Yearly Archives: 2022

The Utopia Project at Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum

November 2022ExhibitionsCenter for Artistic Activism

The Utopia Project
Location: Anacostia Community Museum, Washington D.C.
Dates: November 1, 2022 – March 1, 2023
Admission: Free

from the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum website on the Utopia Project at the Anacostia Museum:

For over 50 years, ACM has exposed injustices and has provided a platform for under-told stories in our urban community. Many of these powerful examples have illuminated the power of collective action toward a more equitable future. The Utopia Project seeks to deconstruct the reasons why social change happens. Why does one tactic work and another fails? This interactive gallery will be a space to learn the art of activism and to unlock the creativity in each of us to transform our world.
Through a series of experiential activities, visitors will first learn to tap into the issues they care about and then envision their own version of a utopia in an immersive “Dream Space.” Here, visitors will be asked to imagine, with all obstacles removed, a world beyond the problem at hand to the awe-inspiring end goal. With that image of success in mind, they discover the research-informed tactics that have most often led to measurable social change. Last is the maker space – where dreams become actions. With everything from cardboard and tape to Legos and whiteboards, visitors are invited to prototype their ideas for making a better world.
Objects, photos, and stories from the ACM collection will be featured throughout the gallery, turning abstract ideas into real-world examples of community members making a difference throughout history. Accounts of these everyday change-makers serve to remind us that the ingredients for change reside in each one of us. And the Utopia Project makes the process transparent and reachable so that the impossible becomes possible.
This project was created in collaboration with The Center for Artistic Activism, a non-profit organization that helps people use their creativity and culture to affect power. Their founders’ book, The Art of Activism, as well as the Center for Artistic Activism’s ongoing research and training provided many of the driving principles illustrated in The Utopia Project.

Behind the Utopia Project at the Anacostia Museum

In 2022 the Center for Artistic Activism ran one of our workshops for museum staff on how ideas from the arts and activism can work and have worked together. At the time they were considering a more practical exhibit on activism and the workshop seemed to inspire them to continue.

The Center for Artistic Activism’s Rebecca Bray deserves recognition for helping to make this happen on our side.

Personally, it was just stunning to see ideas and phrases blown up on the walls of the space that had been passed to me by other teachers, or coined and developed in a bar with Rebecca, Stephen Duncombe, or other colleagues.

Photos from the opening

October 25, 2022

Unstoppable Voters Columbus

October 2022WorkCenter for Artistic Activism, Videos

I spent last month training in Johannesburg, South Africa, Milwaukee, and Columbus with the Center for Artistic Activism. The Unstoppable Voters program helps people… actually you can just watch this video…

Center for Artistic Activism’s Unstoppable Voters Fellowship

August 2022News, Studio LogCenter for Artistic Activism

I spent last week training the inaugural fellows for the Center for Artistic Activism’s Unstoppable Voters program. We selected fellows from organizations working on U.S. Democracy, like New Georgia Project, Poder Latninx, and Fair Count, and are training them in artistic activism. In the coming months they’ll implement some of those methods and concepts within their organizations in order to bring innovation to their efforts in the coming mid-term elections.

Virtual Author Event at Greenlight Bookstore

February 2022News, Talksartofactivismbook, Center for Artistic Activism, MarleneRamirezCancio, Stephen Duncombe, talk

Steve Lambert & Stephen Duncombe, with Marlène Ramírez-Cancio

VIRTUAL: Live via Zoom
Thursday, February 3, 7:30 PM ET
Steve Lambert and Stephen Duncombe present The Art of Activism: Your All-Purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible
In conversation with Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn NY

Join the co-founders of the Center for Artistic Activism, Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, as they discuss their new book The Art of Activism, an all-purpose guide that falls somewhere between Che Guevara’s Principles for Guerrilla Warfare and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Duncombe and Lambert show readers how to bring about effective social change by combining the emotional power of the arts with the strategic planning of activism. The Art of Activism brings together the authors’ extensive practical knowledge—gleaned from over a decade’s experience training activists around the world—with theoretical insights from fields as far-ranging as cultural studies and cognitive science. From the United Farm Workers’ boycott movement in sixties’ California to a canal-side beach in present-day Saint Petersburg, these pages are packed with contemporary and historical case studies in artistic activism that have been shown to work in practice—no prior experience required!
Lambert and Duncombe are joined in conversation by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio—artist, educator, and founder of EMERGENYC, an incubator for emerging artist-activists—for a dynamic conversation about creativity, social change, and the political power of the imagination.

PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

January 2022ExhibitionsCanada, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, Vancouver

I’ll be showing Capitalism Works For Me! True/False at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia. The work will be presented at the Vancouver Public Library January 20-24.

The piece will be presented in ASL on selected days.

Venue
Vancouver Public Library, Central Library
350 West Georgia Street, Vancouver

Showtimes

January 20, 4-8:30 (available in ASL)
January 21, 11:30-4
January 22, 11:30-4 (available in ASL)
January 23, 11:30-4 (available in ASL)
January 24, 11:30-4

About Push

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is one of Vancouver’s signature events. Produced each January, the Festival expands the horizons of Vancouver artists and audiences with work that is visionary, genre-bending, multi-disciplined, startling and original.
The Festival showcases acclaimed international, Canadian and local artists and mixes them together with an alchemy that inspires audiences, rejuvenates artists, stimulates the industry and forges productive relationships around the globe. More than just shows, the Festival is a broker of international partnerships, a meeting place for creative minds, a showcase of Canada’s best and an incubator of brilliant new work.

Steve Lambert