What is racial justice in the arts? How can artists, performers, and producers inspire new possibilities? Through deep conversations with guests, Race/Remix shapes the creative landscape of racial justice. Spanning topics in media, culture, healthcare, justice systems, immigration, and education, Season 1 offers critical insights by pairing creators and thinkers across disciplines and ideas.
Share in the provocations. We invite you to join the conversation. Our first season launches this December 2023.
Race/Remix is produced by Racial Justice Studio on the traditional lands and territories of the O’odham and the Yaqui people at the University of Arizona. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the University strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign Native Nations and Indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships, and community service.
Find out more on the Race/Remix website, building knowledge one conversation at a time.
Cover art and logo design by Deborah Ruiz.
Many societies, including the United States, are experiencing a period of significant polarization and a loss of faith in institutions. So, it might be surprising to learn the American public still places a lot of trust in museums, according to research. This is true across partisan lines. What is it that makes museums relevant and why are people drawn to them?
Co-hosts Jennifer Saracino and Sama Alshaibi speak with curator Rukejo Hockley of the Whitney Museum of American Art to find out more about what happens inside art museums. They delve into Rujeko’s journey of becoming a curator, working with contemporary artists, and co-curating the 2019 Whitney Biennial and earlier projects at the Brooklyn Museum. In this episode, we learn:
Why art museums are as much about the future as they are about the past,
What relationship and responsibility curators have to communities reflected within the exhibitions they shape, and
How controversy can lead to personal and professional growth.
Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum and Curatorial Assistant at The Studio Museum in Harlem. She works with artists and artworks that are breaking new ground, including such projects as the Amy Sherald: American Sublime (2025), We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017), and many other notable exhibitions. She serves on the boards of directors for Art Matters, Institute for Freedoms, and Museums Moving Forward, and the advisory board of Recess.
5 Jun 2025
Episode 11 When Love Over Rules: Hank Willis Thomas
Artist Hank Willis Thomas discusses his exhibition LOVERULES with professors Sama Alshaibi and Jennifer Saracino, exploring art's role in fostering civic dialogue and healing communities through the power of love in this interview.
6 Feb 2025
Episode 10 Seeing Ourselves in Louis Carlos Bernal's Photographic Revolution: Elizabeth Ferrer
Have you ever wondered how art becomes activism? We bring you a conversation with curator and writer Elizabeth Ferrer, who takes us from the Chicano murals of her east Los Angeles childhood to groundbreaking exhibitions on Latinx photography. Guest hosts Gia Del Pino and Lizzy Guevara speak with Elizabeth about her retrospective on Louis Carlos Bernal, a trailblazing Chicano photographer who centered Mexican-American lives and traditions. Through striking, deeply human portraits, Bernal’s images challenge stereotypes and expand the canon of American photography. In this episode, learn about how photographs do more than reflect the culture as it is; how self-representation can dignify and transform how we see ourselves and our communities; and how images can transport the spirit of an individual subject into a cultural movement.
Elizabeth Ferrer recently curated the exhibition Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva, a landmark survey of one of the most significant American photographers of the twentieth century, which is on view through March 15, 2025 at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. The exhibition is accompanied by a book authored by Ferrer and co-published with Aperture, Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía.
12 Dec 2024
Episode 9 Ancestral Sounds and the Language of Music: Michael Mwenso
Michael Mwenso, EMMY Award-winning bandleader and co-founder of Electric Root, explores the transformative power of Black music as a living language that bridges past, present, and future, promoting community, healing, and spirituality.
24 Oct 2024
Episode 8 Artists for Educational Justice: Kim Cosier
Schools have long been a battlefield for racial and social justice. What role do artists play in pushing for reforms in education? Kim Cosier, an art educator and member of the national network of Art Build Workers, explains non-violent practices of using art in service of social justice movements. This conversation is a window into field-tested practices for artists working side-by-side with students, teachers’ unions, state associations, and community organizations. Through her personal stories, learn what it means to embrace the identity of an art worker and how to have fun while leveraging failure and discomfort in the struggle for systemic change.
Kim Cosier is Professor of Art Education in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a member of Art Build Workers, an activist art collective, and founder and director of the Milwaukee Visionaries Project, an award-winning media production/literacy program for urban youth.
25 Sept 2024
Episode 7 Creating Magic Out of Hopelessness: Kayla Farrish
How does one transform trauma into possibility? Trained dancer and multidisciplinary artist Kayla Farrish explores police brutality and death afflicting Black communities in America. Through movement research, she finds a radical imagination that powers the African American struggle to do more than survive from enslavement in the colonial era to systemic oppression by modern institutions. Black people have wrought hope and art from trauma. Inspired by this, Farrish lovingly reclaims the Black body’s histories and its representation in contemporary dance collaborations, film, and sound score. She offers performers strategies for challenging traditional dance industry norms.
Kayla Farrish creates captivating works on stage and film that combine dance theater performance, storytelling, and sound score. She is based in New York City and was named “Break Out Star of 2021” by the New York Times. A recent alumna of the School of Dance at The University of Arizona, she has emerged as an artist to watch in the years ahead.
