A One Day Symposium featuring; Visual, Scholarly, and Activist Responses to Spatial Precarity
The Latinization of U.S. cities has been accompanied by the rapid displacement of Latinx people from their historical stronghold communities. Art and culture have been central to these processes, both to expediting gentrification and to strategies of resistance and Latinx placemaking. This is evident in the role art galleries and culture-based developments have played in the gentrification of urban cities as well as in the rise of Latinx artistic interventions that place culture and place-making at the forefront of their practice.
This one-day symposium gathered participating artists from PELEA Exhibit along with scholars who have been theorizing and acting through these processes in their work and practice. We welcomed the following speakers to speak at this symposium.
9:30 am Opening Remarks
10 am - 11:45 am Panel I: Thinking Through Capital and the Politics of Space 10 am - 11:45 am
Johana Londoño is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American, the Caribbean, and US Latino Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from NYU and a BFA from The Cooper Union. Her articles on Latinx urbanism appear in the edited volumes Latino Urbanism (NYU Press) and Race and Retail (Rutgers Press) and in several journals including American Quarterly, Social Semiotics, and Identities. Londoño is currently completing her book, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in US Cities (under contract with Duke). Her research has benefited from the Princeton-Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities, the Ford Foundation Dissertation, and Postdoctoral Fellowships, and the Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity, among other fellowships and grants. She serves on the Líderes Board of the LatinoJustice Organization (PRLDEF), a champion of Latinx civil rights, and is the co-chair of the Latina/o Studies Section of LASA. Londoño is a founding member of the US Colombianidades Editorial Collective. Lodoño’s Twitter and Instagram, @jlondonoo @jolondono
Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Sociology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her research focuses on understanding how urban space mediates community life and race, class, and social inequality.
Amanda Boston is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University and an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American urban history, politics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the politics and culture of race in the post-civil rights era.
Her current projects focus on gentrification’s racial operations in post-1970 Brooklyn, New York, and their role in the making and unmaking of the borough’s black communities. Amanda holds a Ph.D. and a Master of Arts in Africana Studies from Brown University, as well as a Master of Arts in Political Science and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and African & African American Studies from Duke University. Boston’s Twitter, @atboston.
Miguel Robles-Durán is an urbanist, Associate Professor of Urbanism and member of the Parsons School of Design Graduate Urban Council in New York. He is a Senior fellow at “Civic City”, a post-graduate design/research program based at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) Geneva, Switzerland and is a current fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center Sally & Don Lucas Artists Residency Program in Saratoga, California.
Noon - 1 pm Lunch and Break
1:30 pm - 3 pm Panel 2: Into Action
Shellyne Rodriguez a visual artist who works in multiple mediums to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against false hope, a device employed in the service of subjugation. She’s also an activist and organizer with Take Back the Bronx. Rodriguez has recently been commissioned by the city of New York for a permanent public sculpture, which will serve as a monument to the people of the Bronx.
Rigoberto Lara is from Sunset Park for a Liberated Future, an abolitionist, anti-capitalist collective based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We work with love to build community power and organize against policing displacement, and other forms of systemic oppression affecting our neighborhood.
Lena Melendez from the Northern Manhattan Not for Sale, a coalition fighting gentrification and to keep affordable housing.
3 pm - 4 pm Curator Tour of PELEA
4 pm - 5 pm Reception
This symposium was organized by The Latinx Project and co-sponsored by The Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD), The Institute of African American Affairs/ Center for Black Visual Culture IAAA/CBVC, (CLACS) Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Urban Democracy Lab, New York University Urban Initiative, and The KJCC (King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center).