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Virtual Event: Reimagining Art for the New World


Members of For Freedoms and the Wide Awakes will join to discuss the art community's role in the age of COVID and the possibilities ahead. In this current moment and new era, how can art serve efforts toward equality, justice, and healing?

Panelists include Eric Gottesman, Caran Hartsfield, and Tony Patrick. Hosted by Artadia.

Eric Gottesman, Artist, teacher and Co-Founder of For Freedoms

Eric Gottesman photographs, writes, makes videos, teaches and uses art as a vehicle to explore aesthetic, social and political culture. His photographs have been shown at many galleries and institutions, including the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; MoMA PS1, Queens; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College; the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; and Addis Adaba City Hall, Ethiopia. In 2014, he published his celebrated first monograph, Sudden Flowers (Fishbar, London), and co-founded For Freedoms, an artist-run Super PAC, with artist Hank Willis Thomas. Gottesman is a 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, the recipient of a 2017 International Center of Photography Infinity Award, a 2015 Creative Capital Artist Grant, and a 2010 Fulbright Fellowship in art as well as an Artadia Award, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Artist Fellowship, a Massachusetts Individual Artist Fellowship and other grants and awards. In 2017, he was an artist-in-residence at MoMA/PS1 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio. His work is in various collections, including in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at the State University of New York (Purchase College) and a Mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Project in Beirut, Lebanon.

Caran Hartsfield, Screenwriter and director

Caran Hartsfield is an award winning screenwriter and director. Her film work has won awards at the Director’s Guild of America, Sundance Film Festival, and Cannes Film Festival. Her feature screenplay, Bury Me Standing, won the Sundance NHK Award, the Sundance Annenberg Award, the IFP Parks Screenplay Award, The Media Arts Grant (formally known as the Rockefeller Grant), and was a part of the Cannes Film Festival L’Atelier. She has also won numerous honors and awards for writing and directing Double-Handed, Kiss it up to God, King, and Six Things I Never Told You including: 2nd Place at Cannes Film Festival, the Director’s Guild of America Award, “The Best of Sundance Film Tour," the Martin Scorsese Fellowship, the Spike Lee Fellowship, the Warner Brothers Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Film Fellowship. She is also an Associate Arts Professor at New York University.

Tony Patrick

WorldBuilder, Immersive Director, and founder of the Tenfold Gaming Initiative

Tony Patrick is a WorldBuilder, Immersive Director, and founder of the Tenfold Gaming Initiative. As an author/director of numerous screenplays, documentaries (HBO) and published comics (Batman & The Signal, X'ed), Tony's penchant for creating fictional worlds has catapulted him into future-facing residencies sponsored by Sundance New Frontier, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, NYU, Verizon 5G and Ryot, laying the foundation for a new XR format termed Experiential Comics. When he's not facilitating sessions for the Futurist Writers' Room or generating opportunities for underrepresented youth to pursue game design and innovation careers, he is catalyzing new artworks, prototypes, and civic solutions in his Community-WorldBuilding workshops with communities-at-large.

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