Opening party Wednesday, August 8, 2018 | 6PM – 9PM

// FREE //

Participants in 2018’s Social Justice Leadership Academy – comprised of Hudson youth ages 12 – 20 – will be the August artists in residents in Basilica’s Back Gallery with an exhibition which explores meaning-making through Afrofuturism.

The exhibition is free and open to the public from 6PM.

Basilica Hudson’s artist in residence program asks artists to explore Hudson itself as muse and to create work inspired by the eclectic past and present of the historic river city of Hudson.

“All organizing is science fiction” – Walidah Imarisha

Over the course of five weeks, youth ages 12-20 will come together to intentionally practice the futures we long for here in Hudson – developing their own voices and visions for change. We are grounding our work in the seminal text Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction stories from Social Justice Movements. As artist-in-residency, the youth will engage in a multivocality mode of meaning-making through Afrofuturism. Using black global culture as a lens. As an aesthetic and an epistemology. A method for self-healing and liberation. A way of looking at alternate realities. A reminder that so many of the systems that we are a part of or the beliefs we engage in are creations.

“We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless” – Octavia’s Brood

The Social Justice Leadership Academy (SJLA) is a five-week summer leadership training for teenagers growing up in Hudson, based on the principles of social justice and youth-led change. Led by Kite’s Nest, a center for liberatory education in Hudson, NY