“I Hope…” | Part 2
Lessons Learned by a Black Woman Cultural Leader in 2020
Dr. Indira Etwaroo
Courtesy of and Photo by Hollis King.
The community re-sanctified the ground of the Lenape Tribe (“The People”) with the Black Lives Matter mural of Bed-Stuy in 2020, which is the case study of this article. The community consecrated it with song, dance, prayers, tears, vigils, flowers, sage, poetry, chanting, and unity.
And the creative expression of a community was captured through the creative lens of so many artists. One artist, in particular, stood armed with his weapon of remembrance...his camera. He became our witness, capturing us as we bore witness to a story that seemed to flow out of us like a mighty river onto the unyielding pavement of Bedford Stuyvesant. Hollis King, award-winning creative director, asked the question of each of us through his lens: what does it mean to be human?
He caught us at our wisest, most beautiful, complex, broken, desolate, and exquisite selves. Like a mosaic made up of pieces of shattered colored glass, for all of our brokenness, we are beautiful.
The mural was a creative expression of a community, our most fundamental democratic ideal with which human beings are born: the right to express ourselves. In that space came a racial protest and healing I have never before experienced in my life. Theater found the roots of its etymology, “to see.” Our community was seen and their pain was made manifest.
Our audience went from approximately 40,000 in 2015 to 81,000 in 2019. The mural on the streets drew 200,000 community members…and we spent $0 on promotions; the community was our marketing arm, sharing social media posts, photos, and videos far and wide.
Our community members, hundreds of artists, and a culture institution, all came together and holistically realized the highest expression of ourselves. And for me, out of that experience came many points of hope:
I hope that artists, leaders and communities of the global majority remain central to the arts and culture ecosystem.
I hope that plans to build strategies or new arts spaces consider the voices of artists and community members with appointments to boards, advisory committees and positions of leadership.
I hope that strategic plans are led by the voices that reflect the communities we serve.
I hope that we bring to a screeching halt the modern colonization of sacred arts spaces of the global majority, once stripped of our cultural spaces to only newly-experience a second stripping, as spaces are built and stamped with the names whose economic power have given them permission to place their names, their brands on buildings the same way in which economic power granted permission to brand Black bodies once-upon-a-time in the Antebellum south.
I hope that mid to large-sized cultural organizations cease the predatory practices of “taking over” smaller organizations when they partner and understand that to be smaller and nimble is to be a powerful asset in our current cultural ecosystem.
I hope that we don't merely place more Black women leaders in positions of leadership, without cultivating fertile, safe and supportive spaces for Black women leaders to survive and thrive.
I hope that cultural institutions that have held economic power will partner with those historically disinvested cultural institutions from a place of true equality, asking “what can we do to help you thrive?”
I hope that we put our dollars into the work of artists and the creative expressions of communities and less into bricks and mortar.
I hope that the dollars invested in communities of the global majority during COVID-19 remain a priority.
I hope this time of great challenge was a time of great lessons learned; yet, I am not so sure.
Despite community protests and sit-ins, the Black Lives Matter mural on Fulton Street was reopened Fall 2020. No one ever spoke to the artists, the community, or the artistic leaders about this decision. Cars and buses now drive over 160 names that were a memorial to those slain by racially-motivated justice in this country. While much can be disputed, what is indisputable is that a community - from all walks of life - came together and reached a radical consensus that the killing of Black lives must end.
The paint and the names have faded and the struggle continues, but I hope...
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.
