PROJECT | Arts & Civic Imagination

A placekeeping project of intercultural programming over a year to reimagine the former Columbus Square in Providence, RI. Community research and popular education, cultural gatherings, ritual-based performance, and cultural workforce development.

PUBLIC ART | Arts & Civic Imagination • A visual art installation, storytelling project and mural in Downtown Providence informed by stories and objects belonging to people from the community.

PROJECT | Arts & Civic Imagination • A multimedia project in collaboration with SISTA Fire. A series of community collages representing the idea of Justice, turned into tarot cards and accompanied by a sound piece and sculpture called the Justice Portal. Community is invited to embody walking through and into Justice.

ART EXHIBIT | Arts & Healing • Featuring artists Shey Rivera Ríos, Feda Eid, Luana Morales, this was a reconfiguration of the exhibit ‘Nothing Living Lives Alone’ and its cancellation and censorship by Providence College.

WORKSHOPS | Arts & Health • A series of workshops using art, theatre, and cultural practice as healing justice, by and with SISTA Fire members. This became the Healing Justice Committee at SISTA Fire, a reproductive justice organization in Providence, RI. We learn and practice Healing Justice as a political framework, using art and culture to address grief, cultivate joy, and generate energy for political organizing.

ART EXHIBIT | Arts & Health • An art exhibit showing how artists and organizers in Rhode Island responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the movement against racial injustice. In moments of difficulty, art turns into ‘community portals’ that help us process grief and envision better futures.

ART EXHIBIT | Arts & Climate • A climate justice art exhibit that celebrates the deep relationships that Black, Indigenous, and people of color have with the land and the outdoors, including ancestral practices of land stewardship. Curated with and for Movement Education Outdoors.

THEATRE | Arts & Civic Imagination • A futurist story of familial grief, political upheaval, and Boricua liberation. A glitched adaptation of Antigone. We are welcomed in the Motherboard of Ancestral Technologies, an altar space between dimensions, where ancestors Antigona and Ismene are awakened.

PROJECT | Arts & Climate • A peacekeeping project where artists were commissioned to create sound, poetry, and live performance pieces based on extensive research about the waterways of the city. Providence Waterways is a research archive and multimedia storytelling project. Co-curated by Shey Ri Acu Rivera Rios & Seth Tourjee.

PROJECT | Arts & Health • An AfroFuturist and abolitionist VR film and community-organizing project that uses participatory budgeting and proposes a Health Justice Academy for futures of care and community-centered emergency response. Collaboration with City of Providence.

PUBLIC ART | Arts & Urban Planning • A ‘placekeeping’ and public art project along Main Street in Holyoke, MA, that engages local artists in the creation of public artworks that honor the histories of the neighborhood and the cultural fabric of the long-standing Boricua and Latin community in Holyoke. El Corazon counts on an Advisory Board of residents, local businesses, culture bearers, and grassroots organizations.

PUBLIC ART | Arts & Health • A bilingual public arts and health campaign to share resources and create awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project involved 11 Latine artists wh created altworka for large public art vinyl murals installed in Providence Community Health Centers and important locations to the Latinx community in Providence.