PRESENT FUTURES
Strategies Toward Emancipation
Present Futures is a collaborative group of educators, artists, curators, and organizers that believe in addressing issues around structural oppression and injustice through contemporary art.
Founded by Lynnette Miranda, who asks “How do we create pluralistic art spaces that challenge oppressive structures?” Present Futures believes in creating and reflecting the kinds of literal and conceptual spaces people of color wish to participate in. Spaces where we find time and space for reflection, questioning, analysis, self-determination, and self-preservation, where frustration and anger are equally as important as joy and humor. Space where we are together, whether through our artwork or our bodies, to collectively think through complex ideas and questions. Most of all, spaces where we can feel safe to be different, embrace difference, and to think differently.
TEAL BASKERVILLE
Teal Baskerville is an artist, researcher and organizer from New York City. Her practice focuses on imagining and enacting new ways of being and learning together that embrace multiplicity and creativity as a necessary tools of social change. Her recent work maps the history of black aesthetic through the framework of location, spatial, as well as temporal and social. She currently works at Creative Time where she is coordinating the 2016 Creative Time Summit DC: Occupy The Future.
SUHALY BAUTISTA-CAROLINA
New Yorker by birth + AfroDominican by bloodline, Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, otherwise known as, “The Earth Warrior,” is an artist, educator + community organizer. Her recent works explore themes of the AfroLatinX experience, Afrofuturism + Memory.
KATHY CHO
Kathy Cho is an artist and collaborator whose artistic and curatorial practices focuses on affect theory, affective labor and archiving lived experience. Her work manifests in fictionalized narratives created with objects, images, writings and events. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recently co-curated shows for ACRE Gallery in Chicago and High Tide Gallery in Philadelphia. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia.
LYNNETTE MIRANDA
Lynnette Miranda is a latinx artist, curator, and writer from Miami, FL. She approaches her practice from the perspective of an artist—questioning and challenging established conventions—and an educator—opening up avenues for dialogue and collective knowledge building. Over the last seven years, she has worked at leading art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, ART21, and Creative Time. In 2015, she coordinated three art conferences, including The Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum at the Venice Biennale and at Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School, as well as ART21’s Creative Chemistries: Radical Practices for Art + Education at the Park Avenue Armory. Currently, Miranda is the 2016-2017 Curator-in-Residence at Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, MO.
