Confirmed Speakers in 2024
Shey ‘Rí Acu’ Rivera Ríos
Shey ‘Rí Acu’ Rivera Ríos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker who uses storytelling across mediums to create immersive worlds of magic and liberation. Rivera has 14 years of experience in the nonprofit arts sector intersecting creative practice with urban planning and racial equity. Rivera was the former Artistic/Co-Director of AS220, a renowned arts organization and creative incubator in Providence, RI, and successor to AS220 founder Umberto Crenca. After 8 years at AS220, Rivera took on the role of Director of Inclusive Regional Development at MIT CoLab, in the Dept of Urban Studies and Planning of MIT, where they co-designed and implemented workshops on collective leadership and community innovation in Colombia. Today, Rivera is an independent artist and consultant specializing in the creative development of artist communities, the intersection of culture and urban planning, and arts management grounded on gender and racial justice. Rivera is the founder of Studio Loba in Providence, a storytelling lab that designs and produces art and culture projects that support social change.
Notable projects include: Lead curator for El Corazón de Holyoke public art project, Mi Gente Public Art project in Providence, the transmedia and research-based art works MoralDocs and FANTASY ISLAND, the Luna Loba performance series, and the theatrical productions Antigonx (2022) and Fire Flowers and a Time Machine (2020). Rivera was born and raised in Borikén/Puerto Rico and is based in Providence, RI -land of Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples.
Felipe Ortiz
Colombian artist Felipe Ortiz focuses on the practice of painting, from traditional easel painting to murals and public installations. In 2009, he earned a BFA in 2D Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Felipe has participated in numerous art exhibits of private and public collections, including the Fuller Craft Museum, Punto Urban Art Museum, and the corporate loan collection at DeCordova Museum. His installations have been featured in the Knight Foundation’s Horizontes Project, Northeastern University’s public art collection. Fundación Culata’s Muro al Barrio, and the Ministry of Culture in Cali, Colombia. Felipe has been awarded Mass MoCA’s 2018 Assets for Artists Grant and Massachusetts Cultural Council’s STARS residency grant in 2023 to continue “Harvest” and ongoing mural project in East Boston in partnership with the Boston Public Schools, HarborArts and Eastie farm.
Adrienne Gagnon
Co-founder and director of DownCity Design
Adrienne Gagnon is the co-founder and director of DownCity Design (DCD), a non-profit community design studio that helps people strengthen their communities by harnessing the creative power of design. In their free afterschool and summer programs, Providence teens collaboratively design and fabricate service projects that make civic spaces more welcoming, accessible and equitable. DCD youth designers have designed and built 100+ structures for public spaces like parks, playgrounds, and schools across Providence. At DCD, teens practice wielding their power and develop new skills while making our communities better places to live, work, and learn. Check out examples of their work in action at www.downcitydesign.org
Emily Zaengle
Emily is the CEO of Stone Quarry Art Park, an outdoor contemporary art space located in a rural area of Central (upstate) New York. She works closely with Artistic Director Sayward Schoonmaker and several independent contractors to take care of the 104-acre art space. For the past ten years, she has led the organization over many financial hills and through programmatic valleys while navigating the challenges and opportunities of working in a rural, economically diverse, racially white community.
Emily will host a panel discussion with a focus on enduring connections between community and art in spaces geographically situated in rural areas.
Jose Menendez and Tati Gomez
CBA Board Member
We create inclusive strategies that make our community stronger through communication design. as a multilingual team, we work with individuals, businesses, local non-profits, government, and academia. desarrollamos estrategias inclusivas que fortalecen a nuestras comunidades por medio de diseño de comunicación. nuestro equipo bilingüe trabaja con individues, negocios, ong’s locales, instituciones gubernamentales y académicas.
Through the lenses of experimental publishing, printmaking, branding, exhibition design, public space interventions, and climate visualizations, our work examines the design practice as a platform for multilingual communication, dissemination, access, visibility, equity, and justice at multiple scales.
Jeff Mather
https://alternateroots.org/jeff-mather/
Jeff Mather is a community-based public artist & environmental sculptor and interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta. He has been a member of CBA since 2004. A member of Alternate ROOTS, the southern regional community-based art for social justice organization, since 1992, he has had several of his community-based public art projects, including theater projects, partially funded by ROOTS’ Community/Artist Partnership Program. Mather has been an artist-in-residence at the High Museum in Atlanta, and was the first visual artist-in-residence for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, developing an object theater + dance collaboration for a series of 20 ASO concerts. He has been the STEAM Artist-in-Residence at Drew Charter School in Atlanta for ten years and has also been the lead teaching artist for the Arts Access Program in Cache Valley in northern Utah over this same stretch.
