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This second program in the series is partnered with BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance during the Boogie Down Dance Series. Organized by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, this event brings together dancers/choreographers with connections to the Bronx to generate movement-based actions in public spaces in the South Bronx: Argelia Arreola (with support from Pepatián: Bronx Arts ColLABorative), Ana ‘Rokafella’ García, Paloma McGregor/Angela’s Pulse, and Alethea Pace. Responding to escalating surveillance, policing, and state violence, particularly the terrorization of Black and Brown communities under ongoing ICE raids, the program advances movement as a counter-response to neglect, with care, and shared imagination, asking how bodies navigate, reshape, and reclaim urban space under conditions of threat. This program will activate several points along 3rd Avenue and 149th Street, a major cultural crossroads at the heart of the South Bronx called The Hub.
How Do We ______ in Public? is a free public programming series of four experimental events taking place across New York City throughout 2026.
Organized by the Social Practice CUNY core team of artists, educators, and scholars (Chloë Bass, Tom Finkelpearl, Catherine LaSota, Nicolás Dumit Estevez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Gregory Sholette, and Cory Tamler), the series expands our existing work and reaffirms its commitment to strengthening socially engaged artistic practice, especially at a moment when culture faces sustained attacks and freedom of expression is increasingly constrained.
Building on the foundation of our work in supporting artist-led research and projects while making a deliberate shift, How Do We ______ in Public? is designed intentionally to engage a broader, non-CUNY public through our team’s collective years of producing, experiencing, researching, and teaching social practice within a public university. Framed as an open-ended, collective experiment, each program is a participatory proposition exploring methods of being, thinking, and enduring together in today’s complex sociopolitical landscape.
How Do We ______ in Public? responds to contemporary crises shaping the cultural field, including the defunding and targeting of public institutions and the erosion of shared civic space. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the series tests new forms of social practice in real time, foregrounding experimentation, solidarity, and public accountability.
Across four interconnected programs, How Do We ______ in Public? asks how we study, move, keep secret(s), and continue together in public when the infrastructures that once supported those actions are fraying. As we assess our organizational moment and contemplates its evolving legacy, the series will culminate in early 2027 with a reconvening of participants to reflect on the insight, tensions, and possibilities surfaced through these programs. How Do We ______ in Public? is supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation.
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