Race/Remix

Episode 9 Ancestral Sounds and the Language of Music: Michael Mwenso

Music is everywhere. It’s in our cars, doctors’ offices, shopping malls, movies, and video games. There’s no question that music is ubiquitous, but is anyone really listening? What does it mean to truly listen? What happens when we tune in, not only to the soundwaves of music, but also the vibrations of community, the echoes of ancestors, and the whispers of dreams? For musician and storyteller Michael Mwenso, Black music is a portal to self-discovery and ancestral connection. It is a living, breathing language that bridges the past, present, and future. He sits down with artist Semoria Mosley for a conversation about the art of listening, a collective practice that promotes community, healing, and spirituality. Their conversation will change how you listen to music.

Michael Mwenso is a bandleader, co-founder of Electric Root, and EMMY Award winning creator. He devotes his energy to spreading the message of Black music to uplift, heal, and empower individuals and divided communities across the US.

This episode is co-hosted by Semoria Mosley, an artist and School of Art MFA student at the University of Arizona.

Episode 8 Artists for Educational Justice: Kim Cosier

Schools have long been a battlefield for racial and social justice. What role do artists play in pushing for reforms in education? Kim Cosier, an art educator and member of the national network of Art Build Workers, explains non-violent practices of using art in service of social justice movements. This conversation is a window into field-tested practices for artists working side-by-side with students, teachers’ unions, state associations, and community organizations. Through her personal stories, learn what it means to embrace the identity of an art worker and how to have fun while leveraging failure and discomfort in the struggle for systemic change.

Kim Cosier is Professor of Art Education in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a member of Art Build Workers, an activist art collective, and founder and director of the Milwaukee Visionaries Project, an award-winning media production/literacy program for urban youth.

Episode 7 Creating Magic Out of Hopelessness: Kayla Farrish

How does one transform trauma into possibility? Trained dancer and multidisciplinary artist Kayla Farrish explores police brutality and death afflicting Black communities in America. Through movement research, she finds a radical imagination that powers the African American struggle to do more than survive from enslavement in the colonial era to systemic oppression by modern institutions. Black people have wrought hope and art from trauma. Inspired by this, Farrish lovingly reclaims the Black body’s histories and its representation in contemporary dance collaborations, film, and sound score. She offers performers strategies for challenging traditional dance industry norms.

Kayla Farrish creates captivating works on stage and film that combine dance theater performance, storytelling, and sound score. She is based in New York City and was named “Break Out Star of 2021” by the New York Times. A recent alumna of the School of Dance at The University of Arizona, she has emerged as an artist to watch in the years ahead.

Episode 6 Making the Story Speak: Reid Gómez

Can language practices break down the separation between “us” and “them”? Reid Gómez, a native speaker of Black vernacular English and Navlish (Navajo-English), shares her multi-lingual writing practice. To “make the story speak,” she criss-crosses the boundaries between languages, embracing various linguistic structures and vocabularies simultaneously. Her writing moves away from oppositional colonial frameworks and toward a more fluid poetics of relation. This allows each of us to perceive one another as related rather than separated. In this final episode of Season 1, she explores the idea of “quantum entanglements” and shows how the relationship between writing, translation, and the nature of being are not fundamentally different. 

Dr. Gómez is a writer and scholar from San Francisco, CA. She currently is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. Her latest writing project, The Web of Differing Versions: Where Africa Ends and America Begins, engages with Silko studies, Indigenous studies and Critical Black studies.

Episode 5 Everything Goes Back to an Immigrant: Anike Tourse

What is it like to navigate a world where “no papers” means no identity and no public recognition? For immigrants traversing such a world, are human connections even possible when faced with forced family separation and deportation? Anike Tourse's filmmaking brings audiences into the human dimension of navigating the complexities of US immigration. Through collaboration with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and other organizations, she makes work that raises awareness about immigrant contributions to society.

Anike Tourse is a writer, director, actor, and producer based in Los Angeles. She has written for One Life To Live and Girlfriends, which are among the first television series to primarily feature a multiracial and socioeconomically diverse cast of characters. She wrote, directed, and starred in the 2023 film America’s Family that sheds light on the tumultuous experience of a family whose teenage child is arrested following a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Episode 4 Artists Reworking the Ruins of Racism: Aaron Coleman & Lizz Denneau

Visual artists are skilled at taking ordinary materials and transforming them into something new and thought-provoking. Their work goes beyond aesthetics; it unearths histories, challenges perceptions, and sparks crucial conversations. In the US where racism is endemic—structured into the everyday existence of individuals and institutions so as to appear ordinary—how do artists rework the remains of racism and resist its traumas in the present? In this episode, Aaron Coleman and Lizz Denneau exhume their multiracial pasts using DNA tests, ancestral research, personal experiences, and artistic expression. With a potent mixture of pride and pain, the two artists reveal the rewards and responsibility in making art that challenges and corrects historical fictions.

Lizz Denneau is a Tucson-based multi-media artist and K-12 art educator. Her artwork draws from personal and global histories to express diverse themes of identity, memory, and race. Her teaching incorporates contemporary art methods, visual literacy, and social justice. 

Aaron S. Coleman is the Kenneth E. Tyler Chair and associate professor of art at Indiana University. He makes prints, paintings, collages, sculptures, and installations that connect historical events to the current sociopolitical climate.

Episode 3 Restaging Classical Music for Social Relevance: Monica Ellis and Toyin Spellman-Diaz of Imani Winds

How are classical musicians speaking to the times in which they live? Band kids turned classical virtuosas, Monica Ellis and Toyin Spellman-Diaz have performed with Imani Winds since its founding more than 25 years ago. True to its beginnings, this predominantly people of color woodwind ensemble continues to break new ground with their socially relevant programming and physically demanding musical repertory. In this episode, they share personal and poignant stories filled with justice-minded strategies that will inspire instrumentalists to compose, collaborate, and commission works of consequence. 

The twice GRAMMY nominated Imani Winds has premiered numerous works by contemporary composers of color, contributing to expanding the wind quintet repertoire. The group’s role in transforming classical music is recognized with a permanent presence in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

The music featured in this episode is from the album "Bruits" produced by Bright Shiny Things:

• Bassoon Example: Sometimes: I. Prolog
• Oboe Example: Bruits: V. masse
• Frederic Rzewski Example: Sometimes: II. Sometimes
• Vijay Iyer Example: Bruits: I. gulf

Episode 2 A Typeface For Change: Silas Munro

What do iconic movements like women's suffrage, Civil Rights, queer liberation, and the Vietnam war resistance have in common? They tapped into the power of words and images to convey messages of protest that changed the collective imagination and direction of history. For LA-based designer and educator Silas Munro, there is “no shortage of opportunities for design to be part of the conversation of social justice.” In this conversation with Munro, we learn to use the subtle yet powerful techniques of lettering and type to tell new stories that inspire justice. 

Silas Munro is currently faculty co-chair in graphic design at Vermont College of Fine Arts and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest.