September 2025 News
October 2, 2025 • 8 minute read
Carey Fountain interview with Jazzie Jelks
“In a world where urbanization and technology often overshadow the beauty and richness of rural life,” writes Carey Fountain in his profile of fellow Southern Artist for Social Change awardee Jazzie Jelks, “[Jelks] is creating space to honor the legacy and future of Black communities in rural and urban environments alike. Her project, Spotlight: Black Rural Life, is a community-driven, multimedia initiative that weaves together the powerful stories of Black Americans preserving and innovating cultural traditions.”
Read “Spotlight: Black Rural Life – Jazzie Jelks on Reclaiming Traditions for the Future” on our Voices from the Network blog
Influence – “Ripples to Waves: Building Power for Cultural Equity”
“We, as creative people, have the capacity to create a different ending to the story; explore the context, allow room to acknowledge layers, imagine possible outcomes…”
– LANE Cohort Member
Like water in a tide pool, powerful change ripples both out and around spheres of influence, creating waves that move in different directions through organizations, networks, and movements. Some of the most enduring, far-reaching ripples come from the ways individuals transform themselves in alignment with their vision and values. If movements come in waves, together we can build the power to generate and galvanize the next swell.
Explore this card and others directly on your phone or desktop with our interactive Mixed Metaphor Liberatory Learning Deck
2025 Praxis Project Awardees
Praxis Project funds support organizational partnerships between arts and social justice organizations to increase the capacity for local visionary organizing.
Praxis Project awarded $110,000 to 11 NPN Partner organizations and local community organizations/collectives. This fund supports experimentation, collaboration, and the deepening of relationships to connect/more deeply embed cultural organizations into the local organizing for change infrastructure. These projects move beyond transactional engagement and toward transformative exchange — fostering collaboration, shared learning, and long-term impact.
Read the full announcement to learn more about each of these projects
Opportunities
Asian Cultural Council Announces Grant Opportunities for 2026
The Asian Cultural Council (ACC) has announced their 2026 Global Grant Cycle and is currently accepting applications until November 19th, 2025. ACC’s grants are not awarded to fund specific projects but rather to “enable artists, scholars, arts professionals, and organizations to pursue open-ended research to advance cultural exchange and mutual understanding between the U.S. and Asia.” Funds can cover things like travel and accommodations, daily expenses, museum admissions, event tickets, and interpreters.
The Non-Conforming Criticisms Lab Is Now Accepting Applications From Abolitionist and Anti-Imperial Writers
HowlRound Theatre Commons has announced an open call for applications to the Non-Conforming Criticisms Lab, a new Live Art Writers Network project led by performingborders with Diana Damian Martin. The Lab is a free, three-month-long online program “dedicated to experimental, critical, and politically engaged writing in response to live art and performance. […] Together we’ll think through ways writing can respond to political crises, open up speculative and abolitionist approaches to criticism and shape nonconforming editorial practices.”
Applications are due October 17th.
Announcements
Sharon Bridgforth invites us to heal with her new book, before you go: an Offering
In her new book before you go: an Offering, NPN-supported artist Sharon Bridgforth queerly explores a daughter’s relationship with her aging mother who has dementia. As she cares for her mother, she reflects on her own failures as a mother, which expands her ability to forgive/grow and heal.
“My experience has been that the more I tend what is broken and hurt in me, the better I am able to be with those I Love,” Brigforth writes. “Diving deep. Holding a mirror up to myself. Excavating and articulating what’s under the surface. Walking with haunts and haints. Moving through grief. […] My queer bodied/woman Loving prayer is that before you go: an Offering will be of service to those that receive it. A resource for us all to be ourselves most fully as we care for ourselves, each other, the Earth and all therein.”
L. Kasimu Harris Makes History as His Photos Are Added to MoMA’s Permanent Collection
NPN-supported writer and artist L. Kasimu Harris — a Southern Artists for Social Change and Documentation & Storytelling Fund awardee — has made history as the first Black New Orleans-based photographer to have his work added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Five photographs from his Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges series have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and are featured prominently in their exhibit “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging,” on display now through January 17, 2026.
In Katrina Stories, Mondo Bizarro Preserves a Living History of Hurricane Katrina’s Impact
Katrina Stories is a new documentary podcast built from first-person accounts recorded after Hurricane Katrina. Each episode weaves together voices that reveal the human impact of the storm — stories of loss, resilience, anger, and hope. The series preserves these testimonies as living history, offering listeners an intimate connection to the people and places forever changed by the disaster. The podcast is part of Mondo Bizarro’s I-10 Witness Project, a community-based story project formed to document the myriad tales emerging from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Listen to Katrina Stories on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or paste the RSS feed into your favorite podcast player.
