New York Live Arts to Host Third OPEN SPECTRUM: CRITICAL DIALOGUES, 4/26

New York Live Arts today announced details for 2015's third Open Spectrum, titled Post White America: Can Art Deracialize The Nation? and taking place Sunday, April 26 at 5:00pm in the New York Live Arts Theater. Open Spectrum provides an intimate conversational platform that engages participants in active listening, constructive discourse and action planning.

Spanning the course of three months, Open Spectrum encourages audiences and invited panelists to engage in critical discussions pertinent to the present moment. Bringing together Live Arts' creative community to responsibly voice opinions, raise questions and share resources, we invite artists, educators, scholars, curators and activists to join us for timely and integral conversations. In addition to the live dialogue sessions, a related series of twitter chats will ignite the discussions in the digital realm. All sessions will be moderated by Piper Anderson, who will also be an active and integral participant of the twitter chats.

Post White America: Can Art Deracialize The Nation? will pose the following questions: Can art-practice heal wounds of systemic racial injustice and disinvestment? Beyond representation, do our current social systems change as a result of post-whiteness? Does it actually mean a more equitable distribution of power? How does the ideology of whiteness persist in our culture even as its demographics change? This discussion will be moderated by Anderson, and will feature curator, journalist and author Ren Weschler, Pullitzer Prize-winning journalist and educator Margo Jefferson, leadership and communications strategist Trisha Bauman, assistant professor, cultural anthropologist and author Aimee Meredith Cox and writer, cultural worker and critic Darnell L. Moore. The Open Spectrum twitter chat for this session will take place from 1-2pm on April 22. The public is invited to participate in the twitter chats by tweeting their questions and comments with the hashtag "#OpenSpectrumNYC."

Piper Anderson is writer, educator and Chief Creative Strategist at Create Forward, a consultancy specializing in cultivating creative strategies for social change sourced from our collective radical imagination. She founded Create Forward after 15 years cultivating her creative practice devising local and national initiatives to creatively engage communities in response to structural inequalities. Much of her work has focused on the mass criminalization of people of color and since 2002 she's worked in detention facilities and community organizations in over 26 cities generating dialogue and action on the impact of mass incarceration on communities of color. As a performance artist, she's written and toured three solo performance works and was a company member with The American Place Theatre's Literature to Life program. She teaches courses on the intersections of the arts, community development and social change at NYU, The New School and CUNY's graduate program in Applied Theatre.

Trisha Bauman is the CEO-Founder of the leadership consultancy, TJBauman, LLC. TJBauman guides MNCs, NGOs and startups around the world in leadership development, strategic executive communications and team dynamics to advance sustainable global development. Prior to starting TJBauman, she was the founding Director of Communications of the international educational film producer, BYkids.org. A dancer and an actor, Bauman performed worldwide for two decades in the French companies of Mathilde Monnier, Herman Diephuis, Daniel Larrieu and Alain Buffard, amongst others, and in the NYC companies of RoseAnne Spradlin and Vicky Shick. A master teacher and coach in performance, creative process, somatic studies and movement analysis, she has taught at the leading international dance and theater companies and at universities including Kenyon College, Tufts University, Harvard University, Université de Paris VIII and Universität Bern. Bauman serves on the Board of Directors of the United Nations Association of New York. She has a dual B.A., magna cum laude, in Economics and Modern European History from Bowdoin College.

Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist and tenured professor of Performance and African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Cox's first book, currently available for pre-order on Amazon.com, is Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015). Her second book is an edited volume on Gender & Space (MacMillan). She is a contributing editor to The Feminist Wire, on the founding editorial board of Public: A Journal of Imagining America, and is the former co-editor of Transforming Anthropology. Cox is a former professional dancer who studied on scholarship at the Dance Theatre of Harlem and toured widely with Ailey II/The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble. Dr. Cox is also the founder of BlackLight, a young women of color-led activist art initiative that produced community-based projects in Detroit, Newark and New York City. Cox's articles have appeared in Feminist Formations, Transforming Anthropology, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society and in several anthologies and edited volumes.

Margo Jefferson is the author of On Michael Jackson, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. She has been a staff writer for The New York Times and Newsweek, and has published in The Believer, Bookforum, New York Magazine, The Nation, The Washington Post, Gigantic, Grand Street and elsewhere. Her essays have been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, The Best African-American Essays, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Black Cool and What My Mother Gave Me. She also wrote and performed a theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane Theater and The Culture Project. She teaches in The Writing Program at Columbia University, and her book Negroland: A Cultural Memoir will be published in September.

Darnell L. Moore is a Senior Editor at MicNews and Co-Managing/Editor at The Feminist Wire. Along with NFL player Wade Davis II, he co-founded YOU Belong, a social good company focused on the development of diversity initiatives. Moore's advocacy centers on marginal identity, youth development and other social justice issues in the U.S. and abroad. He has led and participated in several critical dialogues including the 58th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women; the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington National Panel on Race, Discrimination and Poverty, the 2012 Seminar on Debates on Religion and Sexuality at Harvard Divinity School, and as a member of the first U.S. delegation of LGBTQ leaders to Palestine in 2012. Moore received the 2012 Humanitarian Award from the American Conference on Diversity for his advocacy in the City of Newark, where he served as Chair of the LGBTQ Concerns Advisory Commission. He is the recipient of the 2012 Outstanding Academic Leadership Award from Rutgers University LGBTQ and Diversity Resource Center for his contributions to developing the Queer Newark Oral History Project. He received the 2013 Angel Award from Gay Men of African Descent and the 2014 Gentleman of the Year Award from the Gentlemen's Foundation. He was listed as a one of Planned Parenthood's Top 99 Dream Keepers in 2015 and was featured in USA Today's #InTheirOwnWords multimedia feature on contemporary civil rights activists. He assisted in organizing the Black Lives Matters Ride to Ferguson in the wake of Mike Brown's tragic murder. He is presently represented by Chartwell Worldwide Speaker Agency.

Lawrence Weschler was for over twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He recently graduated to director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he was director from 2001-2013. He is also the artistic director emeritus, still actively engaged, with the Chicago Humanities Festival, and sometime curator for New York Live Arts' Live Ideas Festival (2013: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks; 2014: James Baldwin, This Time!). His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). His "Passions and Wonders" series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney's Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998); Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006). Mr. Wilson was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Everything that Rises received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Recent books include a considerably expanded edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a companion volume, True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney; and his latest collection Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative.