Radical Citizenship: The Tutorials—Manhattan (Hunter College)

This is the final iteration of Radical Citizenship; it was previously situated on Governor's Island (NY), Angel Island (CA) and at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. Writers, artists, academics, musicians, dancers, a police captain and their guests provide one on one tutorials regarding citizenship, radical and otherwise. Together we interpret alternate means of citizenship external to a government.

The tutorials are held on a series of structures (five in a star formation) that land somewhere between bench and table; they are made of wood collected from an empty lot in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. These objects hail from Brownsville because it is the site of the New York City's Teacher's Strike of 1968. This seven month strike began when black community run school board dismissed a dozen jewish teachers, asserting that these specific teachers were in violation of the union in their resistance to decentralization of the NY school system [see more below regarding this history].

Friday from 6-8 pm (all tutors listed below are present from 6-8)
Regine Basha (curator) and Che Chen (musician; black pollen press) "Tuning Baghdad"
Nancy Brown/Candles of Paradise (musician) "Mysterious Communion"
Corrine Fitzpatrick (poet) "PLAY IT BACK AND TELL ME WHERE I'M WRONG"
AB Huber (scholar) "Due Vigilence: One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, On Alert"
The Museum of Commerce "Raw Currents-cy"

Saturday from 12-6 (all tutors listed below have specific time slots)
12-6: Mary Walling Blackburn (artist) (substitute tutor/bench warmer)
12:30-2:30: Athena Kokoronis (dancer) "Internal Kitchen"
1-3: Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey (artists) "Trials With an Overview Ahead"
2-4: Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong (artists) "And, And, And—Stammering: An Interview"
2:30-5:30: Amanda Jane Eicher (artist) and Lt. Mark Gagan (policeforce) "Working with the Police/Working with the Polis"
4-6: Carrie Dashow and Matt Bua (artists) "Yesiree the Public Notary"
4-6: Caroline Woolard (Trade School) "What is our work worth to each other?"

MORE ON THE TEACHER'S STRIKE (1968) BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN

In that moment, the Institute for Community Studies, funded by the Ford Foundation, articulated in a community newsletter that community control was a "challenge to the prevalent middle class vision of what education entails" and resisted the notion "that black poor are unteachable in the absence of a drastic reform of their social, cultural, and familial conditions in directions accepted as normal by middle-class whites." The Teachers Union refuted these claims, perceiving the dismissal as race-biased. A civil rights movement based initiative and a union with radical Jewish activist roots were irreconcilable. Both parties were aware that as of 1964 there were more than 200 segregated schools in the city, 400% more than 1954.

Things were not getting better, in the North, regardless of the united black and Jewish efforts to integrate school systems in the American South. It did not translate.

Of this current fascination with schooling amongst artists and academician, Irit Rogoff deems it a "pedagogical turn." To turn towards and away from school and schooling. Does she mean to emphasize the pivot? It doesn't read as so. But I will: because one can turn both ways, against institution and with it. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Strike exemplifies the pivot, both parties, radicalized, undone, turning. Not simple, not solved. Which radicalized citizen does what where?