Speak to Me

The Yale School of Art’s Speak to Me series is an online forum with invited speakers, activists, writers, and artists inaugurated during the summer of 2020 in an effort to address the NOW. Conceptualized in the late spring with the first events hosted throughout June 2020, Speak to Me was originally organized with poet, playwright, author, and Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale Claudia Rankine, Leah Mirakhor, Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, alongside Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean and Professor Marta Kuzma.

Envisioned as a series of virtual events through which the work of activists and organizers engaging in the continued fight for justice can be lifted up, the program will feature a series of individuals from different cities across the United States, in order to facilitate a nationwide conversation on what is going on across the country geographically at the moment. With the aim of spreading awareness as to how ongoing conditions of state violence, racial capitalism, and COVID-19 concerns manifest in the protests and calls for justice we ask: What is to be done?

This program is open to the public, but only 1,000 participants may join an event, so should we approach that limit, access will be available on a “first come first served” basis. These events will be hosted using Zoom, and all participants will be placed in a waiting room until the event begins. All will be muted upon entering the virtual space, and should the invited speaker be open to taking questions, participants are invited to use the “raise hand” feature to engage in the discussion and will be manually unmuted individually.

No advance registration is required. To join an event, simply click the link on the event pages below at the listed time.

2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts

Mickalene Thomas in conversation with Jasmine Wahi

Thursday, December 3, 2020

7:00pm (EST)

Learn more & find the Zoom link to join here >>

JJJJJerome Ellis: On Fugitive Speech

Monday, November 30, 2020

6:30pm (EST)

Learn more & find the Zoom link to join here >>

Hilton Als

New York City

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

5PM EST

Access the virtual forum here >>

Recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in October 1994, and a theatre critic in 2002. He began contributing to the magazine in 1989, writing pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He has also written articles for The Nation and collaborated on film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston. Als edited the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition entitled Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, which ran from November 1994 to March 1995. His first book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, discusses various narratives around race and gender. In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for Creative Writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. Als is an Associate Professor in Writing at Columbia University School of the Arts, and he has previously taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

Watch Hilton Als’ Franke Visiting Fellow Lecture: “The Walk” on Youtube >>

Sarah Schulman

New York City

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

5PM EST

Access the virtual forum here >>

Sarah Schulman is Distinguished Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, AIDS historian, journalist, and active participant citizen. In addition to co-founding MIX: NYC LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, she also serves as co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and serves as the U.S. Coordinator of the first LGBT Delegation to Palestine. Her 20th book Let the Record Show: A Political History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), NY 1987-1993 will be published by FSG in May 2021. Her most recent books include Conflict Is Not Abuse, now in its 9th printing, and the novels Maggie Terry and The Cosmopolitans, selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best American novels of 2016. Upcoming plays include The Lady Hamlet (Provincetown Theater, 2021) and a stage collaboration with Marianne Faithfull.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, The Nation, Publishers Weekly, Mother Jones, INTERVIEW, The Guardian, The Advocate, OUT, Frieze, and more. From 1979-1994 Schulman created, collaborated on, and participated in a wide range of interdisciplinary theater as part of the Downtown Arts Movement, working in such emblematic venues as The Pyramid, 8BC, Club Chandelier, The King Tut Wah-Wah Hut, University of the Streets, Theater for a New City, La Mama, The Performing Garage, PS 122, and HERE.

Greg Tate

New York City

Thursday, June 11, 2020

5PM EST

Access the virtual forum here >>

Greg Tate is a writer and musician who lives in Harlem. A founding member of the Black Rock Coalition, Tate played guitar and co-led the BRC affiliate band Women In Love which included future Burnt Sugar members Mikel Banks, Jason Di Matteo and Lewis Flip Barnes. In 1999 he and Jared Nickerson formed Burnt Sugar which has, to date, produced 16 albums under Tate’s direction on Burnt Sugar’s own Avant Groidd imprint. Greg Tate was a Staff Writer at the Village Voice from 1987-2003. His writings on culture and politics have also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Artforum, Rolling Stone, VIBE, Premiere, Essence, Suede, The Wire, One World, Downbeat, and JazzTimes.

He was recently acknowledged by The Source magazine as one of the ‘Godfathers of Hiphop Journalism’ for his groundbreaking work on the genre’s social, political, economic and cultural implications in the period when most pundits considered it a fad. His books include Everything But The Burden, What White People Are Taking From Black Culture (Harlem Moon/Random House, 2003), Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and The Black Experience (Acapella/Lawrence Hill, 2003); Flyboy In The Buttermilk, Essays on American Culture (Simon & Schuster, 1993). In 2016, Duke University Press published Flyboy 2:The Greg Tate Reader.

Read “Fly as Hell: An Interview with Greg Tate” by Leah Mirakhor (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018) >>

Muneer Ahmad & Lorella Praeli

New Haven

Thursday, June 18, 2020

5PM EST

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

5:30PM EST

Access the virtual forum here >>

POSTPONEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT (6.18.2020): The School of Art applauds the two decisions reached this week by the Supreme Court further protecting DACA recipients and LGBTQ workers. Given the timing of this morning’s decision that the Trump administration may not immediately proceed with its plan to end DACA protections, this evening’s planned Speak to Me event has been postponed to next Tuesday at 5:30, as both Muneer Ahmad and Lorella Praeli are intimately involved in legal and organizational work surrounding this legislation. We trust that our community and the public understands the necessity of the delay.

“We want to use this moment to think about the relationship between immigrants’ rights and civil rights for African Americans and Black people; the role and function of multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition in advancing social change; the power and limitations of Black-Brown coalitions; and the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness, including in the immigration space. We also seek to explore how to ground our work in Black liberation and solidarity while leveraging a newly raised public consciousness to connect to other forms of state violence, such as that carried out by ICE and Customs and Border Protection in the name of immigration enforcement.”

Muneer Ahmad is Deputy Dean for Experiential Education, Sol Goldman Clinical Professor of Law, and Director of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School. He co-teaches the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC). In WIRAC, he and his students represent individuals, groups and organizations in both litigation and non-litigation matters related to immigration, immigrants’ rights, and labor, and intersections among them.

Lorella Praeli is co-president of Community Change, a national organization that builds power from the ground up. Praeli is passionate about building collective power to win transformative policy change at all levels of government so that people can thrive. Most recently, she was the ACLU’s Deputy National Political Director, where she fought to defend and expand the rights of immigrants and refugees. Prior to joining the ACLU, Praeli mobilized the Latinx vote as Hillary Clinton’s National Latino Vote Director and served as United We Dream’s Director of Advocacy and Policy, where she led the campaign to implement DACA and was part of the team that persuaded the Obama administration to protect four million undocumented Americans through DAPA. Praeli is a freedom fighter, movement builder, and adaptive athlete.

Speak to Me is made possible by the Yale School of Art’s Art and Social Justice Initiative, which aims to foster an awareness as to how a practicing artist in today’s landscape is both challenged and influenced by the current climate of political and social dissonance, turmoil of public opinion, and structural problems of inequity.