Please note that the original timing of this workshop has been adjusted. The program now begins at 12:00 pm, enabling participation in morning cultural tours if wanted. For questions or changes to registration, please reach out to the GIA team at conference@giarts.org.
This Sunday preconference workshop carries forward the urgency, questions, and commitments of GIA’s 2025 Collective Action workshops, grounding them in Memphis as a place of practice, reflection, and shared responsibility.
In 2025, GIA members were invited to consider what collective action requires from arts grantmakers in a moment of escalating political threat, institutional fragility, and attacks on creative freedom. In Memphis, those questions take on new texture. The city grounds this program as a place where artists, cultural organizers, and community leaders have long used culture to build power, sustain memory, support community self-determination, and practice democratic possibility through conditions of chronic underinvestment.
From this Memphis grounding, the program will also look regionally across the South, inviting participants to consider what Southern cultural ecosystems can teach the field about shared risk, co-governance, accountability, and the infrastructure needed to move together.
This is not a traditional panel or lecture-based preconference. Participants will move through a participatory arc that includes opening grounding, conversation with Southern cultural leaders, hands-on co-governance practice, and closing reflection connected to Wednesday’s conference-wide Collective Action Assembly.
Featured participatory sessions:
Culture & Community Power Building in the South
Led by Erik Takeshita of the Culture & Community Power Fund, this session will highlight the role of culture in building community power in Memphis, New Orleans, and Utica, Mississippi. Participants will learn from Southern cultural leaders about what it takes to support self-determined communities, why unrestricted and ecosystem-level support matters, and how grantmakers can use their resources to connect and strengthen community power-building efforts.
Speakers include Carlton Turner, Co-Director, Sipp Culture; Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, Chief Equity and Executive Officer, Ashé Cultural Arts Center; Justin Merrick, Executive Director, Center for Transforming Communities; and Erik Takeshita, Director, Culture & Community Power Fund.
Developing Power: Co-Governance through Cyanotype
Led by Southern Movement Committee and Andrus Family Fund, this interactive session uses cyanotype portrait-making as an entry point into co-governance as a lived, collective practice. Grounded in Southern Movement Committee’s organizing around Nashville’s Office of Youth Safety, participants will explore how art, food, culture, and community assembly can move from storytelling into structural change.
Participants will create cyanotype portraits, learn core principles of co-governance, and move into small-group People’s Assemblies to identify issues, propose solutions, and practice collective decision-making while their cyanotypes develop in real time.
Speakers include Erica Perry, Executive Director, Southern Movement Committee; Mike Floss, Art & Culture Director, Southern Movement Committee; LeXander Bryant, Photographer; and Lincoln Mondy, Andrus Family Fund.
Connection to Wednesday’s Collective Action Assembly
This Sunday preconference is designed as a deeper practice space leading into Wednesday’s conference-wide Collective Action Assembly, a new participatory gathering at GIA’s annual conference.
On Wednesday, the full conference will be invited to consider what the field must build, defend, repair, and coordinate together in response to what Memphis and this moment have made visible. Sunday offers participants a more intimate opportunity to enter those questions through Memphis-rooted grounding, Southern cultural-organizing examples, and hands-on collective practice.
Sunday is not required in order to participate on Wednesday, but it offers a deeper pathway into the collective action arc of the conference.
Organized by: Nadia Elokdah, (Grantmakers in the Arts), Erik Takeshida (Culture and Community Power Fund), Lincoln Mondy (Surdna Foundation), and Amber Hamilton.
Expectations: This workshop will be hosted at the Commons on Merton, a former church that now serves as a community hub for immigrant and migrant community members as well as organizing for local community power building. Registration includes refreshments & snacks on-site.
Cost: $200