SACRAMENTO, CA – The California Arts Council opens registration this week for its free online public workshops intended to advance racial equity within the state’s arts and cultural field. The three-part workshop series was co-created through a partnership with the Bay Area’s PUSH Dance Company and Dancing Around Race, as part of a pilot project supported by the Government Alliance on Race & Equity’s Innovation and Implementation Fund.
Themes explored will be relevant to arts organizations, artists, nonprofits, and government agencies interested in advancing racial equity practices in their institutions.
“We share many identities, many degrees of varying existence in what we consider to be a radical imagination, to hold our differences equal to each other through racial equity. PUSH Dance Company is bringing in Dancing Around Race to help ‘champion a spectrum of aesthetic perspectives’ whereby we’ll confront systemic, institutionalized and internalized racism in our everyday artistic frameworks,” said Raissa Simpson, artistic director for PUSH Dance Company.
“This project is an exciting step for the CAC to work more directly with artists and cultural practitioners on this long-term vision for racial equity,” said CAC Race and Equity Manager Katherin Canton. “We know that culture is power and that artists and cultural practitioners are powerful change makers. These workshops are as much a resource for our team internally as they are for the field; we look forward to continuing the learning journey together.”
Each workshop features standalone curriculum; registrants may attend as many as they see fit to the relevance and goals of their work.
Workshops will include closed captioning and live ASL and Spanish interpretation. Archived video recordings of each workshop will be published to the California Arts Council’s Racial Equity Learning Resources page within 72 hours following the webinar.
Workshop #1
Looking Back to Move Forward: How to Begin Addressing the Impacts of Systemic Racism
Thursday, November 3
6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Click here to register
Workshop #2
Decentering Whiteness in Education
Sunday, November 6
12 p.m. – 2 p.m.
Click here to register
Workshop #3
Economics of Race: Intention, Impact, and Consequences
Thursday, November 10
6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Click here to register
For more information regarding these workshops or the Innovations in Government pilot program, visit the Innovations in Government Workshop Series page.
About PUSH Dance Company
Raissa Simpson’s PUSH Dance Company builds vibrant contemporary dances to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges attributed to mixed heritage. This vision includes BΛSE, a BIPOC artists sanctuary for reparative and restorative dance practices through classes, workshops, residencies, and performances. For more information visit the Push Dance Company website.
About Dancing Around Race
The work of liberation requires collaborative decolonial approaches through the body. Dancing Around Race is led by South Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, Latinx, Black, and multiracial facilitators, and proposes a workshop that leads us toward building coalitional solidarity. Seeking to disrupt hierarchical structures, this workshop will lead participants through the concentric circles of liberation work related to self, institutions we belong to, and communities we serve and represent. We ask: How can we connect personal practice directly to institutional and community work with which we engage? How do we remain in the messy work of ongoing collaboration with one another? For more information, visit the Dancing Around Race website.
Media Inquiries:
Kimberly Brown
Public Affairs Specialist
kimberly.brown@arts.ca.gov
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The California Arts Council is a state agency with a mission of strengthening arts, culture, and creative expression as the tools to cultivate a better California for all. It supports local arts infrastructure and programming statewide through grants, initiatives, and services. The California Arts Council envisions a California where all people flourish with universal access to and participation in the arts.
Members of the California Arts Council include: Lilia Gonzáles-Chávez, Chair; Consuelo Montoya, Vice Chair; Gerald Clarke, Vicki Estrada, Jodie Evans, Ellen Gavin, Alex Israel, Phil Mercado, and Roxanne Messina Captor. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov.
The California Arts Council is committed to increasing the accessibility of its online content. For language and accessibility assistance, visit https://arts.ca.gov/about/about-us/language-communications-assistance. To read this announcement in Spanish, please use the website’s Google Translate tool by clicking the “Translate” link in the upper righthand corner of this page.
El Consejo de las Artes de California se compromete a aumentar la accesibilidad de sus contenidos en línea. Para obtener ayuda con el idioma y la accesibilidad, visite https://arts.ca.gov/about/about-us/language-communications-assistance. Para leer este anuncio en español, utilice la herramienta Google Translate del sitio web haciendo clic en el enlace “Traducir” situado en la esquina superior derecha de esta página.
