Alternative Futures: Community-based Practice in New York (ASL Version)

ICI and The Clemente hosted a public conversation exploring the evolving landscape of alternative, community-based curatorial practices in New York today. Amid the current climate of political and financial uncertainty, artists, curators, and organizers are reimagining what it means to engage in projects that are not just created for communities, but emerge from them.

The panel discussion brought together four cultural workers—Elena Ketelsen González (Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1), Azikiwe Mohammed (teacher and maker), Cinthya Santos-Briones (interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker), and Sienna Fekete (Senior Arts Manager, The Lower Eastside Girls Club)—who have each developed models that center kinship and belonging. They discussed how their practices are reorienting curatorial and artistic work away from traditional methodologies and outcomes (such as the art object or the exhibition) and toward meeting material needs and building infrastructures of support, visibility, and resistance. Through youth programs, food banks, healing spaces, and other initiatives, the panelists’ work asks us to expand our understanding of what curatorial practice is and who it can serve.