Art to Think With

Julie and Elizabeth's Anti-Capitalist Concert Series encourages musicians and audiences to connect musical affect to their political desires. Besides programming and commissioning political new music relating to a theme, these concerts experiment with format, extra musical content, and discussion. Recent themes have included Income Inequality, EcoSocialism, and Wage Labor.

Free University NYC has hosted over 25 radical, horizontal, public education pop-ups centered on the socio-political challenges of our time. Events are designed to promote accessibility, intersectionality, movement building, and cross fertilization. Elizabeth participated in the inaugural May Day Free U in 2012, which was organized by the Education Working Group of Occupy Wall Street, and has been involved in organizing since then. Recent themes have included Decolonize Climate Justice (in the run up to the Climate March), Radical Futures, and Cultures of Accountability.

The School for Designing a Society is a project of artists, activists, and teachers, that draws from the arts, systems- and critical theory, and the writings of Herbert Brün to help participants imagine and design projects in the service of their desired society. Elizabeth arrived as a student in 2005, and has been teaching since 2010.

Democratize This! How We Make the World We Want is a book-in-progress co-written with Danielle Chynoweth. Democratize This! teaches how to orient ourselves in relation to the problems and opportunities we face in time and space, articulate the primary systems of domination in a way that reveals their contradictions and contestedness, locate points of intervention, and show how participation is key to change.

Songlines, a project co-organized with the Orfeo Duo, seeks to map a neighborhood in song through public song writing workshops and singing parades. Participants are invited to compose songs about their favorite blocks, whether in the past, present, or a desired future. Organizers help participants notate these songs, and convene singing walking tours of the neighborhood, as seen and sung by its inhabitants. So far, over 60 blocks around Morningside Heights have been mapped this way. Songlines aims to render the neighborhood more beloved, by eliciting and performing the perspectives and creativity of its inhabitants.