The Alternate Currents blog is home to articles, interviews, critical writing, and creative research that examine how justice in the arts in documented, interpreted, and enacted.
“The struggles of artists and cultural workers for fair compensation and financial stability/sustainability cannot and should not exist independent of struggles for housing, healthcare, education, and protections led by people from all walks of life.”
Read More“The composition layers keyboard played by Mary Elizabeth Jo Dixen Pelenaise Kapi’olani Lawson, her vocals (chanting, reading, humming), sounds inside a kitchen, and the voice of Paul Stephen Benjamin singing ‘Black Is the Color.’”
Read More“Indigenous people of this continent have ancestral responsibilities and rights that others do not. Each of us is born with the opportunity to serve our community in a way that fulfills a need. My energy goes towards forging relationships with the plants from this region that remain.”
Read More“Taking the project from its inception to completion helped us deepen our respective creative practices and our relationships with each other and our collaborators. It’s also a process that we invite others to copy freely and use as a blueprint for making similar work in different social and geographic contexts.”
Read More“East, West, North, South, each occupy equal weight on the compass, and all regions enjoy autonomy and self-determination to their fullest possible expressions. Poverty is a memory and prosperity is promised to all. We have achieved Utopia. Now, where do you want to eat?”
Read More“I remember stepping off the plane and thinking, I've made it. This is the promised land. A utopia. A place where dreams come true. Unfortunately over the last decade, I've watched this vision of what America claims to be, fall apart right in front of my very eyes. This utopia is a dystopia in disguise.”
Read More“The bathroom is a space where people can be completely themselves. This is a sacred and safe space because there is no one else around to tell them otherwise, unless it were to be interrupted or intruded. There are an endless number of events that can take place in this setting throughout our lives, whether positive, negative, or neutral.”
Read MoreOn June 14th, Rainy M., Lee Emma Running, and Lauren Simpson sat down for a conversation about positioning creative practice as an investigative tool to explore the relationships between power, touch, consent, and control.
Read More“The World Health Organization (WHO) defines 55dB to be the threshold at which noise becomes harmful to human health. Noise and air pollution are interlinked, as both are typically birthed from machines, transportation, and propagation systems.”
Read MoreOn April 12th, Amanda Huckins, Carolyn Erickson and Eden Erickson, Maritza N. Estrada, and Kelly Seacrest sat down for a conversation about mutual caregiving and its potential as an embodied practice to build solidarity within creative communities.
Read More“Horseplay is fooling around. Horseplay workshop is organized fooling around. We are serious about practicing but not always serious within the practice.”
Read More“There is one nurse,
One doctor,
One psychiatric specialist per 100,000 residents in a single district.”
On February 7th, members of Amplify’s 2023-24 Alternate Currents cohort sat down to celebrate the launch of We Free Us, their collaborative publication, and talk about working together over the past year to to build relationships and shore up regenerative modes of mutual exchange.
Read More“Providing care is not profitable because the value assigned to providing care is low, while the actual human cost to provide care is incredibly high.”
Read MoreOn November 29th, Manne Cook and SaRena Freet sat down with Amanda Huckins, to consider ‘the commons’ more deeply and discuss the terms and social charters that help artists negotiate the often messy process of collectively managing shared resources for the wellbeing of the many, rather than the few.
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