“I Hope…” | Part 1
Lessons Learned by a Black Woman Cultural Leader in 2020
Dr. Indira Etwaroo
Courtesy of and Photo by Hollis King.
I stood in the spotlight of the summer sun in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. I was surrounded by my people, Black folks. We were the current survivors of converging pandemics that disproportionately impacted the lives of Black Americans: COVID-19 and ongoing racial killings, violence and injustices. We shared a collective, yet deep unexpressed knowing that death could literally come to any of us or our loved ones, at any time. My experience, learnings, and musings as the executive artistic director emeritus of The Billie Holiday Theatre, leading the efforts of the Black Lives Matter Mural in 2020, serve as this case study.
The first painted strokes of the Black Lives Matter mural were done on Saturday, June 13, 2020 under a clear blue sky, beginning at the corner of Fulton Street and Marcy Avenue almost a month after the murder of George Floyd. Donned in face masks and armed with paint rollers, brushes, and 150 gallons of yellow and black traffic paint, a community of artists came together, even as we had to stand six feet apart.
It was in this moment — arguably the most consequential moment in modern history — I felt that my twenty years of working in the arts and culture nonprofit sector no longer mattered in the same way that it had historically mattered. I profoundly believe (if we truly look to the future and not focus solely on how to maintain what we have acquired — including power) that the leaders of arts and culture can no longer serve as the primary harbingers of culture, the architects mapping out the blueprint that we have been so carefully crafting over decades that the masses have followed. Our collective blueprint lacks the critical equity, relevancy, urgency, diversity, and agility needed in our current realities. So, who can draft a plan forward to ensure “we can all flourish” and what will that plan look like?
When faced with this question in 2020, it was at this moment that I felt a rare freedom that I have seldom experienced in the non-profit arts and culture world. Freedom, because it seemed like the entire center of the world shifted and those leaders, communities, artists, and institutions who have stood for decades on the front lines of racial equity and social justice along the margins — often barely surviving — immediately and urgently inhabited the center. In our very DNA were hard-won lessons on how to center our communities, how to do much with little, how to pivot quickly and accurately, how to fight for a justice that doesn't come quickly, how to partner from a place of equality, and how to survive in the midst of the seemingly unsurvivable.
I believe the center of the future for arts and culture must be comprised of those whose identities are intersectionally artists, people of the global majority, women, the LGBTQ+ community, the accessibility community, and the poor.
How do we create and maintain a polycentric ecosystem of many centers, a global symphony of communal creative expression? Again, I know of no better point of exploration than The Billie Holiday Theatre in 2020 who stood on the front lines of the fight against long-standing systemic racism with the, then, largest African American community in the nation — Central Brooklyn — disproportionately impacted by both pandemics and our rallying cry was our creative expression, a cry heard across the nation and the world.
Self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet," who dedicated her life to confronting and addressing social injustices, Audre Lorde, shared:
“Those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the masters tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr. Indira Etwaroo (award-winning producer, director, scholar, and arts and culture executive) has worked across the world to develop multiplatform venues and content that represents the diversity of the globe and explores the complex intersections between stories-that-matter and the topics-of-our-time. She currently serves as the first-ever Director of the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple in California.
Dr. Etwaroo was a major force for content innovation and inclusion in the public media field, as the Founding Executive Producer of The Greene Space in NYC and Founding Executive Producer of NPR Presents, the national live events platform to bring live, on-air and online content to audiences across the world. Of note, she Executive Produced the American Broadcast Premiere of the 75th Anniversary of Zora Neal’s Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Phylicia Rashad and the first-ever audio recordings and video broadcasts of August Wilson’s entire American Century Cycle, in partnership with the August Wilson Estate and Artistic Directors Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Stephen McKinley Henderson. She led The Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn through radical growth, as its Executive Artistic Director: more than doubling the audience, increasing revenue by 212%, and producing groundbreaking content, leading to the Presidential Medal of the Arts for the work she led in 2020-2021. Dr. Etwaroo spearheaded the launch of the first-ever national $10 million strategic plan for thrivability for Black theater institutions, The Black Seed, in partnership with Gary Anderson, Dr. Monica NDounou and Shay Wafer. Indira’s work at BAM developed educational and humanities’ content that leveraged BAM’s MainStage work. Dr. Etwaroo has been a professor of graduate studies at Temple University and at NYU, teaching Leading Performing Arts Institutions in the 21st Century.
She has received awards and honors for her work, including the “40 under 40” of national leaders by The Network Journal, the Black Theater Network’s Larry Leon Hamlin Legacy Award, as well as the Larry Leon Hamlin Producer’s Award from the National Black Theater Festival. She has lectured and published extensively on the performing arts, race, womanhood and equity; and has served as a Fulbright Scholar where she lived and worked with refugee Somali women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Indira is the mother of Zenzele, a director and writer.
