University Museum of Contemporary Art to Host “We Are For Freedoms” Virtual Town Hall

For Freedoms logo

The University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) will host a virtual town hall titled “We Are For Freedoms,” Tuesday, Oct. 27, at 6 p.m. Organized by the For Freedoms Student Organizing Committee and presented in collaboration with the youth movement The Wide Awakes, this virtual gathering aims to bring together students, artists and creative thinkers to discuss ideas around survival, healing, civic engagement and a collective, radical reimagining of a just and hopeful future.

The town hall will feature artist kara lynch, an artist and former associate professor of video and critical studies at Hampshire College, who “through low-fi, collective practice and social intervention, explores aesthetic/political relationships between time and space.” The artist’s practice is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered as Black, Queer and Feminist.

The event will include an introduction to the museum’s spring 2021 exhibition of the same name.

The For Freedoms Student Organizing Committee was conceived by Carolyn Parker-Fairbain, a UMCA intern and student in the UMass Afro-Am Department. The committee seeks to engage the community at large with student-led public programming, will serve as the student voice within the museum and will be ambassadors to the community. The goals of the committee are to be an intentionally decolonized space embodying the best practices for the group’s development, and to use art and arts programming to infuse these ideologies into the community at large.

For Freedoms is a national artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action. They work with artists and organizations to center the voices of artists in public discourse, expand what participation in a democracy looks like and reshape conversations about politics.

Registration is required for the virtual town hall, which is free and open to all. This event and the spring exhibition are sponsored by Florence Bank and by a UMass Campus Climate Improvement grant award.