27 Feb 2024
Episode 6 Making the Story Speak: Reid Gómez
Can language practices break down the separation between “us” and “them”? Reid (https://raceremix.arts.arizona.edu/guest/reid-gomez/)Gómez (https://raceremix.arts.arizona.edu/guest/reid-gomez/), a native speaker of Black vernacular English and Navlish (Navajo-English), shares her multi-lingual writing practice. To “make the story speak,” she criss-crosses the boundaries between languages, embracing various linguistic structures and vocabularies simultaneously. Her writing moves away from oppositional colonial frameworks and toward a more fluid poetics of relation. This allows each of us to perceive one another as related rather than separated.
In this final episode (https://raceremix.arts.arizona.edu/episodes/) of Season 1, she explores the idea of “quantum entanglements” and shows how the relationship between writing, translation, and the nature of being are not fundamentally different.
1 Feb 2024
Episode 5 Everything Goes Back to an Immigrant: Anike Tourse
What is it like to navigate a world where “no papers” means no identity and no public recognition? For immigrants traversing such a world, are human connections even possible when faced with forced family separation and deportation? Anike Tourse's filmmaking brings audiences into the human dimension of navigating the complexities of US immigration. Through collaboration with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and other organizations, she makes work that raises awareness about immigrant contributions to society.
Anike Tourse (https://raceremix.arts.arizona.edu/guest/anike-tourse/) Anike Tourse is a writer, director, actor, and producer based in Los Angeles. She has written for One Life To Live and Girlfriends, which are among the first television series to primarily feature a multiracial and socioeconomically diverse cast of characters. She wrote, directed, and starred in the 2023 film America’s Family that sheds light on the tumultuous experience of a family whose teenage child is arrested following a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
13 Jan 2024
Episode 4 Artists Reworking the Ruins of Racism: Aaron Coleman & Lizz Denneau
Visual artists are skilled at taking ordinary materials and transforming them into something new and thought-provoking. Their work goes beyond aesthetics; it unearths histories, challenges perceptions, and sparks crucial conversations. In the US where racism is endemic—structured into the everyday existence of individuals and institutions so as to appear ordinary—how do artists rework the remains of racism and resist its traumas in the present? In this episode, Aaron Coleman and Lizz Denneau exhume their multiracial pasts using DNA tests, ancestral research, personal experiences, and artistic expression. With a potent mixture of pride and pain, the two artists reveal the rewards and responsibility in making art that challenges and corrects historical fictions.
Lizz Denneau is a Tucson-based multi-media artist and K-12 art educator. Her artwork draws from personal and global histories to express diverse themes of identity, memory, and race. Her teaching incorporates contemporary art methods, visual literacy, and social justice.
Aaron S. Coleman is the Kenneth E. Tyler Chair and associate professor of art at Indiana University. He makes prints, paintings, collages, sculptures, and installations that connect historical events to the current sociopolitical climate.
15 Dec 2023
Episode 3 Restaging Classical Music for Social Relevance: Monica Ellis and Toyin Spellman-Diaz of Imani Winds
How are classical musicians speaking to the times in which they live? Band kids turned classical virtuosas, Monica Ellis and Toyin Spellman-Diaz have performed with Imani Winds since its founding more than 25 years ago. True to its beginnings, this predominantly people of color woodwind ensemble continues to break new ground with their socially relevant programming and physically demanding musical repertory. In this episode, they share personal and poignant stories filled with justice-minded strategies that will inspire instrumentalists to compose, collaborate, and commission works of consequence.
The twice GRAMMY nominated Imani Winds has premiered numerous works by contemporary composers of color, contributing to expanding the wind quintet repertoire. The group’s role in transforming classical music is recognized with a permanent presence in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
The music featured in this episode is from the album "Bruits" produced by Bright Shiny Things (https://www.brightshiny.ninja/bruits-fyc):
Bassoon Example: Sometimes: I. Prolog
Oboe Example: Bruits: V. masse
Frederic Rzewski Example: Sometimes: II. Sometimes
Vijay Iyer Example: Bruits: I. gulf
2 Dec 2023
Episode 2 A Typeface For Change: Silas Munro
What do iconic movements like women's suffrage, Civil Rights, queer liberation, and the Vietnam war resistance have in common? They tapped into the power of words and images to convey messages of protest that changed the collective imagination and direction of history. For LA-based designer and educator Silas Munro, there is “no shortage of opportunities for design to be part of the conversation of social justice.” In this conversation with Munro, we learn to use the subtle yet powerful techniques of lettering and type to tell new stories that inspire justice.
Silas Munro is currently faculty co-chair in graphic design at Vermont College of Fine Arts and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest.
2 Dec 2023
Episode 1 When Justice Goes Viral: Ruha Benjamin
How can we “act selfishly for our own humanity”? How might we recalibrate institutions so they reflect how our individual futures are intertwined? Explore these questions and more in a timely discussion with sociologist Ruha Benjamin. She takes on racism in education, healthcare, the arts and beyond in this riveting conversation.
Currently, Dr. Benjamin is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book, Viral Justice, offers an inspiring vision of change.
9 Nov 2023
Race/Remix Coming Soon: Season One Preview
Listen to highlights of Race/Remix conversations between scholars, writers, visual and performing artists at the intersection of racial justice and the arts. Launching in December 2023, Season 1 captures the stories and provocations of innovators building new knowledge and critical spaces, shifting the status quo one conversation at a time.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
7 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 16 / 100
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YouTube
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Engagement
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