November 15, 1pm
205 Hudson Gallery
205 Hudson Street (at Canal St.)
with Black Lunch Table & keondra bills freemyn
Pollinator & Caroline Woolard
New Crits & Ajay Kurian
Tiger Balm/Unity Newspaper & Maggie Wong
This is a Performance School & Monica Mirabile
Presentations & discussions from artist-founded organizations actively leading alternative educational models today. Please join us! Free & Open to the Public
ABOUT THE PRESENTORS
Black Lunch Table & Keondra Bills Freemyn is a writer, memory worker, and archivist in the Black tradition currently serving as Co-Executive Director, Archives + Strategy at Black Lunch Table, a radical archiving project centering Black visual artists. Originally from South Central LA, Keondra is a former US diplomat and has worked with the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, New York Public Library and DC Public Library on oral history, digital transcription, and metadata projects centering marginalized communities. She is founder of the digital archival discovery initiative Black Women Writers Project and former coordinator of Project STAND, an independent archival consortium focused on the ethical documentation of student movements. A dedicated digital humanist, Keondra is a 2024 Curationist.org Critics of Color fellow and a 2022-2023 African American Digital & Experimental Humanities Scholar. Keondra earned a Bachelor's degree in Marketing from Fordham University, a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University, and a Master of Library and Information Science in Archives and Digital Curation from University of Maryland. Keondra completed a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies at Harvard University and is a Society of American Archivists Digital Archives Specialist.
Caroline Woolard is a founding co-organizer of Art.coop and Head of Strategy at Pollinator.coop. She is the Area Head of Foundations in the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University and the co-author of two major reports: Solidarity Not Charity (Grantmakers in the Arts, 2021) and Spirits and Logistics (Center for Cultural Innovation, 2022) and three books: Making and Being (Pioneer Works, 2019), a book for educators about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda; Art, Engagement, Economy (onomatopee, 2020) a book about managing socially-engaged and public art projects; and TRADE SCHOOL: 2009-2019, a book about peer learning that Woolard catalyzed in thirty cities internationally over a decade. Woolard’s artwork has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS.
NewCrits & Ajay Kurian is an artist, educator, and writer. Kurian employs a fluid, multimedia vocabulary which aims to articulate the social and environmental conditions that govern both our worldly and transcendental faiths. His work often tries to bridge the gap between the local and the cosmic. He is the founder of NewCrits, a global platform for virtual studio mentorship for artists of all backgrounds and experience. He's shown internationally including the Fridericianum, Kassel; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Aishti Foundation, Lebanon, and many more. Kurian lives in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BA from Columbia University in Visual Arts and Art History. NewCrits is a global virtual platform rooted in aesthetic education committed to fostering critical care, rigorous inquiry, and artist-to-artist dialogue. We offer mentorship, courses, and conversations that challenge the assumptions of traditional art institutions, while honoring the intensity of their best methods. Our offerings are designed for artists at any stage, especially those seeking meaningful critique rooted in trust, discernment, and deep attention.
Tiger Balm & Maggie Wong is a visual artist and educator whose work encompasses installations, collaborations, publications, and educational projects focused on reconstituting political inheritance. Her practice examines our understanding of politics, kinship, and interdependence through archives, autoethnography, and social networks. Maggie is from Oakland, CA and now based in Boston, MA, and has presented work across the U.S. at well-resourced museums and scrappy DIY artist-run spaces and published in equally disparate imprints. She is a lecturer at Brandeis University and the Gallery Coordinator at Wagner Foundation. Central to her exploration is Unity Newspaper, which examines collective caregiving through the historical lens of the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a multiracial activist organization founded in 1978. By combining archival excerpts and oral histories from League members and their descendants, the newspaper prompts reflections on the connections between past struggles, evergreen solidarities, and social change through intergenerational exchange.
Complementing this is Tiger Balm, a collaboration between Maggie Wong and Hương Ngô, a series of artist-to-artist intergenerational interviews between Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora artists working in the U.S. These conversations connect artists at different career stages, aiming to create a collection of cultural, historical, and political knowledge. Together, these projects highlight Wong's commitment to forging dialogue and interventions into shared histories as a pedagogical practice that runs outside of and in parallel to laboring within institutions.This is a Performance School is a program focused on developing new approaches to performance pedagogy through horizontal learning and practice. It offers an opportunity to cultivate skills as a performer or facilitator and build community through workshops, discussions, and performance opportunities. The school emphasizes releasing fear, encouraging agency, and exploring performance art as a way to discover one's truest self, using movement, theater, sound, and space as mediums. The program is facilitated by Monica Mirabile, Colin Self, Halo Perez and DonChristian Jones.
DonChristian Jones is an artist, musician, and director whose work spans painting, music, performance, and installations. Rooted in themes of collective memory, place-making, and imagined futurities, his practice often transforms alternative and public spaces into immersive, collaborative environments. Jones’ early years creating murals inside Rikers Island and other carceral institutions ground his work in both aesthetic experimentation and civic urgency. In 2020, he founded Public Assistants Inc.—a mutual aid network and community design studio that reimagines sites for care and as creative infrastructure.
Jones has presented work and performed at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva, as well as Hauser & Wirth, The Shed, and The Rhodes House. In 2024 to 2025, DonChristian became the inaugural Adobe Creative Resident at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
