Artists In Presidents

The Outro Message to “Artists-In-Presidents: Transmissions to Power” is a soundscape bringing together messages from across the 21 episodes, and new reflections from contributors on their participation in the project. In this immersive composition, voices from throughout “Artists-In-Presidents” speak to the challenges of performing power, the local contexts and conditions underpinning their messages, and the urgency to reimagine leadership. Over the past four months, twenty-one transmissions and portraits from artists, activists, public intellectuals, and writers have radically reimagined political power and possibility. This international assembly of contributors were invited to position themselves as world leaders who speak directly to the people, describing their vision for the future and how we get there. Together, they compose a rousing collection of imaginative proposals for the leadership we need in this moment of crisis and possibility. Produced and composed by Olivia Bradley-Skill. Excerpted clips from transmissions and interviews by Raji Aujla, Roy Dib, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Emily Johnson, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge), Raqs Media Collective, Fariha Róisín, Adrian Stimson, Melati Suryodarmo, Paulo Tavares, Françoise Vergès, Ravyn Wngz.

“We can't lose sight of the fact that we need each other, especially because we don't have precisely the same experiences, feelings, or words.” As the twenty-first and final contributor to Artists-in-Presidents, project initiator Constance Hockaday shares a message calling for care, generosity, and understanding. Hockaday advocates for a qualified sense of unity; she acknowledges the imperfect and messy nature of working together, while suggesting that the very act of building and maintaining relationships is prefatory to social and political change. “Artists-in-Presidents” is curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Constance Hockaday is a queer Chilean-American from the US/Mexico Border. She is a director and visual artist who creates immersive social sculptures on urban waterways. She has worked with the Floating Neutrinos since 2001, and collaborated with Swoon's Swimming Cities projects, sailing floating sculptures along the Hudson, Mississippi, and the Adriatic Sea (2006–09). In 2011, she created The Boatel, a floating art hotel in New York's Far Rockaways made of refurbished salvaged boats—an effort to reconnect New Yorkers to their waterfront. Her 2014 piece All These Darlings and Now Us highlighted the displacement of San Francisco's queer community: more than 1000 people watched peep show performances on a raft of retrofitted sailboats featuring artists from two recently shuttered iconic queer businesses. Hockaday holds an MFA in Social Practice and MA in Conflict Resolution. She is also a Senior TED Fellow and an artist-in-residence at The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. Photo: Max Knight

“There is an urgency to save our time from becoming the cost of business.” Raqs Media Collective's trio-logue binds economics to climate change, extinction, and extractivism. They stress the externalized costs of our accepted capitalist logics: including extreme weather, species extinction, and language loss. In content and form, the Collective wryly critique the “rationality” of economic thinking, shedding light on its many casualties. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 in Delhi, India. The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, and being in a state of revolution. Raqs Media Collective take this sense to mean “kinetic contemplation” and a restless entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs enlists objects such as an early-modern tiger-automata from Southern India, or a biscuit from the Paris Commune, or a cup salvaged from an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck, to turn them into devices to sniff and taste time. Devices and modalities are also played with to undertake historical subterfuge and philosophical query. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation. Photo: Vicky Roy

“Resistance, and the fight for freedom are still sacred for us. We must not lose our last hope or abandon our dreams. And we want you not to lose your voice or abandon your rights.” Ramin Mazhar's visceral speech shares the plight of human rights defenders in Afghanistan, many of whom were forced to flee the country following the Taliban's takeover. Now in France as a refugee, Mazhar reflects on his continued hope for his home nation. Voiced in English by his friend Ashraf from within Afghanistan, Mazhar's transmission fans the flames of resistance amid state repression. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Ramin Mazhar is, a poet, journalist, and human rights activist from Afghanistan. He graduated from the Persian language and literature program at Kabul university and has worked for 8AM Daily Newspaper and Afghanistan Independent Human Commission.