Asian Arts Initiative Welcomes Sonia Mak as Its New Executive Director
On September 5th, Asian Arts Initiative announced the appointment of its new Executive Director, Sonia Mak: “With nearly three decades of experience as a curator, fundraiser, and community builder, Sonia brings a distinguished career dedicated to uplifting artists of color and creating exhibitions that center the voices and experiences of the AAPI community,” including at the Chinese American Museum in LA (where she was Founder and Lead Curator), Craft Contemporary, the Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation, and ICA Los Angeles. Welcome, Sonia!
Upcoming Artist Activities
Árabe Mahrajan: Texas + NOLA, Amanda Ekery
October 2–9 (multiple performances)
Texas (multiple cities) & New Orleans, LA
Hear the music and stories of Árabe this fall in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and New Orleans. Mahrajans were part of Syrian homeland culture, similar to block parties used for community formation.
Oct 2: Dallas @ The Wild Detectives
Oct 3: San Antonio @ River Sun Jazz
Oct 4: Houston @ Asia Society Texas
Oct 9: New Orleans @ New Orleans Jazz Museum at 2pm. Presented by the Consulate General of Mexico in NOLA
Los Alamos Arts Council presents Stories from Home, Safos Dance Theatre
October 3, 6:00
Duane Smith Auditorium (Los Alamos, NM)
Choreographer and NPN-supported artist Yvonne Montoya and the Safos Dance Theatre company draw upon personal histories and ancestral knowledge in contemporary dance that embodies the oral traditions of Nuevomexicano, Chicano, and Mexican American communities in the American Southwest.
First Bite, Mary Prescott
October 3, 7:30 pm
Mabou Mines (New York, NY)
First Bite offers a taste of interdisciplinary performance artist Mary Prescott’s Ancestral Table and her explorations around sense memory and storytelling. Through her Thai mother’s family recipes, Prescott investigates matrilineal heritage transmitted through food, and its infusions of migration, ecology, culture, and community.
Raw Fruit Live Soundtrack Recording, KM Dance Project
October 7, 7:00 pm
New Orleans Jazz Museum (New Orleans, LA)
KM Dance Project engage a community audience at the New Orleans Jazz Museum with the sound and storytelling of our touring work Raw Fruit. Artists will recite poetry, sing and perform all vocal and original musical elements from Raw Fruit. This event will serve as a fundraiser, listening experience, and live recording of the Raw Fruit soundtrack.
Becoming Daddy AF (West Coast premiere), David Roussève/REALITY
ctober 17, 8:00 pm
October 18, 2:00 pm
The Nimoy (Los Angeles, CA)
NPN Creation Fund artist David Roussève’s first full-length solo performance in more than 20 years is an intimate meditation on life’s purpose, created and performed by a queer African American acutely aware of his mortality. Like strands of DNA, it connects elements encoded in his 64-year-old body, including 600 years of genealogy, a roller coaster journey with HIV, the shattering loss of his husband, and 35 years of dance-making.
Praise Music Sonogram, Julia Barbosa Landois
October 24, 6:00 pm
Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (University of Texas at El Paso, TX)
NPN Creation Fund artist Julia Barbosa Landois’ Praise Music Sonogram combines spoken word, video, and experimental sound to tell a story of motherhood, miscarriage, and abortion access across national and state borders. The performance is accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Javier Martinez as well as a storytelling and knowledge-sharing zine, Tía Sabiduría, co-designed with Julia by Tina Hernandez.
Ghostly Labor presented by UC San Diego ArtPower, La Mezcla
October 24, 7:30 pm
Epstein Family Amphitheater (San Diego, CA)
Through tap dance, Mexican Zapateado, and Afro Caribbean movement, and accompanied by traditional Son Jarocho music from Veracruz, Mexico and an Afro-Latinx percussive score, this full length dance theater production by an all female dance company highlights the experiences of farm workers and domestic workers throughout California, and the generations of labor that have gone unseen.
What We’re Reading
Each month, NPN’s staff and board engage with a reading that helps shape our analysis of our sociopolitical landscape and deepen our understanding of how to embed liberatory practices throughout our work. The Collective Learning Series is organized by NPN’s Department of Racial Justice and Movement Building (DRJAM).
This month, we read an excerpt from Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard. First published in 2014, Collective Courage quickly became an important tool for understanding the history of cooperative economic enterprises in the African American community. This now-classic work recounts how African Americans benefited greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.
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