About RRR: Youth Arts Advocacy for More Equitable Cultural Production

ReAct ReCreate ReVision (RRR) is a research creation initiative engaging diverse emerging artists, 3 organizations and 1 university, in community arts advocacy. Over an 18-month period, 18 racialized and gender diverse artists took part in creative research. Together they developed artworks and activations responding to the question: What change do you want to make with your art? 

This work culminated in a group exhibit Trajectories of Now: An Anthology, which took place June 6, 7, 8th 2024 at Bodyshop studios on Geary Avenue, Toronto . Through visual, audio, and tactile works, the Trajectories exhibition dynamically voiced aesthetic narratives of traversing the now for insight and social change. 

We want to first and foremost open this guide with recognition that racialized artists and arts workers have always been working this way: in community and for community, driven by deep understanding of needs, desires, and intentions for building equitable and sustainable arts and cultural practices. In a multitude of ways that lead ecosystems for collective liberation. 

RRR connects emerging equity-insightful artists with established socially-engaged artists and researchers to extend into and from the broader ongoing arc of arts for social change. 

The magic of designing and activating with and by young gender diverse and racialized artists are the interconnected dynamics at play. The power capacity that artists can hold to confront generations of historical trauma, and build on their present navigations of systems, towards visions for a new future. Alongside creating and amplifying partnerships, allyships and relationships that can help to scaffold this capacity. 

This necessitates opening an intermediary, or third space, working across community and academic spaces. With a commitment to disrupting systemic racist and colonial knowledge hierarchies.

As an organizing team of both white and racialized facilitators, we tried to come together to deal with this question of inverting power. To provide material and partnership resources for emerging artists to be recognized and resourced as artist-researchers. 

We have recognized the importance of mediation not just for brokering access, but also for a reflexive living in and confronting of these tensions.

We invite you into this practice, through this field guide expressing key stories and insights from our project trajectories and aesthetic advocacies. We emphasize that this is a very localized and subjective exploration. We offer this guide in no way as fulsome, definitive or prescriptive, but rather as exploratory and reflective on pathways and ongoing openings.

RRR Emerging Artist-Researchers: Ashley Beerdat, Ashley T, Ayonti Mahreen Huq, Bernice Maura, Bert Whitecrow, Blessing O. Nwodo, Claire Tran, Edan Maxam, Ehiko Odeh, Ezra Li, Gloria O’koye, Lannii Pettiford, Maggie Chang, Michella Ma, Nabeela Malik, Neshat Neishabouri, Olympia Trypis, Vincy Lim

RRR Organizing/Working Group: Alia Weston, Charlotte Lombardo, Phyllis Novak, Rose Gutierrez, Sarah Couture Mcphail

Research Creation Advisors: Alexandra Hong, Julian Diego, Min Sook Lee, Miriam Kramer, Myia Davar, Naty Tremblay, Paulina O’Kieffe, Robin Sokoloski, Rudy Ruttimann

Production Support: Jane Doe Smith, Michael O’Connell, Marcus Armstrong, Monique Armstrong, Emmersn Outlaw, Jared Bishop & Bodyshop Studios