi. They will also delve into their organizing work with Brady's Burning Worlds newsletter and dialogues with artists and authors on climate change, Kaye's work in communities, libraries, and schools with her global tree tagging initiatives, and Emko's work with Darwin Animal Doctors working with communities around the world to protect and sustainably and autonomously manage their wildlife.


Kristin Kaye is an award-winning author and teacher whose work sits at the intersection of nature, narrative and spirituality. Her novel, Tree Dreams, has given rise to a global tree tagging campaign that celebrates the myriad ways we are connected to the natural world, to each other and to our future. Teachers have adapted Tree Dreams for the classroom, and a generous grant from the Panta Rhea Foundation has supported the creation of standards-aligned lesson plans for K-college. Kristin has hosted writing and Tree Dreams events and workshops across the U.S. including at the American Library Association, National Science Teachers Association, the California Academy of Sciences and more.  kristinkaye.com and treedreams.net



Amy Brady is the deputy publisher of Guernica magazine, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review of Books, and a columnist for Catapult magazine. Amy is also the editor of the "Burning Worlds" newsletter about art and climate change, and the co-editor of House on Fire, an anthology of personal essays about climate change forthcoming on Catapult in 2021. Her writing has appeared in O, the Oprah magazine, Slate, The Village Voice, The New Republic, and many other places. The holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has won awards from the National Science Foundation, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and various academic organizations. She is also a recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Library of Congress Research Fellowship.


Tod Emko is a conservationist from New York City. He has saved animals from Antarctica to the equator since 2008, but his greatest accomplishment is probably raising Piggy, the three-legged dog, now his service dog, who was the inspiration that led to the creation of the education and conservation group Darwin Animal Doctors. Together, Tod and Piggy visit schools and teach children that they can overcome unimaginable struggles, both mental and physical. And that being different is just another kind of superpower.



Stephanie Elliott is Head of Editorial, US at Working Partners Ltd. She has been editing and writing children’s fiction for twenty years. Previously an acquiring editor at Random House’s Delacorte imprint, she now manages the US team of the international children’s packager Working Partners, and leads the creative team behind the New York Times bestselling series Warriors.


6:30 p.m. — Virtual Protest with The Illuminator
Workshop led by Rachel Brown, Chris Rogy, and Grayson Earle of the Illuminator Collective

Illuminator Collective image Virtual Protest

In the wake of the 2012 student uprisings, the Québécois government installed the P-6 Regulations, which restricted the amount of people allowed to demonstrate in public space to a mere 50. With the inception of this and other anti-protest laws, we have witnessed the familiar authoritarian impulse that has repeatedly emerged during times of popular unrest. In 2014, The Illuminator projected virtual protests throughout Montreal onto landmarks associated with the student movement to stand both as tribute to popular uprisings and as a strategy to navigate the post-P-6 landscape.

In the era of Covid-19, when we cannot gather in mass to protest, and when there is so much to demonstrate about, we have taken our Protest Generator to the web, to create a virtual protest that everyone can participate in. Over three days, this online demonstration will collect your thoughts, wishes and demands related to the current covid crisis, the climate crisis, our need to care for each other, divestment and resource protections, a push for voting and the need for change in the Fall. While this is not intended to supplant traditional forms of demonstrating IRL, a protest is in part a visual spectacle, its visibility determined by the level of participation.

To participate in this protest:

  1. Visit http://theilluminator.org/virtualprotest/

  2. Draw, write or type your message. Keep in mind that the screen canvas is the size of your protest sign, so write big enough for spectators to see!

  3. Press Save when you're done.

  4. Make sure you're on the zoom between 6:45-7:00pm today and tomorrow to see the protest!

The Illuminator is an art-activist collective composed of visual artists, educators, and technologists based in New York City. Since 2012, the collective has staged hundreds of projection-interventions in public spaces, transforming the street from a space of passive consumption and transit into a site of engagement, conflict, and dialogue. Our work primarily uses large-scale, guerrilla projections to call attention to the many urgent crises that confront us, in support of the ongoing struggle for a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.

6:45 p.m. — Virtual Protest and Artist-led ArtAction!
A collaboration with Andrea Haenggi and The Illuminator Collective

The Illuminator Collective joins artist Andrea Haenggi in a virtual protest in parallel with an on-the-ground protest that you can participate in!

We will experience the virtual protest posters that you have created with The Illuminator and hold a virtual and Artist-led ArtAction: balcony/window/outside socially distanced on-the-ground protest at 7:00 p.m. with Andrea Haenggi and The Illuminator Collective.

Video Still by Robert Neuwirth

Calling on the plants as her guides, teachers, mentors and performers, Andrea Haenggi (Brooklyn, NY)’s dance research and eco-social art practice creates a form of theater called Ethnochoreobotanography, which simultaneously explores issues regarding ecology, feminism, power, labor and care. To expand her art-activist approach with spontaneous urban plants, in 2017 she co-founded Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) with artists Catherine Grau, Ellie Irons, and Christopher Kenney. Appropriating the acronym EPA - in response to the ongoing rollback of Federal environmental policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency – using artistic, social, and embodied practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment.

weedychoreography.com and environmentalperformanceagency.com


Climate Working Group logo by Jonathan Lo, Public Assembly