“No nipple is that dark.”

Have you had a moment in art school when you realized you can’t even talk about the work because you have to explain/defend/validate your own body/experience/everything?

MTT member Shefali Mistry, as part of her graduate Public Practice thesis project, has conducted a series of interviews on the experiences of artists of color in graduate school. From these discussions, Michelada Think Tank (MTT) continues the “PoC Survival Guide” project with a public conversation about higher education and art school. Is formal education even necessary? What if you choose a formal education? For people of color who decide to go to art school, how do you survive? How do you thrive as an artist when the curriculum and the community don’t reflect your lived experience and your practice?

Join us for a think tank style generative discussion on not only what issues we face, but WHAT CAN BE DONE. How do we advocate for our own education within these institutions? Where do we try to implement change in curriculum and hiring practices? How do we create large scale structural change to move the condition of PoC artists beyond surviving and into thriving? We know this labor shouldn’t only be our burden, but can we do it to ensure a better education for the generations behind us?

This event is part of the Decolonize LA series, and was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.

More about the Survival Guide project:
Are we so busy surviving that we forget to be radical?

In summer 2015, Michelada Think Tank initiated the “PoC Survival Guide” project, posing the question, “If there was a PoC Survival Guide for Artists of Color, What Topics Would You Want it to Cover?” The project was a tongue-in-cheek, but critical exploration of survival under a framework of institutional racism in the arts. Through a summer residency at LACE (as part of Chats About Change) and a series of think tanks, MTT brought people together to talk about survival strategies for artists of color working in a predominantly white art world.

Michelada Think Tank is a group of socially conscious artists who are interested in hosting conversations, creating safe places and opening up opportunities to connect and build relationships between people of color (PoC). Through think tank sessions, MTT creates networks of socially-engaged /community artists interested in creative ways of making social change happen.