Two years ago, during peace negotiation talks between the US government and the Taliban, Ramin organized and performed an art program at Kabul University in protest. He said to the audience that in those talks, victims of war, women, and Afghanistan are completely ignored. He also expressed the pain and frustration of millions of Afghans who thought that the peace talks would hand the country back to the Taliban, and that the progress over the last twenty years related to democratic values and basic human rights would be eliminated. Farsi Voiceover: Ramin Mazhar Photo: Fatimah Hossaini

“Resistance, and the fight for freedom are still sacred for us. We must not lose our last hope or abandon our dreams. And we want you not to lose your voice or abandon your rights.” Ramin Mazhar's visceral speech shares the plight of human rights defenders in Afghanistan, many of whom were forced to flee the country following the Taliban's takeover. Now in France as a refugee, Mazhar reflects on his continued hope for his home nation. Voiced in English by his friend Ashraf from within Afghanistan, Mazhar's transmission fans the flames of resistance amid state repression. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Ramin Mazhar is, a poet, journalist, and human rights activist from Afghanistan. He graduated from the Persian language and literature program at Kabul university and has worked for 8AM Daily Newspaper and Afghanistan Independent Human Commission.

Two years ago, during peace negotiation talks between the US government and the Taliban, Ramin organized and performed an art program at Kabul University in protest. He said to the audience that in those talks, victims of war, women, and Afghanistan are completely ignored. He also expressed the pain and frustration of millions of Afghans who thought that the peace talks would hand the country back to the Taliban, and that the progress over the last twenty years related to democratic values and basic human rights would be eliminated. English Voiceover: Ashraf Photo: Fatimah Hossaini

“[O]urs was a struggle not to take power. But to dismantle power altogether. We made presidency an empty seat, a void, a space never to be acquired nor exercised.” In a speculative address by three performers, Paulo Tavares weaves a story of state repression and environmental destruction from recent histories in South and Central America. Collapsing past, present, and future, Tavares' transmission highlights the need for movements to shift “do luto à luta” (from mourning to struggle): using remembrance and mourning as fuel for resistance and rebellion. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Paulo Tavares is an architect, writer, and educator. He is the author of Forest Law (2014), Des-Habitat (2019), and Memória da terra (2020), and runs the spatial advocacy agency autonoma. He teaches spatial and visual cultures at the University of Brasília in Brazil. Speech delivered by arquivo mangue (camila mota and cafira zoé) and Cyro Morais Song credit: Excerpted soundtrack from Terra em Transe (Dir: Glauber Rocha), 1967. Photo: Pedro Pinho

“A healthy ecosystem is a multitude of life forces. So love yourself. Be fulfilled in your meadow flower-ness, your mossiness, your grassiness, your rockiness, your wild animal-ness. We are all related.” Cheryl L'Hirondelle shares Cree songs and teachings on strength, pride, and interdependence. Through song and speech, L'Hirondelle also affirms the rootedness of languages in the territories from which they emerge: her transmission eloquently shows the inseparability of culture and environment. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Cheryl L'Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose family roots are from Papaschase First Nation, amiskwaciy wâskahikan (Edmonton, AB) and Kikino Metis Settlement, AB. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place, incorporating Indigenous language(s), audio, video, VR, olfactory, sewn objects, music, and audience/user participation to create immersive environments towards “radical inclusion.” As a songwriter, L'Hirondelle's focus is on both sharing nêhiyawêwin (Cree language) and Indigenous and contemporary song-forms, and personal narrative songwriting as methodologies toward survivance. Song Credits: “okâwîmâw,” © 2016 Miyoh Music/SOCAN. Melody: Cheryl L'Hirondelle and Ursula Johnson. Lyrics: Cheryl L'Hirondelle and Joseph Naytowhow. “waniska,” traditional Cree morning song. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tenille Campbell

“Not too long ago, humans and nonhumans lived in co-dependency. We intuited, breathed, and created together. Their offspring was mine and my offspring was theirs.” In an intimate letter from an older generation, Raji Aujla links gender-based oppression, economic logic, the invisibilization of non-Western forms of knowing, and environmental destruction. “Dispel this illusion of our current worldview,” she intones, “by thinking about revolutionary, radical love that impacts our very social and political structures.” Aujla's powerful rejoinder to capitalism and colonialism spans personal and collective experience across generations. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Raji Aujla is the founder and president of Willendorf Cultural Planning and editor-in-chief of Newest Magazine, sister companies that focus on better representation and inclusion of IBPoC voices in Canadian arts and culture. She has been a cultural builder, curator, creative director, and advocate in the Canadian arts sector for the past ten years. Prior to this, she worked in journalism, spending tireless hours researching and developing stories focused on racial, gender, and caste injustices. Throughout this experience, storytelling has been her greatest superpower to help bring together people of different backgrounds and beliefs and to empower her generation to design a better future. She believes that the arts have a transformative power to bring people together and build empathy.
 Photo and Video: Nithya Thayaal Assisted by: Adad Hannah Punjabi translation and voiceover: Surjit Kaur Producer: Aakanksha Luthra Photo hair and makeup: Sangeeta Bhella

“Not too long ago, humans and nonhumans lived in co-dependency. We intuited, breathed, and created together. Their offspring was mine and my offspring was theirs.” In an intimate letter from an older generation, Raji Aujla links gender-based oppression, economic logic, the invisibilization of non-Western forms of knowing, and environmental destruction. “Dispel this illusion of our current worldview,” she intones, “by thinking about revolutionary, radical love that impacts our very social and political structures.” Aujla's powerful rejoinder to capitalism and colonialism spans personal and collective experience across generations. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Raji Aujla is the founder and president of Willendorf Cultural Planning and editor-in-chief of Newest Magazine, sister companies that focus on better representation and inclusion of IBPoC voices in Canadian arts and culture. She has been a cultural builder, curator, creative director, and advocate in the Canadian arts sector for the past ten years. Prior to this, she worked in journalism, spending tireless hours researching and developing stories focused on racial, gender, and caste injustices. Throughout this experience, storytelling has been her greatest superpower to help bring together people of different backgrounds and beliefs and to empower her generation to design a better future. She believes that the arts have a transformative power to bring people together and build empathy.
 Photo and Video: Nithya Thayaal Assisted by: Adad Hannah Producer: Aakanksha Luthra Photo hair and makeup: Sangeeta Bhella

“I'm scared. I'm fragile, weak, and scared.” Roy Dib smokes, checks Instagram, and looks out onto the Mediterranean while delivering a pensive monologue on love, sex, nationhood, and migration. Between drags, Dib pries apart the norms that ostensibly unite societies (marriage, the nation-state, the pursuit of happiness), forging a critique embedded in his own entanglements and complicities. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Roy Dib (born in 1983) is an artist and filmmaker based in Beirut. On both formal and conceptual levels, Roy Dib challenges common notions of space and boundary, weaving together archival material, scripted text and hypothetical circumstances to chronicle the political narratives of our day. His work has been presented at Studio la Città (2021), Loop Barcelona (2020), Galerie Tanit (2018), MAXXI Museum (2017), Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), ALFILM (2017), JCC (2016), Forum Expanded – 64th and 65th Berlinale, Exposure 2015 – Beirut Art Center, Uppsala International Short Film Festival (2014), Queer Lisboa (2014), Images Festival (2016) - Toronto, Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2013, 2015 and 2017), Ashkal Alwan (2014), and Video Works (2011–2014). Song credit: Cesária Évora, "Sodade," 1992. Photo: Aly Saab

“How do our cells become oriented to justice?” Dancer and activist Emily Johnson invites us to embody justice through song, dance, and vibration. “Think of the ground lifting up with you, beneath your feet … this vibratory lift. The stomp is after the sound, the impact, the land. The spaces in-between: possibility, otherwise.” Emerging from Johnson's land and water protection efforts in Lenapehoking (New York City), her Transmission serves as a call-to-action to resist setter capitalism. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land- and water-protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in Lenapehoking/New York City. Johnson is of the Yup'ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history, and role in building futures. Johnson is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future. Contributor Acknowledgments: Love to Karyn Recollet, ever collaborator; Zach Crumrine, sound engineer and support; and Eileen Myles who offered feedback. Photo: Adam Sings in the Timber

“This body is a shelter, / of networking, of systems, / which give a complete life / and responsibilities / beyond culture, classes, and language.” Punctuated by gasps, inhalations, whispers, and nonverbal vocalizations, performance artist Melati Suryodarmo bridges the connections between her own body and the social bodies that sustain us. In a poem that probes the boundaries of oration and performance, Suryodarmo shows how we might find empowerment within our own bodies as the basis for collective transformation. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Melati Suryodarmo (born 1969, Solo, Indonesia) graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunscheweig, Germany. Her practice is informed by Butoh, dance and history, among other things. Her work is the result of ongoing research in the movements of the body and its relationship to the self and the world. These are translated into photography, dance choreography, video, and live performances. Suryodarmo is interested in the psychological and physical agitations that may be from the self or the world but somehow result in lasting change on the individual. The body is the home for memories and the self, rather than the individual itself, and the body's system. Photo: Harry Hartantio.

“Never let go of your authentic self, even if it must be in hiding for now. Protect it like a lit match in the wind. Don't let fear blow it out.” Blending frankness and wit, Esra'a Al Shafei speaks out against state-led repression of speech and expression. She chronicles the survival mechanisms—art, spoken word, music, comedy—that she regularly uses to critique and change her circumstances. Al Shafei powerfully affirms the need to live as one's authentic self, as a leader who lights the way for others to do the same. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Esra'a Al Shafei is a Bahraini human rights activist and founder of Majal.org, a network of digital platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This work includes Mideast Tunes, a web and mobile application for independent musicians in the MENA who use music as a tool for social justice advocacy; Ahwaa.org, a discussion tool for Arab LGBTQ+ youth which leverages game mechanics to protect and engage its community; and Migrant-Rights.org, the primary resource on the plight of migrant workers in the Gulf region. Illustration: Nicole Georges

“Today we see that the past is the future, and what once was will be once again.” Stimson offers a powerful call-and-response to John F. Kennedy's 1961 Presidential Address, using JFK's words as a springboard to advocate for decolonization and environmental stewardship. Looking beyond the borders and bounded histories of the United States, Stimson centres Turtle Island and Mother Earth in his speech, reflecting on how generational and ancestral stories of interdependence might shape a freer and more unified future. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, Treaty 7 Territory, in southern Alberta. Stimson has a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. He is an interdisciplinary artist and exhibits nationally and internationally. Stimson received the Alumni of Influence Award in 2020 from the University of Saskatchewan, the Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2018, the REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017, the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005, and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003. Audio credit: "Owl Dance Song" by Calvin and Mary Boy from An Historical Album of Blackfoot Indian Music, FW34001, courtesy Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. (p) (c) 1979. Used with permission. Photo: Blaire Russell

“Only we, the people together, can inhabit the world differently. We are not united by the illusion of saving the world but defending life, binding ourselves to the territory through relationships of reciprocity.” In a future where queer leadership holds the seat of power, Emmelhainz speculates on the structures of governance needed for a revolutionary, horizontal, Earth-centred territory. She addresses a nationless public as a reluctant leader—spearheading an exit from extractivist capitalism, and reimagining what participatory democracy can look like. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Anahuac Valley (Mexico City). Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to many languages and presented at an array of international venues. Her book in Spanish, The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico's Neoliberal Conversion (2016), is currently being translated to English to be published by SUNY Press. She has also published the books The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine with Taurus Mexico (2017) and Jean-Luc Godard's Political Filmmaking with Palgrave Macmillan (2019). Also forthcoming is Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance with Vanderbilt University Press. Photo: Lake Verea

“Only we, the people together, can inhabit the world differently. We are not united by the illusion of saving the world but defending life, binding ourselves to the territory through relationships of reciprocity.” In a future where queer leadership holds the seat of power, Emmelhainz speculates on the structures of governance needed for a revolutionary, horizontal, Earth-centred territory. She addresses a nationless public as a reluctant leader—spearheading an exit from extractivist capitalism, and reimagining what participatory democracy can look like. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Anahuac Valley (Mexico City). Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to many languages and presented at an array of international venues. Her book in Spanish, The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico's Neoliberal Conversion (2016), is currently being translated to English to be published by SUNY Press. She has also published the books The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine with Taurus Mexico (2017) and Jean-Luc Godard's Political Filmmaking with Palgrave Macmillan (2019). Also forthcoming is Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance with Vanderbilt University Press. Photo: Lake Verea

“Is it my greed? Is it my greed that propels me to behave like this? How do I learn to share? Is it my fear? Is it my fear that propels me to behave like this? How do I learn to not be afraid of the unknown?” Writing as Patriarchy Misogyny, anitafrika reflects on how this character sees his domain under threat in the face of constant resistance. In an address to the Global Village, Patriarchy Misogyny muses on how his norms have been constructed and upheld, and the contested terrain on which they rest—testifying to the inspirational progress of feminist, queer and trans, and anti-racist movements. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. 
 d'bi.young anitafrika is an African-Jamaican-Tkarontonian, London-based dub poet, theatre interventionist and decolonial scholar committed to embodying art that ritualizes acts of transformation from violence inflicted upon the people and the planet. The multi-award-winning Canadian Poet of Honour, author of twelve plays, seven albums, and four collections of poetry was recently recognized as a Global Leader in Theatre and Performance by Arts Council England. After receiving hxr Masters from the University of London, anitafrika was awarded a Dean's Scholarship by London South Bank University (LSBU) to conduct doctoral research in Black womxn's theatre. In addition to being the Director of Curriculum Design and Pedagogy at the new Soulpepper Theatre Academy in Canada, anitafrika works at the UN's Global Initiatives Fellowship as Theatre Interventionist and lectures at LSBU. Shx continues to share hxr liberatory framework—the Anitafrika Method—with practitioners worldwide through hxr ongoing online residencies. Shx most recently worked as Director of Kaie Kellough's Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song for Obsidian Theatre's 21 Black Futures project and is currently completing Dubbin Theatre, an anthology of hxr plays written between 2000-2020. You can find hxr latest theatrical work in She Mama Wata— as an audio version that she wrote, directed and performed—featured in Soulpepper Theatre's Around the World in 80 Plays. Photo: Anthony Rock

