Introduction

CONVERGING LIBERATIONS RESIDENCY (CLR) is an experimental residency project committed to the belief that artistic practice is key to imagining and practicing liberatory futures for Massachusetts-based artists of color. The residency's design was informed by community feedback, carried out by members of CreateWell's Co-Tending Designers, and hosted by the Studios at MASS MoCA. CLR was designed to provide resources, time, and space for community building, research, and artistic experimentation across disciplines. Alongside the stated goals, a liberatory imagination and its bodily architecture were summoned to the Berkshires region of Massachusetts.

The Converging Liberations Residency project started in the summer of the uprisings as we, stewards of CreateWell Fund, were reevaluating our collective relationships to space, place, and power. In developing CLR we sought to answer the question: how will we know liberation when it comes?

What will it look, feel, sound, or even taste like? How will we define it? We sought to make sense of our unique paradox: being both at the center of many global conversations and at its periphery. The urgency was clear. The vertigo of our contemporary condition (the impossibility and possibility that we felt in 2020, when the world was broken open) made our path forward even more apparent: to find, or return to, modes of collective care that adequately meet the needs of those most marginalized by both the art worlds and our wider communities.

The following document contemplates our work to realize the dream of a more liberatory residency program, arts economy, and, more broadly, for the region. In this reflection, we articulate the desires, impulses and urgencies which created its conditions, and the outcomes and opportunities such endeavors hold. This publication may perhaps be considered a roadmap, a bad archive, or a textual meditation towards the evolution of our contemporary arts structures.

Berkshires Mountains, photographed by Mona Layne-Carter.

“When attempting to define liberation, we were struck by the abundant and myriad ways communities of color have imagined and performed liberatory ways of being. In the same way that our objective seek to hold space from a place of a abundance. When we invoke, and think of liberation, we’re thinking across people, movements, and spaces that inspire arrangements of freedom that are neither static nor singular. We believe that creativity and coalition lie at the center of the collective care that contour the conditions for liberatory practices.”

Message

It is important to us to acknowledge the land and the unceded territories of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok and Wabanaki peoples, past, present, and future on land now known as North Adams, MA. We have immense gratitude for ALL the folx (in spirit and embodied) who supported and guided us through the emerging and iterative processes of our inaugural Converging LIberations Residency. Informed and guided by your wisdom, generosity, and kindness we were able to weave together the desires and needs of many local QT/BIPoC creatives, cultural organizers, and social activists and bring this residency out of our imaginations and into the MA arts and culture ecosystem/landscape. We appreciate you all deeply; we know this residency would not have been possible without you!

Warm thank-yous to our community advisors: mercedes loving-manly, Chelvenaya Gabriel, Seraah, Destiny Polk, Maria Cartegena, Autumn Ahn, Sopheak Sam, Nia Holley, Erica Wall, Nikki Greene, Delande Justinvil, Mea Johnson, Flannery Payton, Julian Parikh, and Kent Alexander (rest in peace)…

To our reviewers: Dell Hamilton, Nia Holley, Gloretta Baynes, and Yara Liceaga we thank you.

Deep gratitude to the folx who generously facilitated offerings to our residents: Ife Franklin, Terna Hamida Tilley-Gyado, Krysia L Villon, Linda N Wells, and Muse Dodd. 

To our amazing inaugural cohort: Anukriti Kaushik, DiDi Delgado, Jaypix Belmer, Keysha Rivera, Perla Mabel, Lolita Parker Jr, mercedes Loving Manley, Nia Holley, Norioshi Needle, Shantel Miller, Rixy, and Vick Quezada.

For the clutch residency admin work and design we thank: Odiase Williamson, Ashanti Thomas, and Julian Parikh. 

To Molly and the rest of the A4A team we thank yall for housing this residency and all the admin/logistical support we shared with us.

Gratitude for the financial support of the Barr Foundation. Thank you for believing in us and valuing the longings of the MA-based QT/BIPoC creatives, healers, organizers, activists, and artists we invited into this process and journey.

process

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