https://raceremix.arts.arizona.edu/

Race/Remix, University of, Tucson, AZ (2025)

11/22/2024

In Episode 8, “Artists for Educational Justice,” Kim Cosier, artist, activist, and educator offers a thought-provoking perspective: a movement isn’t something that happens on its own. It’s more like a pendulum—requiring a push to swing in any direction. Without a deliberate push, momentum stalls. Every push is an effort to create movement, challenge the status quo, and keep shifting the balance in a cyclical, rather than linear, path to systemic change.

Full quote:
“The pendulum doesn’t swing unless we get out in the streets and do the work. It’s not a natural cycle. These are all human-made cycles. And so, I don’t mean to imply that it just is going to happen that way. That’s just the way it happens. Labor unions across this country now are making headway again.

And ever since the 70’s and Reagan smacking down the air traffic controller’s union, this country has been in decline. And the power of unions. What happens is that those folks just push so far over the edge, people can’t take it anymore. And little people like myself and all of us at this table stand up and say “we’re not going to take it anymore.”

And so, Black Lives Matter. That was people just taking it to the streets. I had never felt so hopeful and warm all over. And I was going to communities in Wisconsin … you never would have imagined to see Black Lives Matter signs in people’s yards and things like that. Now that’s kind of backed off again.

So, we have to be vigilant and keep at it. And it’s very much the idea of people coming together to make change.” - Kim Cosier

Arizona Arts University of Arizona School of Art

10/25/2024

Episode 8 of Race/Remix, “Artists for Educational Justice,” explores the powerful role artists play in advocating for educational reform. Kim Cosier, an influential art educator and member of the Art Build Workers network, shares her vision of harnessing creativity for social justice. https://azart.fyi/RaceRemix8

Dr. Kim Cosier, professor of Art Education in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and co-founder of the Milwaukee Visionaries Project illuminates how artists can mobilize, collaborate, and transform educational spaces through non-violent art practices. Through personal narratives, she illustrates the importance of embracing the identity of an art worker and the joy found in navigating failure and discomfort in the pursuit of systemic change.

Engage with innovative ideas and strategies for making a meaningful impact in your community. Listen now and continue the conversation!

10/10/2024

In Episode 7, Kayla Farrish shares her fascination with other worlds and alternative paths, drawing inspiration from authors Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Toni Morisson, James Baldwin, and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s “Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders.” Their writings have inspired her recent works, “Martyr’s Fiction” and “Put Away the Fire, dear” where she expresses and shapes her own characters and stories through choreography and embodiment dance. Farrish invites us to witness how art can serve as a bridge to new realities and untold narratives.

Episode link https://azart.fyi/RaceRemix7

Full quote:
“Yeah, I really am interested in radical imagination, and I love this poem. At the end of this total work, we’ve navigated through this quartet and duet. I find it’s like playing with different ideas of power and history. And at the end, there’s one person who becomes the reporter and they’re telling us all the news events.

But it’s like, oh, what headlines have happened under the Trump administration that could be both imaginative or real? And what was scary, as we were saying these headlines, even if they were imaginative, they weren't very far from the truth. So, it was this high impact and also trying again to play into the erasure and things that have been happening, created in satire. So, this reporter’s ridiculously cracking and then this person comes out at the end and is reading this poem, which, I was inspired by James Baldwin, actually, and then finding my own words.

Swing low, sweet chariot. That’s the song that’s been there forever. Just imagining turning the trauma that enslaved folks have lived and breaking their backs, creating magic out of hopelessness, turning soil into a nation—such a powerful image, while also saying, we’re still here. Like, you can’t change this. You can’t alter it. This is what happened, but we’re still here.” - Kayla Farrish

09/25/2024

How does one transform trauma into possibility? In Race/Remix Episode 7, Kayla Farrish, trained dancer and multidisciplinary artist, explores police brutality and death afflicting Black communities in America. https://azart.fyi/RaceRemix7

Through movement research, she finds a radical imagination that powers the African American struggle to do more than survive from enslavement in the colonial era to systemic oppression by modern institutions. Black people have wrought hope and art from trauma. Inspired by this, Farrish lovingly reclaims the Black body’s histories and its representation in contemporary dance collaborations, film, and sound score. She offers performers strategies for challenging traditional dance industry norms.

Kayla Farrish creates captivating works on stage and film that combine dance theater performance, storytelling, and sound score. She is based in New York City and was named “Break Out Star of 2021” by the New York Times. A recent alumna of , she has emerged as an artist to watch in the years ahead.

09/23/2024

Race/Remix podcast explores the intersections of racial justice and the arts, building knowledge one conversation at a time.

Look out for Episode 7 on Wednesday, Sep 25, 2024 available on all podcast platforms worldwide.

03/23/2024

In Episode 6, Reid Gómez describes how she can “make the story speak” by criss-crossing the boundaries between languages, embracing various linguistic structures and vocabularies simultaneously. Her writing moves away from oppositional colonial frameworks and toward a more fluid poetics of relation. This allows each of us to perceive one another as related rather than separated. https://azart.fyi/RaceRemix6

Dr. Reid Gómez is a writer and scholar from San Francisco, CA. She currently is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. Her latest writing project, The Web of Differing Versions: Where Africa Ends and America Begins, engages with Silko studies, Indigenous studies and Critical Black studies.

Full quote:
“I cannot tell you what anything means because your job is to make meaning of it. What I can tell you is every detail. I can make the story speak. And then I have to know what story is needed to speak to this moment. I got it! I get the story. I tell you the story. That’s my power, connecting what story speaks to this moment. What story do I need? I tell the story and all the details. Now you’re the one that’s got to make meaning of it. And so I need to keep all the details. Because what is meaningful to you may not be meaningful to the person that needs the story the next time.” - Reid Gómez

Arizona Arts

03/13/2024

What is your connection to immigrants? In Episode 5, “Everything Goes Back to an Immigrant, Filmmaker Anike Tourse shares her connections to the immigrant story and the impact immigrants have on our lives from both close up and wide shot perspectives. https://azart.fyi/RaceRemix5

“For me, everything goes back to an immigrant. Everything goes back to an immigrant. So when I think about the people that I became close to, the first friends that I had. When I think about the people that have really believed in my work and have financially really supported that work. And when I think about the closest friends that I have now, where, you know, my friend is from Israel and her husband is born in the U.S., but comes from a Thai African-American family.

Like everything, everything. And then even going back, obviously, to my own I mean, I haven’t talked about it, but my background. My father’s African-American, my mother’s white and Jewish Ashkenazi. But when you go back to grandparents and great grandparents we’re looking at Russian, Polish, from the Iberian Peninsula, from Spain, from Cuba. So it gets very, very diverse.

So I guess this is a long way of saying that, I mean I owe everything to immigrants and I think that people really kind of thought about it, they would understand that there are many, many immigrants that are helping facilitate their lives as well.” - Anike Tourse

Arizona Arts

02/27/2024

Can language practices break down the separation between “us” and “them”? In Episode 6, Reid Gómez, a native speaker of Black vernacular English and Navlish (Navajo-English), shares her multi-lingual writing practice. https://azart.fyi/RaceRemix6

To “make the story speak,” she criss-crosses the boundaries between languages, embracing various linguistic structures and vocabularies simultaneously. Her writing moves away from oppositional colonial frameworks and toward a more fluid poetics of relation. This allows each of us to perceive one another as related rather than separated. In this final episode of Season 1, she explores the idea of “quantum entanglements” and shows how the relationship between writing, translation, and the nature of being are not fundamentally different.

Arizona Arts

Race/Remix

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