From the Executive Director

The Skin I Own

By Wendy Levy

As summer winds down, the creative nonprofit organizations you love are winding up. It’s a little crazy for all of us – writing grant proposals for the year to come, reporting on the year we’re still in, speaking at panels, conferences and festivals, forecasting budgets, gathering at intense meetings with our Boards and staff, visioning new programs, tending to relationships that keep it all going, seeding new films and projects, figuring out exactly how our work will be creating the conditions for the change we want to see.

It is a righteous, sometimes frustrating, always creative cycle. This September, once some federal and foundation grants are filed, I get to travel and work with friends and colleagues in the Alliance network who are collaborating with us to launch Arts2Work, design new HatchLabs and re-ignite the Creative Leadership Lab, grow the national Youth Media Network, publish the next issue of THE ISSUE magazine, bust open our Innovation Studio with The VR Colored Girls Museum project and the CherryPIX AR story app, and plan our 2019 regional summits and the 2020 Alliance National Conference in Montgomery, Alabama. At times its overwhelming. Today, it feels exactly right, like we are on the road we’re meant to be on. We are in a place and time when artists go to work.

I call this month’s Executive Director’s note The Skin I Own because that is the title of a new VR piece that we are working on in our Innovation Studio and I can’t stop thinking of what it means to own your own skin. In this instance, inspired by The Colored Girls Museum project and a poem by Amanda Shelby who is also directing the piece (Now don’t get me wrong, I love the color of the skin I own, It is the very essence from which my strength has grown…), the Skin I Own will be a five-minute volumetric journey where VR technology is rendered as ethnopoetry; the beat of the music, the geography of the viewer’s body, the architecture of the virtual space, and the voices of black women guide visitors through the garden, into the museum, on to the porch, through the door and into the front room, where we, the viewers, are among the paintings and objects, seeing our reflections and entering their worlds. In the light of the collective realness of black women, in full view of scars that have healed, and the pain still carried on her shoulders, The Skin I Own also enables viewers to acknowledge their own fears of being unseen, and unheard.  The goal is a creative, communal and emotional experience — centered through the stories, and grounded by the voices, of ordinary/extraordinary black women. Stay tuned for this next year – no telling where it will turn up.

The Alliance is investing in this work because we must; we must provide access to emerging media for everyone, we must walk the talk of equity/diversity with projects run by artists persistently marginalized, and we must hold the space for the change that we know is coming if we stay and dream together.

We hope you’ll join or renew your membership to The Alliance before the end of the year, so we may continue to lift up new opportunities for the field, produce labs, offer grants, underwrite pilot projects, deepen our collaborations, expand our access to emerging tech, and create the conditions where humanity, creativity and culture thrive.

Hope to see you before the end of the year in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Oakland, London or Philadelphia! As always, get with me anytime, wendy@thealliance.media

Notes from the Field

Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival to be Held in October
On October 10th through new The Alliance member Double Exposure, a project of the investigative news organization 100Reporters, will be a hosting a festival presenting a variety of investigative journalism films inspired by the investigative instinct. It will combine film screenings for the public with a professional symposium for journalists and visual storytellers.

Short Film The Fabric of America Released by Ghandi Brigade
A new short film by new The Alliance explores the sides and issues underlying the complex and controversial topic of immigration in the United States. The film focuses how these issues manifest specifically, in Montgomery County, Maryland. It tackles important issues regionally and nationally as “Raids against new residents are on the rise, and as are deportations that lead to families and communities being torn apart.”

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