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ICPP Leadership Talks: Marc Bamuthi Joseph on Activating Community

August 12, 2016

Danspace Project was a founding partner of Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance in 2011. Over the past six years, Danspace Project has continued in partnership with ICPP as core faculty, through shaping course curricula, and through artists’ residencies and fellowship opportunities.

ICPP is committed to supporting current dialogue around performance curation. To this end, the Institute recently launched “Leadership Talks from ICPP,” a series of digitally archived presentations by today’s leaders in the field. Excerpts from class lectures, public presentations, and intimate interviews with artists, curators, architects, critics, and presenters will be posted on our website throughout the year, starting with two by Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Chief of Program and Pedagogy, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – watch above) on activating community and by Elijah Huge (Associate Professor of Art, Wesleyan University) considering architectural space in curatorial practice.

An arts activist, spoken word artist, performer, and librettist, Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a pillar of American performance, arts education, and artistic curation. After appearing on Broadway as a young actor, Joseph wrote and performed in a series of poetically-based works for the stage that have toured worldwide, including Word Becomes Flesh, Scourge, and the break/s: a mixtape for stage, all which were produced by MAPP International Productions. His full-evening theater work, red, black & GREEN: a blues was also produced by MAPP, and premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2011) and toured through 2014. red, black & GREEN: a blues was nominated for a Bessie (2013) for “Outstanding Production of a work stretching the boundaries of a traditional form.” The Walker Art Center says of his work that “it’s socially engaged without being didactic..utilizes a high-level of self-awareness, self-deprecation and humor that disarms an audience that worries about being preached to.”

Joseph currently serves as Director of Performing Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He co-founded “Life is Living,” a national series of one-day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life. Joseph has won numerous grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and Creative Capital Foundation. Named one of “America’s Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences,” he graced the cover of Smithsonian Magazine (2007), received the inaugural US Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2007), and was an inaugural Doris Duke artist (2012).