Join us for Jewish Women of Color on the Role of the Artist-Philosopher in Uncertain Times 9/5/24 Noon at Sketchpad, 4411 N Ravenswood Ave Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60640. RSVP at https://bit.ly/zazugoldye. Read more on the presenters below!
This event will be a public dialogue between Cara Judea Alhadeff and Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, two Jewish women of color who are artist-philosophers. They will discuss their work and ways to expand connections among philosophy, the arts, and changemaking. RSVP at https://bit.ly/zazugoldye
More information on Cara and Shahanna:
Cara will highlight how we can transform our individual and collective habitual capitalist-consumer-driven behavior through a historical and contemporary commitment to biomimicry and biophilia, love of life. She will explore how to engender this psychological metamorphosis—how to put theory into action in our daily lives. Embedded in radical interdependency, this embodiment recalibrates our normalized relationship to consumption / disposal habits and invokes mutually beneficial solutions that both spiritual leaders and citizen-activists can adopt as we transition from our petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber culture to a regenerative ecological spirituality. Learn more at https://carajudeaalhadeff.com/
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff is the author of the critically-acclaimed books Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene EraandViscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene. Cara’s forthcoming book, Alchemy: Unlearning What We Think We Know, will be launched during the World Affairs Conference. An Arab-Jewsih, Sephardic professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological Leadership, Cara has published dozens of books and articles on Judaism, Sephardic identity, art, sexuality, philosophy, climate justice, “life-passion” activism, and “petroleum parenting.” Her photographs and performance videos have been exhibited across the globe from Seoul to Lyon to Hamburg and are in collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, and the Kinsey Institute. Her repeatedly censored analog photography has elicited international controversy and has been defended by freedom-of-speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, artsave/ People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU). Cara collaborates with international choreographers, composers, philosophers, sculptors, architects, and scientists including Kristeva and Irigaray. Her lectures and Keynotes include Brooklyn Museum of Art, UCLA, and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. Alongside Vandana Shiva and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Cara received the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award. Her work has been the subject of documentaries for international public television/ radio. A former professor at UC Santa Cruz, Alhadeff and her family live and perform creative zero-waste in their eco-art installation repurposed school bus.
Shahanna will highlight her work To Be And Not To Be Madame Goldye Steiner: exploring liminal spaces and false dichotomies in my research and performance of the great African American Khaznte. Born Gladys Mae Sellers in 1889, Madame Goldye was a part of the golden age of khazones–the art of Jewish cantorial prayer signing–and she mesmerized diverse audiences across the USA at a time when doing so as a Black woman meant overcoming great obstacles. Edot Midwest incubated the effort, along with the Wisconsin Black Historical Society/Museum and other partners, to identify Gladys’s unmarked grave in Milwaukee and to purchase a marker for her final resting place, and Shahanna is working to retell Madame Goldye’s story using the power of “popup” theater, with support from Milwaukee’s Bronzeville Arts Ensemble. Learn more at https://linktr.ee/madamegoldye
Shahanna McKinney-Baldon comes from a large Midwest US African American and Ashkenazi family with Cherokee, Blackfoot, Seminole, and Sephardi roots. She is Founding Executive Director at Edot Midwest, and serves as Clinical Program Co-Director at Wisconsin Center for Education Research, the research center for the UW-Madison School of Education, as well as in the roles of evaluation specialist and Co-Principal Investigator for several programs there including Shalom Curriculum Project. A longtime thought leader on racial and ethnic diversity in the Jewish community, Shahanna is a former classroom teacher who has held leadership roles in Jewish and public education institutions such as Chief Diversity Officer roles for large education organizations. Shahanna is also an artist, known for her work as frontwoman for ska band Highball Holiday. She currently stewards a research and performance project on the life of Madame Goldye Steiner, the African-American woman vocalist who was part of the Golden Age of Jewish cantorial music during the 1920’s and 30’s. Her research is anchored at the Global Center for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. Among her volunteer activities, Shahanna sits on the Board of Governors for Reconstructing Judaism and co-chairs the Tikkun Olam Commission for the Reconstructionist movement. She also sits on the advisory boards of Diaspora Alliance and Tiyuv Jews of Color-led hub for culturally responsive evaluation, which she helped found in 2021.
Sponsored by Global Center for Advanced Studies, Edot Midwest, Sketchpad, Bronzeville Arts Ensemble with support from other friends and supporters