The Steel Yard
@thesteelyard
The Steel Yard is a center for creative activity and events. We’re a collaborative of artists, craftspeople, makers, and learners. Every October we pour molten iron through 30-foot metal sculptures, all created and burned by volunteers! We host fully accessible courses in metalworking, ceramics, jewelry and more, and our Public Projects team collaborates with artists and the community to creates functional public artwork across New England.
Islay Taylor (she/her) has served as the Associate Director of The Steel Yard for the past five years. In this role, she has facilitated the development and implementation of the mission and vision of the organization; she also dedicated her time mentoring emerging professional staff members to grow their confidence, competency and establish useful organizational systems.
She believes in expanding equitable access for artists and arts organizations through transparency, resource sharing and community dialogue. She has a successful history of creating needs-based programming that’s reflexive to gaps in artist programs, with a specific focus on incubating sustainable creative practices.
Dave Loewenstein
@daveloewenstein
Dave Loewenstein is a muralist, printmaker and community organizer based in Lawrence, Kansas. His community-based murals can be found across the United States, and in Northern Ireland, South Korea and Brazil. Loewenstein’s prints, which focus on social justice issues, are exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of Kansas Murals: A Traveler’s Guide, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book Award Winner, and is the subject of “Called to Walls,” a feature length documentary that premiered in 2016.
Chance Kinyange Boas
Founder, Program Design
Chance was born in Katumba Refugee Camp and grew up in Mtabila Refugee Camp in western Tanzania, East Africa. He moved to Providence, RI with his mother and three brothers in 2008. Chance graduated from Mt. Pleasant High School and attended the Community College of Rhode Island. He then transferred to Bryant University where he received a Bachelor Degree in Business Administration, majoring in Accounting in 2014. After college, Chance worked for prominent organizations such as Xerox, Yale University and Brown University. Chance founded PVD World Music Institute to promote and celebrate the joy of traditional music of African refugees and immigrants like him in New England. In 2023, Chance joined Wesleyan University to study Ethnomusicology and is currently building a Library in Tanzania. Chance invests his free time in the community and hanging out with his two nephew.
Katherine Melcher
Katherine Melcher is an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design, where she teaches courses in participatory design, social theory and design, healthy places, and urban design. Her research interests span two areas: landscape architecture theory and the social aspects of design, with a special focus on engaging communities in the design process.
Katherine is the author of Community-Built. Art, Construction, Preservation, and Place Throughout history and around the world, community members have come together to build places, be it settlers constructing log cabins in nineteenth-century Canada, an artist group creating a waterfront gathering place along the Danube in Budapest, or residents helping revive small-town main streets in the United States. What all these projects have in common is that they involve local volunteers in the construction of public and community places; they are community-built….
Samantha Cullen-Fry (she/her/hers); Indigenous Empowerment Center Manager; Narragansett
Samantha Cullen-Fry is the Indigenous Empowerment Center (IEC) Program Manager at Tomaquag Museum. Samantha’s role is to help facilitate relationships, through museum partnerships, that create a catalyst for economic change within the Native Community of Rhode Island. Many of the relationships formed have been with nonprofits in the state of Rhode Island. These partnerships focus on the various areas of interest in the community, including but not limited to theater, community-led initiatives, metalworking, pottery, education, business development, entrepreneurship, fish and wildlife, and many others. Samantha comes from a strong background in sales management. The creation of IEC was a calling for her to get back into the workforce after being a stay at home mom of her two beautiful girls. Her goal is to make a meaningful difference in her community through social justice and activism lens. In her spare time, Samantha enjoys attending Providence basketball games, listening to audiobooks, podcasts. She also enjoys gardening. Samantha is currently attending College Unbound in Providence, RI, obtaining her Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Leadership and Change.
Tom Arie Donch
CBA Board Member
Tom Arie Donch has orchestrated hundreds of community projects in twenty one states over fourty-three years. With a passion for learning and sharing the ingredients of successful community built events he has collaborated with over fifty community built association members and firms. His work has included parks, playgrounds, public sculpture, murals, nature trails, skateboard parks, school enhancements, low income housing projects, environmental projects, gardens and plazas. Currently Tom is lecturing on CBA work, mentoring and creating sculpture on social concerns.
