This is Day 3 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 2 programs as well.

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

ArtAction!

5:00 p.m. — Trauma and the Enviro Crisis
Panel and Q&A with Artists Mary Ting and Nocturnal Medicine
Moderated by Alexandra Chang, Rutgers University-Newark

With the world experiencing increased globalized crisis from the current novel coronavirus pandemic to the related Climate and Ecological Crisis, we are experiencing and needing to come to terms with intensified and sustained first and secondary traumas in our every day.

Artists Mary Ting and Nocturnal Medicine: Larissa Belcic and Michelle Shofet discuss their range of artistic practices including installation, public engagement, embodied experiences, performance, and sound in addressing the need to acknowledge and work through our collective trauma and grief in relation to hope for our possible futures.

5:25 p.m. — Artist-led Workshop with Nocturnal Medicine

Artists Larissa Belcic and Michelle Shofet of Nocturnal Medicine lead an artist-led experience with participants in relationship to the emotional impacts of our current climate and ecological crises.

Image: Mary Ting, Rows of Beaks, Hands, Feet from the Ginling Memorial Series. Cut paper, soot, nails, installation detail.

Mary Ting uses visual art, community projects, writing, research and lectures as a means to reflect and comment on cultural history, trauma and the loss of nature. Solo exhibitions include Lambent Foundation, Dean Project, metaphor contemporary art, and Kentler Drawing Space. Ting has received grants and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Gottlieb Foundation, Pollack Krasner Foundation, Joan Mitchell Center NOLA, and the MacDowell Colony among others. Her research focus on wildlife products and Chinese modern history has been presented at Animals for Asia 2017 Jane Goodall Institute Nepal; UC Davis; The Explorer’s Club, NY and on a 2019 South African lecture tour speaking to conservationists and rangers. Mary teaches in both the art department and the environmental justice program at John Jay College. http://www.maryting.com

Nocturnal Medicine is a creative studio dedicated to cultivating emotional connection to climate change and sustainability. Working to create new, regenerative understandings of self, community, and environment, Nocturnal Medicine designs multi-sensory experiences that help people move through the emotional challenges that arise as we encounter the climatic and ecological crises that define our current moment. Founded by Larissa Belcic and Michelle Shofet in 2017, Nocturnal Medicine aims to build a culture that understands that the way we live and relate to each other and our planet impacts our emotional health; the practice aims to support a way of living based in intimacy and accountability. Belcic and Shofet met while earning their Masters degrees in landscape architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. They share extensive experience in art, design, ecology, education, and community engagement.

Alexandra Chang is a curator and writer working on EcoArt and climate change. She organizes the Climate Working Group and the EcoArt Salon at Paul Robeson Galleries, bridging Science, Humanities, and the Arts. Chang is Associate Professor of Practice with the Art History program at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and Interim Associate Director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, and Associate Director of the American Studies Program. She helps organize RU-N’s Eco Working Group and teaches EcoArt and Global Asias and Visual Cultures. She serves as an advisor of the NYC Urban Field Station Artist-in-Residence and as Vice Chair of Communication for the American Alliance of Museums Climate and Environment Network.

5:45 p.m. — Zoom Sew Social with the Auntie Sewing Squad:
with Kristina Wong, Gayle Isa, Valerie Soe, Annette Lee, Leilani Chan, and hosted by Grace Yoo

Auntie Sewing Squad (folx sewing masks to protect against Covid-19)
The Auntie Sewing Squad is a network of over 300 volunteers, mostly women of color, who are making and distributing free homemade facemasks for frontline workers and other vulnerable community members throughout California and the U.S. The group began on March 24, 2020 as a solo effort by Los Angeles-based performance artist Kristina Wong who started making masks in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and needed support creating masks and increasing awareness that our federal government and healthcare system was not equipped to provide PPE for healthcare workers or individuals. The membership of the group has exploded as has the need in our communities, and the group is evolving as a resource and supportive community more than just a single-source provider of masks.

- “State of the Sweatshop" — from Kristina Wong

- Community Care — Kristina Wong and Gayle Isa will speak about organizing efforts and the incorporation of and importance of community care in their efforts.

- Sew Social! — Sociologist and public health researcher Grace Yoo will share the impact that the auntie sewing squad has had in their families and communities. The Aunties will also give a tutorial on how to download the pattern and get started cutting and sewing and answer your technical questions on sewing masks. Mask directions and care guidelines are included on the Auntie's Facebook and in the ArtAction/Resilience/CareForAll toolkit for you to sew along.

- Private Sector and Creating Communities of Care: Actress Angel Pai and Creative Director of Virgin Orbit Jonathan Lo will talk about their experiences of organizing and participating in efforts in creating much-needed ventilators and ventilator splitters through on-the-ground organizing and private company efforts. Angel has been working to organize a hundred artists to be ready to print 3-D printed ventilator splitters for hospitals, and Jonathan has been working with colleagues at Virgin Orbit in their efforts of creating ventilators during this current health crisis. Moderated by Gayle Isa.

Angel Pai is Co-founder of Keep Breathing, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing evolving relief in response to the coronavirus. This fully volunteer-based organization provides open-source designs, as well as manufactures and donates 3D-printed ventilator splitters, intubation boxes, ear savers and PAPR(powered air purifying respirator) for medical staff on the front line during the COVID-19 pandemic. As featured in:Time Magazine, Observer, World Journal. She is a STEAM Ambassador of the Aspire Artemis Foundation and a proud advocate of women empowerment working closely with the There Is No Limit Foundation. She was most recently Master of Ceremony for the 2019 Break The Silence Awards, hosted in commemoration of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly; honoring the First Lady of Burkina Faso and other key global advocates for their work in ending gender-based violence and FGM. Pai is an actress, model, and designs handcrafted jewelry for her brand Illumin Designs.

Jonathan Lo is the Creative Director at Virgin Orbit – the Long Beach, California-based New Space start-up. He is currently pioneering the brand experience for both satellite customers and the greater space community through physical, digital and virtual platforms. He is the founder of Public Assembly, a design practice dedicated to guiding and mentoring mission-driven cultural and social impact organizations through creative storytelling, project planning, and design. Clients include The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Broad Foundation, and NRG Station A. Over the last decade, he has lead design initiatives across a broad range of companies and industries – at agencies including Mirada and 2x4; and at in-house departments including Shop Architects and The Broad Foundation. He is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania.

www.publicassembly.org
www.virginorbit.com
www.virginorbit.com/ventilators

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 culminating tonight!

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

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.

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 to be on the zoom between 6:45-7:00pm tonight to see the protest!

Visit our ArtAction | Resilience | CareForAll TooKIT.

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

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.

Climate Working Group logo by Jonathan Lo, Public Assembly