“Do you even know what you want to want?” Jacob takes us on a looping and circuitous path through self-care and empowerment rhetoric. “Own it!” “You know you want it.” “I'm over it—you do you.” With a text-to-speech device twisting these words to the point of their collapse, Jacob at once celebrates their capacity to inspire, and exposes their vacuity. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Based in Toronto, Luis Jacob is an artist whose work destabilizes conventions of viewing and invites collisions of meaning. Jacob has achieved an international reputation, with his work exhibited at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2019); Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2019); the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2018); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2017); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); Taipei Biennial 2012; Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Hamburg Kunstverein, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (both 2008); and Documenta12, Kassel (2007). In 2016 he curated the exhibition Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, with a catalogue co-published with Black Dog Press in 2020. Photo: Miguel Jacob

“Hope has always been necessary, but I do wonder if we've ever really had it.” Set against the backdrop of COVID-19 in New York, and rooted in complicated family histories, Róisín's address advocates for hope in spite of its many obstacles. In a heartfelt letter to the listener she shares resilience and capacity for hope, amid loss and cataclysm. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Brooklyn, New York. Róisín's work exists at the intersections of her identity as a queer, Muslim, South Asian woman interested in spirituality, race and pop culture. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Allure. She has also pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities. She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019) and the novel Like A Bird (2020). Her upcoming work is a book of non-fiction entitled, Who Is Wellness For?, to be released in spring 2022. Photo: Clémence Polès

“When I say ‘Let's get cozy,' I'm asking you to join me in the making of a new and better world.” Gotkin reflects on the historical, social, and political meanings of coziness—from its origins in consumer culture, through to its contemporary usages in networks of self and community care. Rejecting political movements premised on discomfort or hustle, Gotkin shows how getting cozy should be celebrated when founding movements rooted in disability justice principles. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Kevin Gotkin is an access ecologist, community organizer, and teacher. They received their PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and were a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, & Communication at NYU from 2018–2021. From 2016–2019, they co-founded Disability/Arts/NYC with Simi Linton. More recently, they were an Artist-in-Residence at Het HEM in the Netherlands, lead steward of the REMOTE ACCESS nightlife series, and an inaugural cohort member of Creative Time's Think Tank. Photo: Louise Hickman

“drag your body into the sunlight / dig a hole and bury yourself in it” Delivered via distorted and whispering proxy, Walden sends a biocentric message from the swamp: “take a lower kind of view / spend some time with the bugs in the dirt baths.” The artist's instructions show how we might be more queerly in touch with our bodies and environments, opening up new points of connection to the more-than-human world. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Romily Alice Walden is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centres a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Their practice questions contemporary Western society's relationship with care, tenderness and vulnerability in relation to our bodies, our communities and our ecosystem. Walden is interested in our ability (and failure) to navigate physicality, interdependency and fallibility both communally and individually. Recent work has shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art: Newcastle, Hebel Am Uffer: Berlin, SOHO20: New York, Kunstinstituut Melly: Rotterdam, and Tate Exchange: Tate Modern: London. In 2019 Walden was a Shandaken Storm King resident and will be resident at Wysing Arts Centre and HAU Berlin in 2021. Since 2019, Walden has been a fellow of the Universität der Künste Berlin Graduate School and Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences.