Bethany Lacktorin
https://bethanylacktorin.wixsite.com/bethanylacktorin www.littletheatreauditorium.org
Bethany Lacktorin is a performance artist, community organizer, producer and musician based in rural SW Minnesota. Executive+Artistic Director of Little Theatre Auditorium in New London, she is part of a thriving artist community that believes in making art an everyday experience as a vehicle toward creating a sense of belonging. A Korean adoptee, Bethany’s practice explores issues and meanings surrounding identity, displacement and human connections to land, place and shared experience.
Bethany is a professional sound designer/composer with 20+ years in the field. Bethany studied violin at Lawrence University, received her AAS in Music Production at McNally Smith College of Music and BFA in Experimental Media at Prague College School of Art & Design.
Dr. Jean Paul Aracena Oliver PT, DPT
Paul has always been interested in how the human body works, especially how it moves. This brought him to study Exercise Science with a concentration in Adapted Physical Activity and Health from the University of Playa Ancha, in Chile, where he was born. He then specialized in Sports for the Disabled at the University of Leipzig, Germany before moving to the USA to get his Doctorate in Physical Therapy from New York Medical College. Since 2018 he has used his Spanish to empower his patients in the Latinx community in Pawtucket and Central Falls to live healthier and more active lives. He will be presenting about easy ways to stay flexible and strong in order for Muralists to prevent mechanical injuries.
Jean is going to lead stretching and physical therapy for public artists!
Molly Johnston
Springboard for the Arts
Molly Johnston lives and creates in Battle Lake, MN and is the Rural Program Manager at Springboard for the Arts in Fergus Falls, MN. Through her work at Springboard, Molly engages with rural artists, culture bearers and creatives in a number of ways, including fostering the Rural Regenerator Fellowship, the Falls Community Arts Exchange, and many other community-driven arts collaborations.
Rural Arts Panel | Molly will offer viewpoints from the work Springboard for the Arts has done in rural communities over the past 13 years in Fergus Falls, MN.
https://www.facebook.com/springboardarts
https://www.instagram.com/springboardarts
Brendan Rose
Brendan is a multidisciplinary architect working in the fields of sustainable architecture, public art, and custom fabrication. His public art practice includes neighborhood murals, large sculptures, custom street furniture, and public space design. He is committed to finding delight in both the process and product of design and believes the arts strengthen our affection for life.
Brendan will be co-leading the metal studio leadership workshop at the Steel Yard, and presenting on his experiences with community engagement in creating public art and architecture.
Lynne Elizabeth
New Village Press Director
New Village Press is a nonprofit, public-benefit publisher, best known for transdisciplinary books in community cultural development and urban sociology. Our titles aim to animate emerging movements in societal transformation with true stories about collaborative community building and the creative new roles that artists and scholars, citizens and planners can play in public life.
New Village will be displaying selected titles and selling books at a conference or student discount and also looks forward to meeting educators and potential authors.
@newvillagepress
https://www.facebook.com/newvillagepress/
Jessica Hammond
Liz Hafey
CBA Board Member
@trashnosetrash
https://www.instagram.com/trashnosetrash/
Liz Hafey is a transdisciplinary conceptual artist, writer, and social activist located in Pawtucket, RI, and has served on the Community Built Association board since 2020. Hafey holds a Master of Fine Arts & a Master’s in Visual & Critical Studies from California College of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In her artistic practice, Hafey makes absurdly humorous installations, sculptures, and performances and uses a playful Duchampian process of readymade-found objects, inside jokes, and sexual innuendoes—Hafey’s concepts reference issues derived from the impacts of globalism with a means of cultural critique and pushes the institutional boundaries of the art world by bringing art to a more accessible public setting. Hafey’s research and scholarly interests are located at the intersection between visual culture, contemporary art, the capitalist system, and the archive as an intervention to challenge contemporary ideological conventions and encourage alternative ways of thinking in true punk fashion.
“The more I read, write, research, and create, the more I untangle my subconscious and understand myself and those around me. Probably the most punk rock thing you can do is to find out what makes you consciously tick in reaction to the world around you. ”
Liz Hafey has served on the CBA board since 2020 after attending and presenting at her first CBA conference in Half Moon Bay, California. After the hit of the COVID-19 pandemic and the BLM riots in Oakland, CA, Hafey advocated for an anti-racist platform and aided in the CBA doing outreach leadership work, admin, and COVID-19 safety protocols for the CBA Omaha Nebraska conference while finishing her Master’s degrees at California College of Art. Hafey is a regional CBA board organizer for the 2024 CBA conference in Providence, RI, along with Howie Sneider and Jose Menendez.
