POSTPONED Artists & Communities: April Brown, Ditra Edwards, Tsedaye Makonnen, Aisha White

This event has been postponed.

This Just Futures Roundtable discussion with April Brown, Ditra Edwards, Tsedaye Makonnen, Aisha White and moderated by kara lynch ’90, is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. The initiative aims to tell a different, more complete story of New England and its global connections– past, present, and future– titled “Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty, and Freedom.” The concept for this discussion originated with Black doctoral students and postdocs immersed in the possibilities of organizing against repression.

April Brown is an educator, ordained minister, poet, singer and actor living in Providence, RI.  She has performed in the United States, Japan, and Israel.  Her passion for arts and culture education manifested itself with experience in museum work with the Smithsonian Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the National Museum of American History.  Locally she has worked with Rhode Island Black Storytellers,  the National Association of Black Storytellers, and Turnaround Arts: Providence. She has worked in educational systems with a focus on cultural engagement; professional development; and local community activism.  She currently serves as a board member of Community Music Works and is on the Special Committee for Commemorative Works for the City of Providence. Over the course of her career, she has used her arts expertise in a variety of applications including pre-K, secondary, post-secondary arts training, working effectively with administrations serving low income students. Her specialties include curriculum and professional development, community engagement, staff management, and team oversight/coaching. For April, arts practice is the way we speak life into humanity and we need to teach this to our youth.   

Ditra Edwards is the Co-founder and Director for SISTA FIRE. She is a Black woman born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, with over 20 years of experience working on racial and economic justice issues. Throughout her career, she has carried the thread (and accent!) of her upbringing in Rhode Island and has woven it with lessons she learned everywhere from Boston to Washington, DC and beyond. The theme that runs through all of her work is making connections between people, their values and vision, and the change they want to bring about.  Because of this, she believes in a people-centered approach to changing structural conditions and building community power. In 2015, Ditra’s heart brought her back to Rhode Island to be closer to her family. In 2017, she won the Rhode Island Foundation Innovation Fellowship to start SISTA FIRE.

Tsedaye Makonnen is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, researcher and cultural producer, whose studio and practice threads together her identity as a Black mother, Birthworker and a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants. Her work flows between Sculpture, Textile and performance art. Through a variety of mediums she traces the history of state-sanctioned violence and brutality towards Black women throughout the world, while exploring the West’s response to the contemporary African migrant crisis which is reminiscent of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Tsedaye Makonnen’s multimedia works are rooted in ritual, ceremony, remembrance, and memorialization.  Makonnen grapples with the long history of the dehumanization of Black women and their communities through processes which normalize their premature death.

Aisha White is a cultural organizer, artist and researcher with a passion for community building and social impact. A majority of her work centers supporting her community of artists to build and grow their projects, while her personal practices focuses on public health and fellowship. Her background in social enterprise, community engagement and sustainable development has informed her passion for socially engaged art. Her research in ethics and project development leads her to take a trauma informed approach to all of her work. Aisha holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh and a MA Cultural Policy Degree in Arts, Enterprise and Development from the University of Warwick in Coventry UK. In addition, she hold a certificate in Mixed Reality Design from Oxford University.

kara lynch ’90 is an Associate Professor of Video & Critical Studies at Hampshire College. Ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture, she is curious about duration, embodiment, and the aural. Through collective practice and social intervention she explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered: Black-Indigenous-Immigrant, anarchist, queer, and feminist. kara is a member of Interdiciplinario La Lìnea, a feminist artist collective based at the US/Mexico borderlandia. She has published in XC Streetnotes, Ulbandus Review, BFM, contributed audio to Cabinet Magazine, video to PocketMyths, and drawings/writings to the Encyclopedia Project v.II F-K. Along with Henriette Gunkel, kara co-edited We Travel the SpaceWays: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions, an anthology of African Diaspora Futures art, criticism, and conversations published by Transcript, summer 2019.

This event is part of the Captivity, Betrayal, Community Just Futures Roundtable series and is cosponsored by the Oakley Center and the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Following the Spring 2022 ENTWINED: Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, African American roundtable series organized by the Williams Just Futures grant, Captivity, Betrayal, Community examines how the historical impacts of enslavement and dispossession impact and are confronted by contemporary educational and ethical endeavors.