Community Conversations: Readiness & Resilience – Recording

---

On Thursday, August 5, 2021 we hosted our fourth virtual Community Conversations: Readiness & Resilience. Moderated by June T. Sanders, Chai Adera, Shantell Jackson, Roin Morigeau, and Dujie Tahat spoke to a range of topics, including being ready for unexpected change, building resilience through building community, and how the current pandemic and racial injustices has shifted our thinking around readiness and resiliency. We encourage you to watch and listen to the conversation in the video above.

 

June T Sanders is a trans artist, writer, educator, and curator from southeast wa state. She lives there still. She is an assistant professor with the digital technology & culture program at Washington State University. 

 

Chai Adera is a mixed-media artist born and raised in Seattle’s South End. His work reflects the dynamic fluidity of young males of color both surviving and thriving in underserved urban communities. Having worked in digital media beginning in middle school with experiences as part of Longhouse Media, Red Eagle Soaring and Clearsky Native Youth Council he has a strong foundation in community driven stories. Now as a young adult, emerging as a recognized artist, his video works have been accepted into SIFF, Local Sightings Film Festival, Bridge Productions, Re:definition at the Paramount Theatre, First Thursday Art Walk, the Muckleshoot Tribe and on Ruptly.tv. 

 

Multimedia Visual Artist Shantell Jackson has spent the last 14 years in the Pacific Northwest, by way of Buffalo, NY, where she was raised. Shantel began doing acrylic paintings 7 years ago and has been creating and exploring ever since. Her works include acrylic abstract paintings, ink drawings, digital illustration, a recent exploration of printmaking, watercolors, and hand lettering. Her hope is that while her work may not be for everyone that someone connects with a piece on a deep and almost spiritual level. 

Shantell also writes and performs original poetry at local spoken word events. Recently she has started focusing her creative process in electronic music. She hopes to take all her disciplines to create installations and performance art pieces that explore the human condition contemporarily and historically, in order to create dialogue across difference, that will build bridges and forge acceptance, and healing. Most recently, Shantell took part in painting a public “Black Lives Matter” mural in downtown Spokane at 244 West Main Ave., along with 16 other local artists of color. 

 

Roin Morigeau is a queer + two-spirit interdisciplinary artist experiencing and investigating pain through mixed-media such as drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture. Living with physical limitations and chronic pain from a spinal injury, Roin centers their art practice as a form of protest and healing.   

 Their work lives in public and private collections including ARTSWA, The City of Spokane, and has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions including yəhaw̓ at King St. Station at Seattle Office of Arts + Culture, Whitworth University Bryon Oliver Gallery, Sacred Circle Gallery at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, and the Chase Gallery at Spokane City Hall. They are the owner/ curator of YES IS A FEELING, an artist-run studio and gallery in downtown Spokane, and a member of Saranac Art Projects. Roin is a descendant of the Flathead Salish Tribe of Montana and lives in occupied Spokane territories where they were raised.  

 

Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. They are the author of Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship; Salat, winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award and Balikbayan, finalist for The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM chapbook contest and Center for Book Arts honoree. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon podcast. 

---

ArtistsCerf+CommunityPreparednessReadinessReadyResilienceTown Hall