Passage Theatre Company: Community Dialogue: Art as Activism

Passage Theatre Company's Community Dialogues Session: Art as Activism

Community Dialogues are an open discussion, taking place in a community space, where we collectively unpack and discuss a pressing issue related to the production. This season, our Community Dialogues will be on the subjects of Art as Activism (for 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘒 𝘛𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘰𝘯 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵) and Addiction & Recovery in Mercer County (for 𝘎𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘱!). Our Panelists will sharing information about how their expertise intersects with these issues and how we can work together to tackle community challenges with unity and equity.

This Community Dialogue is proudly Co-Sponsored with The Trenton Free Public Library and Princeton University Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship.

Moderated by Cherry Oakley

Featured Panelists include:

Tamara Torres is a Trenton-based artist. Being an artist has allowed Tamara Torres to share her world, creating works that embody her Afro-LatinX ancestry and life experiences. The lack of female-identifying Latina abstract artists in the white-dominated art world has pushed Torres to pursue this field with passion. Without formal training, but with support from important mentors at critical junctures in her career, Torres has exhibited her art in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, and Rome.

Jonathan Conner (Lank) is an artist, designer and educator from Trenton, New Jersey. A graduate of the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, Jon has designed artwork and signage for Whole Foods Market and created educational content for Utrecht Art Supplies. Jon currently works for Monmouth University and teaches drawing, two dimensional design, and digital media at Mercer County Community College. He is a founding member of the city beautification non-profit S.A.G.E. Coalition and has been working with the public art organization Albus Cavus since 2008, participating in public art and mural projects along the east coast.

Alison Isenberg is a professor of history at Princeton University and founding co-director of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She writes and teaches about nineteenth and twentieth century American society. Isenberg’s first book Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (University of Chicago Press, 2004) received several awards: the Ellis Hawley prize from the Organization of American Historians; Historic Preservation Book Prize from Mary Washington University; Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History; and an Honor Book award from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Her second book, Designing San Francisco: Art, Land and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay (Princeton University Press, 2017), received the 2018 PROSE Award for Architecture & Urban Planning from the Association of American Publishers, and a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.