Art & The City: Cultural Planning in the Bay Area
Presented by Arts + Design, in collaboration with the Civic Arts Commission of the City of Berkeley, Office of Cultural Affairs of the City of Oakland, the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, and the College of Environmental Design
Monday, January 28, 6:30-8pm
BAMPFA
Featuring Christian Frock, Independent Writer and Public Scholar; Jennifer Lovvorn, Chief Cultural Affairs Officer, Civic Art Program, City of Berkeley; and Roberto Bedoya (Cultural Affairs Manager City of Oakland.
Recently both the City of Berkeley and the City of Oakland have rolled out new cultural plans focused on enriching public life through the arts. Join us for an imaginative conversation about the future possibilities for culturally enriched civic spaces in urban communities, the challenges facing cities, and the possibilities for coalition building within the region. Featuring Berkeley’s recently appointed Chief Cultural Affairs Office Jennifer Lovvorn and Roberto Bedoya Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland in conversation with independent writer and public scholar Christian L. Frock.
Christian L. Frock is a writer and public scholar. Her work focuses on art, politics, and public life. Her writing has been published in KQED Arts, The Guardian US, and the San Francisco Chronicle and she has also produced commissioned writing for The Fleishhacker Foundation, Kala Art Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Open Space, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among other publications. Since 2009, she has written monthly museum and gallery critic’s picks for San Francisco Arts Monthly, a San Francisco Bay Area supplement to The New York Times. Frock has organized public programs, commissions, and exhibitions for Headlands Center for the Arts, Mills College Art Museum, San José State University, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues. She has consulted on a number of private and public initiatives, including projects for Facebook HQ and Stanford Graduate School of Business. She has participated in public programs organized by the Bay Area Society for Art & Activism, Oakland Museum of California, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other institutions. She has taught undergraduate and graduate seminars at California College of the Arts, California Institute of Integral Studies, and San Francisco Art Institute; and has guest lectured at UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and Stanford University, among other schools. Recent academic appointments include Spring 2017 Visiting Scholar at San Francisco State University School of Art and 2015 - 2017 Scholar in Residence at California College of the Arts’ Center for Art + Public Life, as well as Fall 2018 Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley.
Jennifer Lovvorn is the Chief Cultural Affairs Officer for the City of Berkeley’s Civic Arts Program where she directs the City’s arts programs, operations and municipal arts policy. She is responsible for managing the City’s arts and cultural grants programs, public art projects, and City-sponsored exhibitions. Working with the Civic Arts Commission, she provides leadership in developing new policies and partnerships in order to build a stronger and more sustainable arts ecosystem throughout the City of Berkeley. Ms. Lovvorn’s current focus is on beginning implementation of the recently approved Cultural Plan for the City of Berkeley, developing a festivals grants program, and launching a series of temporary public art installations in the downtown.
Roberto Bedoya is the Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland where he most recently shepherded the City’s Cultural Plan. - “Belonging in Oakland: A Cultural Development Plan”. Through-out his career he has consistently supported artists-centered cultural practices and advocated for expanded definitions of inclusion and belonging throughout his career. His essays ““Creative Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging” ; “ Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City” and “ “Poetics and Praxis of a City in Relation” reframed the discussion on cultural policy to shed light on exclusionary practices in cultural policy decision making. He is a Creative Placemaking Fellow at Arizona State University.