Join us on zoom for today's program:

Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://moadsf-org.zoom.us/j/81064671165?pwd=ZXFIRTYvbnZPSXhtbk1rQ3BBeHBOdz09

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BLATANT is a forum and live zine series authored and facilitated by Independent curator and cultural strategist Ashara Ekundayo that centers the lived experiences and radical imagination of Black womxn artists and cultural workers creating across discipline and geography. Presented in conjunction with her “Artist As First Responder” platform, this monthly discussion highlights artists whose creative practices heal communities and save lives. Follow Us on IG @blublakwomyn @artistasfirstresponder @moadsf

This month Ashara Ekundayo will be in conversation with vanessa german and JOJO ABOT.

vanessa german is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing creativity, inhabiting technologies of loving and tenderness as vital forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir.

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JOJO ABOT is a nomadic interdisciplinary artist exploring evolving themes of spirituality, identity and community with self as the starting point to collective evolution. With an exciting blossoming career, JOJO ABOT has offered interdisciplinary works in collaboration with the MOMA, Brooklyn Museum, The Ghana Pavilion at La Biennale Di Venezia, Frieze art fair x Theaster Gates x Prada, Hult Center, Armory week NYC, Perez Art Museum Miami and many others. JOJO ABOT has toured with Ms Lauryn Hill, played stages life Afropunk, Roots picnic, Radio city music hall, The Apollo Theater, Kennedy Center, Greek theater and more while being the first unsigned artist to perform live for NYC's Times Square new year's eve concert to over a million people.

An alumni of the New Museum's incubator program, New Inc, and former resident at National Sawdust, JOJO ABOT continues to develop and present her interdisciplinary practice through POWER TO THE GOD WITHIN and other curatorial projects.

Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, artist, cultural theologian, creative industries entrepreneur and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces. Through her company AECreative Consulting Partners she places artists and cultural production as essential in equitable design practices, real estate development, and movement-building. Her intersectional worldview offers both an Afrofuturist and radical Black feminist framework to the public sector by centering the lives, traditions, and expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. She sits on the Advisory Boards of the Global Fund for Women “Artist Changemaker Program,” San Francisco MoMA SECA Committee, and the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music. In 2019 she founded and currently stewards Artist As First Responder, an organization and 6-point philanthropic, interactive arts platform that reifies artists whose practices heal communities and save lives. She also serves as Cultural Strategist for Chef Bryant Terry’s 4Color Books, an imprint of Ten Speed Press. www.Ashara.io

Artist As First Responder is supported by: AECreative Consulting Partners | the African American Art & Culture Complex | Akonadi Foundation | Women’s Foundation of California | Walter & Elise Haas Fund | Tao Rising | William & Flora Hewlett Foundation