“We envision a timeless and a historical future. We bury our seen and unseen dead. We mourn all of our losses. We catalogue our human and more-than-human martyrs in the war against you, Earth.” In an intimate letter to Earth, Madre Tierra, Pachamama, Gómez-Barris mourns the colonial and capitalist-induced harms to the planet, while steeling our resolve for fierce resistance to ecocide. Rooted in the queer, decolonial, and more-than-human perspectives that animate her work, Gómez-Barris calls for earthly and embodied activist practices. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Macarena Gómez-Barris is a scholar and writer who works at the intersections of the built environment, decolonization, visual arts, memory, land, and sea restitution. She is the author of four books: Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), and Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010, with Herman Gray). She is completing a new book on what she terms the colonial Anthropocene, At the Sea's Edge: Liquid Ontologies Beyond Colonial Extinction (Forthcoming, Duke University Press). She is a series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts, Duke University Press. Macarena is also the Founding Director of the Global South Center and the Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award, the 2020–2021 Pratt Research Award, and the 2020–2021 Graduate Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Photo: Soraya Zaman

“Keep going, keep going.” Wngz sings, whispers, and celebrates the legacies and histories that helped her find her voice: Sankofa; Harriet Tubman; Jackie Shane; abolitionism. Weaving together centuries-old traditions of struggle with those of today, she calls for us to reclaim land and body connection, radical love, and interdependence. Ravyn Wngz, “The Black Widow of Burlesque,” is a Tanzanian, Bermudian, Mohawk, 2Spirit, Queer and Transcendent empowerment storyteller. Ravyn is an abolitionist and co-founder of ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company. She is a Canadian Best-Selling Author, one of the Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada (2021), and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada. She serves on the steering team of the Black Lives Matter Toronto Chapter, a group committed to eradicating all forms of anti-Black racism and to supporting Black healing and liberating Black communities. Photo: Jackie Brown “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca.

“There is no doubt our future will be unlike any other in the history of humanity, when we choose to remember. When we choose to restore the stories our ancestors once told.” Spoken with the gravitas endowed by a pulpit or lectern, Mkomose forcefully demands that we remember: our ancestors, the wisdom of past generations, the Anishinaabe creation stories of gratitude and kinship. His speech ties together long histories with the urgent actions demanded to combat settler colonialism and climate catastrophe. Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge) is Assistant Professor of Anishinaabe Studies at Algoma University and Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig, and has Lectured at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University, The University of Waterloo, and coordinated Indigenous Studies at Conestoga College. He specializes in Anishinaabe cultural knowledge, ethno-medicine, and land-based learning. Mkomose has learned from, worked and consulted with, and served Indigenous Elders and community leaders for over a decade. He has founded several community-led Indigenous knowledge-based programs at elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels and works tirelessly to promote land-based sustainability practices. Mkomose has delivered over a hundred invited lectures related to Indigenous knowledge. He is focused on supporting conscious awakening using plant medicines and Anishinaabe cosmovision to respond to the current state of society. He has been initiated into both Midewiwin and Mayan Day Keeping societies and regularly participates in the ancient ceremonial practices of his Anishinaabe ancestors. Photo: Andrea Pinheiro “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca.

“To live, we need to breathe, to be held and to hold, to love and be loved, to make kin and communities. Yes, to love and be loved.” In a rousing address to “sisters and brothers, comrades and friends,” Vergès offers a call for peace, love, and joy as pillars in the long struggle towards freedom. Vergès reclaims these traits, articulating their capacity for anti-racist and queer liberation. Françoise Vergès loves green mangoes with chili and lime, to cook for friends, to swim, to sew, to read, to dance and go to protest marches. She likes hot weather. She grew up in Reunion Island, Indian Ocean, and is forever grateful to have been educated by anticolonial feminist activist parents. She speaks Creole. She is an antiracist decolonial feminist who admires, and is inspired by, the struggles, voices, and strength of Black, Indigenous and brown women. Photo: Boulomsouk Svadphaiphane “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca.

Returning in a new iteration for 2021, "Artists-In-Presidents: Transmissions to Power” invites artists, public intellectuals, and writers to radically reimagine political power and possibility. Hockaday and the Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga) have commissioned an international assembly of 21 contributors to create audio addresses that position themselves as world leaders who speak directly to the people, describing their vision for the future and how we get there. In this Welcome Message, Hockaday outlines the project's central concerns: Who has the power to reimagine leadership? What would it look like if artists assumed authority over our collective future? What if we all joined in this mission? Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca. Featuring the voices of Artists-In-Presidents: Irmgard Emmelhainz, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Kevin Gotkin, Luis Jacob, Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge), Fariha Róisín, Adrian Stimson, Melati Suryodarmo, Françoise Vergès, Romily Alice Walden, Ravyn Wngz. “Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry. Sound design by Stefana Fratila.

Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited and published internationally. Fusco's work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

RICHIE RESEDA: Freed from prison in 2018, Richie is a music and content producer, abolitionist-feminist community organizer and the founder of Question Culture, a social impact record label. He executive produced and produced multiple songs on Defund The Sheriff (The Album) (2020), featuring Vic Mensa, Lauren Juaregui and more, to bring national support to #DefundTheSheriff Campaigns accross LA County. He produced the mini-doc/music video “YQYG” (2019) which premiered at AFROPUNK Brooklyn 2019, contributed to the Proximity art installation for the release of the Just Mercy film (2020), and is executive producer alongside Common, Greg Wells and Scott Budnick for an album featuring major and incarcerated recording artists. While serving his 10-year sentence in California prison, Richie co-founded the prison abolition organization Initiate Justice and the feminist program for incarcerated men, Success Stories, which is the subject of the 2018 CNN documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y. Madame Gandhi is an American electronic music producer, drummer, artist and activist. Gandhi holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, has been listed as Forbes Music 30 Under 30 and is a 2020 TED Fellow. Her music career includes being a touring drummer for artists M.I.A., Thievery Corporation, and Kehlani. Her music and activism focuses on gender liberation and fourth-wave feminism. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Nafis White is an interdisciplinary, multihyphenate artist whose recent body of works are created from objects commonly found in beauty supply stores, industrial sites and the seemingly limitless horizons of our global and political landscapes. Through weaving, hairdressing, sculpture and installation, White centers the uncanny audacity of self- affirmation and love by means of repetition as a form of change. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Marfeco is a multi-media visual art practice about glowy things, packaging, land, motherhood, humor and identity. A book of poetry, “Like Finding Money on the Ground” will be published sometime soon by Andover Street Archives/ Conflux Press. Her show in November 2019 at Great Highway Gallery was entitled “What is Shakespeare in a time of Climate Change.” She believes that she is here, and that since she is here, she can try. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Mel Chin is a conceptual visual artist. Motivated largely by political, cultural, and social circumstances, Chin works in a variety of art media to calculate meaning in modern life. Chin places art in landscapes, in public spaces, and in gallery and museum exhibitions, but his work is not limited to specific venues. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Rosamond S. King is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist whose work is deeply informed by the cultures and communities she is part of - including African, Caribbean, American, and queer. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Sofía Córdova, born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, and currently based in Oakland, is an artist whose work considers sci-fi, dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical objects, colonial contamination, extinction, migration, and climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Carmelita Tropicana is a Cuban-American stage and film lesbian actress who lives and works in New York City. She has been performing in New York’s downtown arts scene since the 1980s, straddling the worlds of performance art and theater in the U.S., Latin America and Europe with her irreverent humor, subversive fantasy and bilingual puns. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of choreography, sculpture, text, and time-based media. Their practice speculates on circumstances of land, economies of labor, and the conditions that figure black and contemporary life through research-based processes synthesized through performative assemblages usually generated collaboratively. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Celeste Headlee is a Communication and Human Nature Expert, Award-winning journalist, Author, and musician. She is the best-selling author of We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter and recently published Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Roger Guenveur Smith adapted his Obie Award-winning solo performance of A HUEY P. NEWTON STORY into a Peabody Award-winning telefilm. His Bessie Award winning RODNEY KING is currently streaming on Netflix. He has also devised studies of Frederick Douglass and Christopher Columbus, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, iconoclasts artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Simon Rodia, and Charles White, and baseball greats Juan Marichal and John Roseboro. His latest work is inspired by Otto Frank, father of diarist Anne Frank. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Mariana Dietl is an Argentine-American writer and novelist. In her last novel, Confined, Mariana speaks the voice of the unheard women in the Argentinean dictatorship of the seventies. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

PHILTH HAUS is an art collective of 6 members, or entities: ANDRA, SYLLA, LYLEX, COLY, ROCO, and PHILIP. This community is channeled through ANDRA and now interacts as an ever-evolving system of trans member entities searching for a form. Their recent album is “ATOFYL.” Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone.