Elliza Mollman
Elliza Mollman is in the process of moving from rural South Dakota to Silver City, New Mexico. She is a community-focused creator who shapes relationships and community through theatre, music, sewing, cooking, and more. Elliza was selected to participate in the 2022 Creative Community Leadership Institute, which led her to create The Mending Circle, a gathering space to practice mending while exploring slow fashion, sustainability, justice, and other issues of consumption and capitalism.
Sam Kornhauser
Schoolworks & CBA Board Member & Treasurer
www.schoolworksnyc.com
Since founding Schoolworks with fellow architecture students at the City College of New York in 1968, Sam Kornhauser has designed and built play and learning environments for children, starting with a small grant to help parents and teachers create “do-it-ourselves” community day care centers. Schoolworks has worked to involve communities in designing and realizing their own visions in all the places kids inhabit, including classrooms, outdoor and indoor play spaces, museums and health facilities.
Sam will be sharing information about the history of CBA and will be presenting the Jimmy Jolly Award.
Stephanie P. Fortunato,
Co-Founder, Constellations Cultural Studio
Social media: LinkedIn | Instagram @spfortunato
Stephanie is on a mission to inspire discovery, delight, and understanding by exploring the transformative power of arts and culture with communities. Stephanie’s approach is informed by her experience within city government where she served as Providence’s Director of Art, Culture + Tourism, working at the intersection of cultural planning and community development. Throughout her career, Stephanie has collaborated with local communities to co-create arts-based policies, programs, and partnerships that aim to strengthen neighborhoods, facilitate connections, and animate public spaces. She works as a consultant specializing in arts and cultural strategy and public engagement. Stephanie is the Global Cultural Districts Network’s Special Projects Director and co-host of its podcast The Three Bells, produced by AEA Consulting. She holds an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University (2008) and a BA in humanities from Providence College.
Sandra Kern Mollman
Community Based Theatre Artist, Writer, Musician
Sandra Kern Mollman co-creates as a mother and a community-based theatre artist, writer, and musician in rural South Dakota near Vermillion. She is an adjunct theatre instructor at the University of South Dakota and co-led the American Library Association’s Civic Imagination Station project in Vermillion in partnership with the Vermillion Public Library. Sandra explores co-sensing with all things unfolding into an unknowable co-creation of real life.
Mark Lakeman
Mark is a national leader in the design and development of participatory, artful, and ecological public places. In the last decade he has directed, facilitated, or inspired designs for more than five hundred new community-generated public places in Portland, Oregon alone. Through his leadership in Communitecture, Inc., and it’s various affiliates such as the The City Repair Project (501(c)3), The Village Building Convergence, and the Planet Repair Institute, he has also been instrumental in the development of dozens of participatory organizations and urban permaculture design projects across the United States and Canada. Mark works with governmental leaders, community organizations, and educational institutions in many diverse communities.
Asher Henry
Asher Henry is a recent high school graduate committed to building community and supporting the work of organizations like Concrete Couch. He recently completed a four-week internship at Concrete Coyote in Colorado Springs where he worked on construction projects, trail building, and a mural at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind. Prior to that he completed an internship at Asparagus Media Studio in Washington DC where he supported community musicians in recording projects. Earlier in the year he spent a month working on a small organic farm in upstate New York which specialized in microgreens and herbal teas. Asher will start at Bard College in September 2024 and intends to study music, studio arts and architecture.
Steve Wood
Steve wood is a dad, community organizer, public artist, and teacher. steve and friends started the community-building, global-warming fighting, friend-making, job-training, fun-filled non-profit Concrete Couch in 2003, and he has served as executive director since inception. he joined the CBA board in 2012.
Vatic Astahili Tayari Kuumba [V.A.T.K] (he/him) is an artist, writer, educator, and father of three children. Vatic is an Arts Facilitator for One Square World, a racial and climate justice organization, where he applies creativity as an essential tool for policy design, civic engagement, and popular education. Vatic is an artist in residence for Providence Housing Authority at Chad Brown as part of One Nation One Project and the National League of city sites.