2020-21 PROGRESS REPORT AND SCOPE OF WORK
PUBLIC PROGRAMMING
Claiming the Visual Narrative Initiative
Claiming the Visual Narrative is an interdisciplinary community arts initiative, which uses research and strategic arts engagement to:
The Drug Policy Program of the Open Society Foundations has awarded The Confined Arts a grant for the Claiming the Visual Narrative Public Arts Project. The purpose of the grant is to counter the racist narratives of the drug war through artistic collaboration in New Jersey. The Confined Arts, founded by Multimedia Visual Artist Pastor Isaac Scott of Columbia University, uses a unique methodology of strategic arts engagement to change popular perceptions, build relationships,
and foster action towards collaborative community-based solutions.
METHODOLOGY
The Claiming the Visual Narrative Initiative executes its mission of targeting and undoing systemic oppression in popular culture in the form of community misrepresentation by forming Community Convening Cohorts (CCC). The CCCs are designed to be made up of different community stakeholders with its primary function to collaboratively conceptualize, fabricate, and install public art and media that represents the values and experiences of community members. The CCCs are designed to be formed in different spaces amongst different groups of people with the goal of using art in whatever preferred form to change public attitudes about individuals and communities impacted by the criminal legal system and inform representational policy solutions.
Claiming the Visual Narrative Initiative
Claiming the Visual Narrative is an interdisciplinary community arts initiative, which uses research and strategic arts engagement to:
- Change perception about people impacted by the criminal legal system,
- Build relationships across different experiences to create more informed policy as well as strategic partnering to scale new and existing advocacy campaigns,
- Foster action toward collaborative and creative solution making.
The Drug Policy Program of the Open Society Foundations has awarded The Confined Arts a grant for the Claiming the Visual Narrative Public Arts Project. The purpose of the grant is to counter the racist narratives of the drug war through artistic collaboration in New Jersey. The Confined Arts, founded by Multimedia Visual Artist Pastor Isaac Scott of Columbia University, uses a unique methodology of strategic arts engagement to change popular perceptions, build relationships,
and foster action towards collaborative community-based solutions.
METHODOLOGY
The Claiming the Visual Narrative Initiative executes its mission of targeting and undoing systemic oppression in popular culture in the form of community misrepresentation by forming Community Convening Cohorts (CCC). The CCCs are designed to be made up of different community stakeholders with its primary function to collaboratively conceptualize, fabricate, and install public art and media that represents the values and experiences of community members. The CCCs are designed to be formed in different spaces amongst different groups of people with the goal of using art in whatever preferred form to change public attitudes about individuals and communities impacted by the criminal legal system and inform representational policy solutions.
The Newark Public Arts Project
With the primary goal to map, galvanize, and support arts organizations and programs focused on community healing, racial justice, restorative justice, transformative justice, and criminal justice reform, TCA has created a community arts project that will promote the development of representative imagery in Newark, a community in New Jersey that continues to be extremely vulnerable to racially unjust narratives of the war on drugs, as one of primary targets for true drug policy reform and holistic rehabilitation. In the pilot form of the Public Arts project, we will focus our coalition building efforts to provide framing tools, leadership, and guidance to address the project’s prompt:
What does an end to the war on drugs and systemic racism in your community look like in Newark?
With the primary goal to map, galvanize, and support arts organizations and programs focused on community healing, racial justice, restorative justice, transformative justice, and criminal justice reform, TCA has created a community arts project that will promote the development of representative imagery in Newark, a community in New Jersey that continues to be extremely vulnerable to racially unjust narratives of the war on drugs, as one of primary targets for true drug policy reform and holistic rehabilitation. In the pilot form of the Public Arts project, we will focus our coalition building efforts to provide framing tools, leadership, and guidance to address the project’s prompt:
What does an end to the war on drugs and systemic racism in your community look like in Newark?
ARTS, JUSTICE, AND SAFETY COALITION THEATRICAL EVENT
This is a theatrical event that will counter popular stereotypical narratives that persistently drive criminal justice discourse in this country. This production will be collaboratively-devised and determined by TCA’s Arts, Justice, and Safety Coalition, which is made up of arts programs and arts practitioners working at the intersection of the criminal legal system in the New York region and are integrating safety, accountability and justice into their work. Through this project, we hope to facilitate a cross-generational dialogue that centers healing and the undoing of narratives of criminality, while engaging with the punishment paradigm and the realities of “criminality” as justification for a punishment system.
This artistic event will be informed by the people who are directly impacted. It will emerge from their stories, thoughts, ideas, and decision-making. The event will showcase the perspectives of young adults as well as women and men that have been justice-impacted, and will include our target populations, like children, families, schools, and communities across New York.
This artistic event will be informed by the people who are directly impacted. It will emerge from their stories, thoughts, ideas, and decision-making. The event will showcase the perspectives of young adults as well as women and men that have been justice-impacted, and will include our target populations, like children, families, schools, and communities across New York.
ARTS AND EDUCATION
FILM DOCUMENTARY WORKSHOP
The Film Documentary Project, is a collaboration with The Confined Arts, based in Harlem and out of Columbia University, and the Newark Community Solutions Center (Center for Court Innovation). The project aims to bring Newark and Harlem community residents together to explore solutions to issues within their communities through discussions that are centered on the different experiences, perspectives and identities of community residents. This workshop will explore complex community relationships and issues related to social and emotional safety and well-being, and propose co-created solutions to the following topic: Undoing Gender Stereotypes and Societal Norms in Black and Indigenous Communities of Color.
Through a 10 week documentary-style workshop training, participants will be taught documentary skills and techniques while gaining the hands-on needed to produce a short documentary film.
Through a 10 week documentary-style workshop training, participants will be taught documentary skills and techniques while gaining the hands-on needed to produce a short documentary film.
LYRICS FOR CHANGE
Music, spoken word, and visual representations (depictions) have the ability to bring together even the most polarizing opinions and groups, they also have the power to foster generational dehumanizing narratives and stereotypes with lasting impacts. In collaboration with The Confined Arts and Professor Ellen Francese at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Lyrics for Change is a hybrid course/workshop which promotes social change in representation through music, lyrics and visual arts by exploring the idea of Full Participation in Artistic Representation. Students will interrogate historical pieces of visual artwork and music to investigate culture as a determining factor in human rights.
Course/Workshop:
Course/Workshop:
- Introduce students to the historic relationships between dehumanizing language (lyrics) and iconic imagery and how different forms of representation have influenced America’s present visual culture.
- Enable students to see how cultural products such as works of Music and Visual art are linked to social and political networks.
- Give students a working vocabulary for discussing images and help them to better understand how visual forms produce meaning.
- Help students develop visual analysis skills.
- Enable students to develop dialogue skills that will be useful in all fields of music composing and subsequent visual creation.