Dr. Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin (Scholartist + Performing Historian)born to African immigrants in Tuskegee, Alabama and raised in Kansas, “Dr. Amma” is a scholartist, performer, and producer who transforms historical material about black identity into performances for the stage and screen. She is a 2019 TED Fellow and best known as the creative force behind AT BUFFALO—a new musical in development about race, America, and the 1901 Buffalo, NY World’s Fair. AUDIO RECORDING CREDIT ATTRIBUTIONS This audio recording "BAKING AMERICA: A Presidential Address by Dr. Amma” for the project: Artists in Presidents contains three royalty-free songs created by a third-party artist and licensed under the terms of a specific Creative Commons License. Usage of the following songs do not suggest that the licensor or composer endorses the artistic work, “Baking America: A Presidential Address by Dr. Amma”. Plain Loafer by Kevin MacLeod  Link: https://incompetech.filmm!u1s8i4c2.5io/song/4223-plain-loafer  License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/  Unnatural Situation by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4567-unnatural-situation  License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/  Clear Waters by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3516-clear-waters  License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/  Note: This song has been modified for usage in this audio recording. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Nibia Pastrana Santiago is a Puerto Rican artist based in San Juan. She develops site-specific “choreographic events” to experiment with time, fiction and notions of territory. Her work addresses archipelagic thinking to question the colonial apparatus. In her performances, nibia makes strategic use of materials and text to deal with failure and indisposition. She is the author of the lazy dancer manifesto. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

My Other Me, is a collective acknowledgement of a seamless kinship across the we. Composed of Zoe Blaq an artist, poet and urban gardner who teaches gardening as a form activism and healing, Set Hernandez Rongkilyo an undocumented immigrant filmmaker and community organizer who organizes around various migrant justice issues, King Jaybo a hip hop artist, fashion designer and community organizer working to dismantle the prison industrial complex and Gloria Galvez an artist, organizer, and amateur mycologist that maintains a practice of disrupting, subverting, and dismantling bland and oppressive status-quo norms. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

گاف is an undisciplinary artist and writer who, in 2009 was transplanted from street protests in a city of four seasons to the windowless rooms of the University of Southern California where aesthetics and politics were discussed in endless summers. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Nao Bustamante is a legendary artist, residing in Los Angeles, California. Bustamante's precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture and writing. The New York Times says, "She has a knack for using her body." Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival/New Frontier, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del BarrioMuseum of Contemporary Art, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. She was also an unlikely contestant on TV network, Bravo's "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." In 2020 Bustamante’s forthcoming VR film, “The Wooden People” received an award from the Mike Kelley Foundation and will be presented at REDCAT in 2021. Bustamante is alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2020 she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from her alma mater, SFAI. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently she holds the position of Professor of Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. There, she also serves as the Director of the MFA in Art. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, and director. He is the author of the books The Cruising Diaries (2014), Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger (2015), and Since I Laid My Burden Down (2017) and the zine Fag School; frontman for the punk band The Younger Lovers; and founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney is a poet who studies the presidents. She is currently the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and she received her MFA from New York University. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based artist from the El Paso/Juarez border that uses performance, video and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racial, gender and queer subjects. She draws inspiration from sexual subcultures to humorously and defiantly reimagine the aesthetic dimensions of difference. Curse by Xandra Ibarra and Sound Design by Rosana Caban Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Edgar Fabián Frías, MA MFT is a nonbinary, queer, indigenous (Wixarika) and Brown interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and psychotherapist. Their work traverses academic, social, historical, and relational planes, building bridges and weaving webs. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, composer, performer, singer, writer, educator, and Feldenkrais Method practitioner based in Lenapehoking aka Brooklyn, NY. His work creates irreverent and empathetic spaces outside traditional discourse. Recent projects include This Bridge Called My Ass, a performance that bends tropes of Latinidad, and SADONNA: The Brown Ambition Tour where he re-interprets Madonna’s upbeat songs as sad anthems. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.

Jasmine Nyende is a fiber, performance and sculptural artist and musician from South Central Los Angeles. Her work explores holding space in community and decolonizing arts education. Song is called "Burn Ye Old White Male Patriarchy Burn" by Jasmine Nyende with her band Fuck You Pay Us Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020 will be released weekly via podcast, virtual gallery, and social media. To visit the virtual gallery: www.artistsinpresidents.com and follow us @artistsinpresidents Sound design by Phoebe Unter & Nicole Kelly featuring Mara Lazer on saxophone. Music by DASK.