New Agora: June

NEW AGORA
June – September
Morning to Sunset

Saturday, June 25 | All Day
Poster Design: Vincent DiVito

Spend a full Saturday each month, this summer exploring art and the outdoors with New Agora. Discover new creatives and perspectives with family-friendly workshops, conversations, tours, screenings, performance, music, and more!

For June, New Agora is excited to collaborate with The Fortune Society to present their Annual Arts Festival celebrating community and healing through the arts. Join us for a day of workshops, performances, and readings. Founded in 1967, The Fortune Society’s vision is to foster a world where all who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated will thrive as positive, contributing members of society. Join us for this powerful celebration of the healing and transformative powers of imagination and creativity.

SCHEDULE

9:30 am & 11:00 am – Yoga | Free, No Reservations required

10:00 am – 2:00 pm – Hellgate Farm Stand

10:00 am – 2:00 pm – Astoria Food Pantry Free Store
The Astoria Food Pantry will be in the park to distribute free clothes, books, and essential items. Accepting donations of non-perishables and clean clothes to bring back to the pantry for distribution to our neighbors also. Information about the Astoria Food Pantry and associated projects (including Astoria Free Store, The Rolling Library, and The People’s Bodega) will also be available on-site. Come say hello!

11:00 am – 1:00pm – Socrates x Noguchi Field Guide
Exploring a “New Nature” Gardens & Model making–> RSVP required

12:00 – 7:30 pm – Makina Cafe Food Truck
Born in Ethiopia from parents of Eritrean descent, Makina Cafe founder Eden G. Egziabher is the first Eritrean-American female entrepreneur in NYC with a food truck serving “Habesha” food. Used as a term of pride, the word “Habesha” is used to eliminate the distinction between different tribes of Eritrea and Ethiopia and celebrates the unity of people of the same region. Tasty, healthy, nutritious and something quite unique, Makina Cafe serves up breakfast and lunch to New Yorkers that are tired of the same old take-out options.

ALL DAY – Visit HÉLIO OITICICA’s SUBTERRANEAN TROPICÁLIA PROJECTS: PN15 1971/2022 and experience the short film, “Gazing Up at the Buildings” ​by Vincent DiVito and Nick Evans

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2:00 pm – Welcome/Official Kick-Off of The Fortune Society Arts Festival
Location: Cobblestone Stage

2:00 – 3:00 pm – Pennants & Poets Workshop with artist Jenny Polak
Location: Grove of Trees

Pennants & Poets is a public art installation and spoken word event created by Jenny Polak. In collaboration with writers from The Fortune Society and Hour Children Working Women, it features more than 50 flying pennants printed with poems and messages from people who have been directly impacted by incarceration. The pennants, with their nautical and sporting associations, create a resilient and celebratory image. The combined messages form a powerful collective call for an end to mass incarceration and support for the millions affected by it. The public will be able to engage with the installation and participate in a pennant-making workshop with Jenny Polak from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm. With the pennants as a backdrop, performers from The Fortune Society will step up to the mic to share their original work in our headlining event.

2:00 – 5:00 pm – Learn more about advocacy efforts from the Center for Community Alternatives
Location: North Path

3:00 – 4:00 pm – Theater for The People
Location: North Lawn

Actors from The Fortune Society will perform excerpts from their favorite plays.

4:00 – 5:00 pm – The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Hip Hop: A Conversation with Artists and the Hip Hop Heads Who Love Them
Location: Cobblestone Stage

Moderated by Trasonia Abbott

Joined by
Eddie Connor
Roque Rodriguez
Lionel “Doc da Edutainer” Limage
live painting session with artist Amira Hasib

This conversation will bring together 4 different lovers of HipHop to engage with the revolutionary history of what is now the biggest music genre in the world. How did something started just 50 years ago with two turn tables and a microphone by black and Latino youth in the Bronx, take over the world? What can this ever-expanding genre teach us about our path to liberation?

This conversation will also include a live painting session with artist Amira Hasib. Amira Hasib is an Afro-Asian multimedia artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA in film/video from Pratt Institute. Themes of Hasib’s work stem from her background as an Asian/African American to themes of introspection, love, politics, ancient folklore, and the general experience of being human.

5:00 – 6:00 pm – Dances for Solidarity Workshop + Performance
Location: Cobblestone Stage

Dancing Through Darkness is the title of a seven-step movement score created by long-term collaborator Dushaan Gillum, who is incarcerated in in the Texas state prison system. He created the text as a tool for other people in segregation to learn to dance and create original choreography, and this performance creates a bridge from inside prison walls to the outside by way of individuals who have personally been impacted by incarceration. The choreography comes with an embedded narrative, using dance as a form of freedom to move from a dark place to a place of light. Ultimately, it is about overcoming obstacles and past hurt, shedding past identities and creating a new future.

6:00 – 7:30 pm – Voices of Fortune Performance
Location: Cobblestone Stage

Celebrate with Fortune’s poets, musicians, singers and commentators as they share powerful performances rooted in liberation and healing.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

The Fortune Society
Becky Jane Dunham
Chon “Shy” Smith
Clemese Jack
Daniel Kelly
Dave Coleman
Dawud Rahman
Erobos Abzu Lamashtu OKA “E”
Felix Guzman
Francisco Lino
Helen Taylor
Hilton N. Webb Jr.
John Runowicz
Jonathan Finkelman
Karter Santana
King David
Lionel “Doc da Edutainer” Limage
Marcus Crenshaw
Mark Lucas
Milklifshitz
Milton Jones
Nestor “Panama” Eversley
Rev. Keith Finesse Gadson
Rhon Sanchez
Ronette “Pink” Cordette
Roslyn Svendsen
Rubi Hochland
Ryan “Blustone” Bennett
Samantha
Sparks Alexander
The Spiritual Activist Marvin Wade

Contributing Artists
Amira Hasib
Art Gueverra
Dances for Solidarity
Jenny Polak
Laura Cerón Melo
Nick Evans
Roque Rodriguez
Eddie Connor
Trasonia Abbott
Vincent DiVito

ABOUT

The Fortune Society 

The Fortune Society’s (Fortune) mission is to support successful reentry from incarceration and promote alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of our communities. The agency offers support to New Yorkers following the trauma of legal system involvement and incarceration and helps to bridge the many systemic divides that are barriers to individual and community success. We do this through a holistic, one-stop model of service provision. Since the organization’s inception more than 50 years ago, Fortune has been committed to using the restorative capacities of art and art-making to promote healing through the arts and to help to realize possibilities for more just collective futures.

Learn more: http://fortunesociety.org

Trasonia Abbott

Trasonia is a multidisciplinary artist. Their work centers on their experience as a Black Nonbinary person. They have immense love for their community and culture and enjoy engaging in deep meaningful conversations with and about them. Trasonia has channeled this love into many different projects and events in the last couple years including Queens Liberation Project’s mutual aid events, a Podcast called Identity Crisis with Pam and Trasonia, a Black History Month conversation series for Flux Factory Rhizome project, and Queens Solidarity festival, a day of thanking and paying BIPOC organizers in queens. They are currently working on a musical project.

https://www.identitycrisispt.com
https://trasonia.bandcamp.com/music
IG: @trasonia_abbot

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