Live via Zoom

Admission is free.  RSVP HERE

DESCRIPTION:
This unique multimedia event invites USC students and the larger community to join forces with Milwaukee visual and spoken word artists Fondé Bridges, Mikal Floyd-Pruitt, and Dasha Kelly Hamilton to recognize familiar but so-far-unnamed racial experiences and brainstorm new vocabulary around them. Using language skills drawn from hip hop to highlight the Black urban experience, new language and new words will be sprouted and spread.

This event is part of Foresight Is 2020: Racial Justice and the Arts. Over four evenings of performance and discussion, USC faculty, students, alumni, and guests from Los Angeles and beyond will ask: What does a nation free of institutional racism look like, and how can the arts provide a vehicle for reaching it?

Bios:
Fondé Bridges is the founder and director of Healthy Words Literary Kitchen, an agency that empowers individuals, teams, and communities with Healthy Words, positive, beneficial, and nutritious vocabulary and the best literary diet on earth. He has worked as an artist and creative placemaking consultant for the Greater Milwaukee Committee, MKE<->LAX, NEWaukee, and Creative Alliance Milwaukee for the Beerline Trail, the Night Market, The Spot 4MKE, HERE! CNI, and other Milwaukee-based initiatives. He attended the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, for English and Creative Writing.

Mikal Floyd-Pruitt started rapping and producing music as a youth, taking up the moniker MC Mikal. These early forays into making music led to his first collaborations with other artists. Along with his personal art practice, he is a community artist and cultural producer. His involvement includes “putting together projects with youth groups, serving as creative consultant on various public art projects, and going into organizations to help them accomplish an idea.” After graduating from Harvard University in 2006, he moved his multidisciplinary art practice back to Milwaukee, where he grew up. 

Dasha Kelly Hamilton is Milwaukee’s eleventh poet laureate and a writer, performer, facilitator, and creative change agent who seeks to amplify community connections by facilitating discussions about topics that often divide communities, such as race and class. Stirring ideas and the courage to carve them into writing, into conversation, she holds workshops and retreats on writing, symposiums on cultural organizing, in-service for educators, and implicit bias training for leadership teams and reaches audiences in venues ranging from college campuses to correctional institutions.

Related Events (all times are PT):
The Intersection: Woke Black Folk
A Performance by Funmilola Fagbamila
Sunday, October 11, at 5 p.m.
Live via Zoom
For more info and to RSVP, click here. 

New Leaders Now: Artists Advancing Racial Justice
Monday, October 12, at 5 p.m.
Live via Zoom
For more info and to RSVP, click here.

Arts, Activism, and the Academy: Addressing Racism within Higher Education 
Tuesday, October 13, at 7 p.m.
Live via Zoom
For more info and to RSVP, click here. 

Presented by USC Arts in Action and USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative, in partnership with USC Race, Arts, and Placemaking.