Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

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Alternative Futures: Community-based Practice in New York

Clockwise from top left: Elena Ketelsen González (Photo: Fabian Guerrero), Azikiwe Mohammed, Cinthya Santos Briones, Sienna Fekete.

Jun 3, 2025
6:30–8 pm

New York, NY, USA
The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center

107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002

 

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, RSVP ENCOURAGED

Clockwise from top left: Elena Ketelsen González (Photo: Fabian Guerrero), Azikiwe Mohammed, Cinthya Santos Briones, Sienna Fekete.

Join ICI and The Clemente for a public conversation that explores the evolving landscape of alternative, community-based curatorial practices in New York today. Amid the current climate of political and financial uncertainty, artists, curators, and organizers are reimagining what it means to engage in projects that are not just created for communities, but emerge from them.

The panel discussion brings together four cultural workers—Elena Ketelsen González (Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1), Azikiwe Mohammed (teacher and maker), Cinthya Santos-Briones (interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker), and Sienna Fekete (Senior Arts Manager, The Lower Eastside Girls Club)—who have each developed models that center kinship and belonging. They will discuss how their practices are reorienting curatorial and artistic work away from traditional methodologies and outcomes (such as the art object or the exhibition) and toward meeting material needs and building infrastructures of support, visibility, and resistance. Through youth programs, food banks, healing spaces, and other initiatives, the panelists’ work asks us to expand our understanding of what curatorial practice is and who it can serve.

Live ASL interpretation will be available at this event.

RSVP

Participants
Cinthya Santos Briones

Cinthya Santos Briones is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker of Nahua Indigenous heritage based in New York.

Sienna Fekete

Sienna Fekete is a curator and educator based in New York City with a background in radio, podcasting, and music.

Elena Ketelsen González

Elena Ketelsen González is a curator, researcher, writer, and educator and is currently Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1.

Azikiwe Mohammed

Azikiwe Mohammed is a crafter who builds physical spaces that include Blackness and the stories of the people of this land.


About The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center
This program is hosted at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, a model organization for collective and knowledge justice practices in the Lower East Side for over 30 years. It is presented in partnership with the Historias Initiative, a multi-year program led by The Clemente in collaboration with LxNY and supported by the Rauschenberg Foundation. Historias celebrates the transformative impact of Latinx communities in New York City through research, artistic interpretation, and public engagement.

Credits
This program is hosted in collaboration with The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council. Support for this program is also made possible by the William Talbott Hillman Foundation.