Thursday, May 23, 2013 | 6pm | Hemispheric Institute

The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, a book launch with author Arlene Goldbard

Please join us for a talk by writer, speaker, and cultural activist Arlene Goldbard, focusing on the ideas that animate her two new books, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future; and The Wave. She argues that we must greatly enlarge our understanding of the public interest in art. We know ourselves and each other through music, images, movement, and stories. Thousands of years ago, art aided our survival as a species. Culture is the laboratory in which we nurture compassion and discover how to improvise a livable future. And artists are both the stem cells of the body politic, generating myriad forms of beauty and meaning, and the indicator species for social well-being. A reception will follow the talk. Books will be available for sale.

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site: www.arlenegoldbard.com. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her two new books on art’s public purpose—The Wave and The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future—will be published in spring 2013. New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and author of Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe, on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Independent Television Service, Appalshop and dozens of others. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.

Free and open to the public, photo ID required to enter NYU buildings.

Presented as part of the Hemispheric New York Performance Network Emerging Artist Fellow program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund.