Art & … Being In Solidarity

Antonio Serna, Todd Ayoung, Aurora P. Robinson

Screening and Discussion

July 28 at 7pm

Triangle, New York hosts Antonio Serna of artists of color bloc and Todd Ayoung of Pratt Social Practice, to facilitate a debriefing discussion along with Aurora P. Robinson from Black Lives Matter (Pratt). The discussion will be centered around a screening of Flag Wars (2007), a film by Linda Goode Bryant & Laura Poitras; it documents the gentrification of a community in Columbus, Ohio and raises issues concerning intersectionality. This event follows the Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement slated for July 24, 2016 at the Brooklyn Museum.

The Brooklyn Community Forum is the result of successful protests, negotiations, and combined efforts of a wide network of black-led anti-gentrification groups, indigenous groups, and various artists/activist and allies. Serna and Ayoung have participated in this dialogue in effort to ensure the program gave voice to those most affected by gentrification. They also host one of the forum workshops titled, “How Can Cultural Institutions Support Communities?”

Protests began November 17, 2015 when the Brooklyn Museum hosted the 6th Annual Brooklyn Real Estate Summit. The event was seen as an unabashed and non-nuanced conference on modes and strategies for the continued gentrification of the borough. Further, it occurred between the exhibitions “Crossing Brooklyn”, a survey of artists living and working in the borough, and “Agitprop!”,  an exhibition addressing the intersection of art and activism. The discussion at Triangle will make space for a layered, structural look at how various groups negotiated with the museum and what “being in solidarity” entails in a time of intersectional activism and rapid displacement of communities of color. The event is meant as an opportunity to consider how the energy catalyzed by the events at the Brooklyn Museum can move forward from here.

Antonio Serna isAlum of Triangle’s Residency Program (2015) as part of the Artists and Workers of Color Initiative. Serna is an artist working in New York with both a collective and studio based practice. He is currently working on Documents of Resistance: Artists of Color Protest (1960-2016). Additionally he is a member of artists of color bloc an cultural worker advocate group focusing on artists of color, and Arts & Labor’s Alternative Economies Working Group, an Occupy Wall Street activist group which organized “What Do We Do Now?”, the first alternatives economies fair and resource guide for artists in NYC. Through these and other autonomous collectives he promotes self-organized cultural events, research, education, and artist-as-activist interventions.

Todd Ayoung, born in Trinidad and Tobago, W.I., is a visual artist and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute and Parsons, New School. He has exhibited and lectured throughout the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. Some of Ayoung’s intellectual, political, activist pursues and artworks have been published in The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, Third Text, Bomb Magazine, Shrifter, OCTOBER, Afterimage, Kyoto Journal, New Observations and Social Text. Ayoung is a founding member of the REPOhistory collective and Alien Abduction Collective. Currently he is involved with artists of color bloc and Pratt Social Practice Group.

Aurora P. Robinson is a Brooklyn resident and a member of Black Lives Matter Pratt; she is Pratt Alumni (MA Arch), and current Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) Faculty.