Future/Present: Arts in a Changing America - Paperback

by Daniela Alvarez (Editor), Roberta Uno (Editor), Elizabeth M. Webb (Editor)

FUTURE/PRESENT brings together a vast collection of writers, artists, activists, and academics working at the forefront of today's most pressing struggles for cultural equity and racial justice in a demographically changing America. The volume builds upon five years of national organizing by Arts in a Changing America, an artist-led initiative that challenges structural racism by centering people of color who are leading innovation at the nexus of arts production, community benefit, and social change. FUTURE/PRESENT includes a range of essays and criticism, visual and performance art, artist manifestos, interviews, poetry, and reflections on community practice. Throughout, contributors examine issues of placekeeping and belonging, migration and diasporas, the carceral state, renegotiating relationships with land, ancestral knowledge as radical futurity, and shifting paradigms of inequity. Foregrounding the powerful resilience of communities of color, FUTURE/PRESENT advances the role of artists as first responders to injustices, creative stewards in the cohesion and health of communities, and innovative strategists for equity.

Author Biography

Daniela Alvarez is REFRAME editor and Research Manager at Arts in a Changing America, and Public Programs Coordinator at the Getty Museum.