The Blackwood and Artist Constance Hockaday Launch Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power

Twenty-one audio addresses and presidential portraits from artists as leaders

Released every Friday through December 17, 2021

Available at ArtistsInPresidents.com and BlackwoodGallery.ca
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Spotify

Who has the power to reimagine leadership?

What would it look like if artists assumed authority over our collective future?

What would it look like if we all joined in this mission?

In Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power, Chilean-American artist Constance Hockaday has created a platform that takes on these questions and invites artists, public intellectuals, and writers to radically reimagine political power and possibility. An international assembly of 21 artists was commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga), to create brief audio addresses, positioning themselves as world leaders who speak directly to the people, describing their vision for the future and how we get there.
 
With support from professional photographers, each artist has also created a “Presidential Portrait,” embodying the kind of leadership they wish to bring into being, and subverting conventions of presidential portraiture. The 21 audio transmissions and portraits form a revolutionary collection that speaks to a new generation of activists, policy-makers, and community leaders with wit, passion, and pathos.

Hockaday was inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Depression-era radio broadcasts called the “Fireside Chats,” as a framework for speaking frankly and directly to the people in a time of crisis. A previous iteration of Artists-in-Presidents was presented alongside the 2020 US presidential election campaign, produced in partnership with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and Stanford Live Arts.

Now, commissioned in 2021 with the support of the Blackwood Gallery, Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power continues to expand and reimagine vernaculars and aesthetics of power with the voices and bodies of brilliant artists, writers, researchers, performers, and musicians.

This iteration brings together visionaries from Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Mexico, and the United States. Their voices include a dub poet and decolonial scholar, an Anishinaabe land-restoration expert, a DJ, and community organizer, and more—all conjuring new propositions for leadership. Each advance new, unexpected, and provocative strategies for upending our understandings of power. As civil rights activist and comedian Esra’a Al Shafei says in her presidential address: “I am not sure I would survive in a fight with a Pomeranian. But yes, I am a threat. My very existence and identity are a threat to large men with lots of money who run rogue governments, even more so now that I have the power to represent and speak up for people like me. People like you.”
 
Conceived and executed as a digital project amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power features Esra’a Al Shafei, d’bi.young anitafrika,  Raji Aujla, Roy Dib, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Kevin Gotkin, Luis Jacob, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge), Raqs Media Collective, Fariha Róisín, Desi Small-Rodriquez, Adrian Stimson, Melati Suryodarmo, Paulo Tavares, Françoise Vergès, Romily Alice Walden, Ravyn Wngz. Full participant biographies are available at ArtistsInPresidents.com and BlackwoodGallery.ca.

This remarkable cohort tackles some of the most urgent issues facing human and non-human citizens of earth: environmental crisis; the disastrous fallout of global capitalism and settler colonialism; the ongoing effects of war; the alienation of people from their governing structures; the necessity of healing ongoing traumas; and international movements for Black lives, Indigenous sovereignty, LGBTQ2S rights, open Internet, and disability justice.
 
According to Hockaday, “All of our public leaders are constructed by a team of writers, photographers, strategists, and probably therapists and coaches—even spiritual guides. All of these components come together and create this person’s performance of power, defining what leadership looks like. Yet, so many of us long for visions of the future and collective power outside of the toxic, imperialist, one-man-hero story we’ve inherited. We have to expand our vision of leadership beyond the current norm.”
 
Hockaday continues, “Historically, creative thinkers and visionaries have been the cornerstones of movement-making ideas. Artists have the ability to articulate what needs to be said right now and figure out ways to say things we don’t know how to say yet. It only makes sense to give them a platform at this moment.”
 
Artists-In-Presidents audio transmissions are free, released via a dedicated website at ArtistsInPresidents.com, and as a podcast feed available on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, and Spotify. Each artist speaks directly and intimately to listeners, wherever they may be. With the support of The Blackwood, Hockaday has given all Artists-In-Presidents access to professional speechwriters and technical support in creating their transmissions.

Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power audio addresses and presidential portraits will be released every Friday from August 6, 2021, to December 17, 2021, at ArtistsInPresidents.com and BlackwoodGallery.ca. ASL interpretations of each audio address will be available, as well as text transcriptions.

Listeners are invited to create their own presidential addresses and share their visions for the future and new modes of leadership on social media, using the hashtag #ArtistsInPresidents.
 

About Constance Hockaday 

Constance Hockadayis a queer Chilean-American from the US/Mexico Border. She is a director and visual artist who creates immersive social sculptures on urban waterways. She has worked with the Floating Neutrinos since 2001, and collaborated with Swoon’sSwimming Citiesprojects, sailing floating sculptures along the Hudson, Mississippi, and the Adriatic Sea (2006-09). In 2011, she created the Boatel, a floating art hotel in New York’s Far Rockaways made of refurbished salvaged boats—an effort to reconnect New Yorkers to their waterfront. Her 2014 pieceAll These Darlings and Now Us highlighted the displacement of San Francisco’s queer community: more than 1000 people watched peep show performances on a raft of retrofitted sailboats featuring artists from two recently shuttered iconic queer businesses. Hockaday holds an MFA in Social Practice and MA in Conflict Resolution. She is also a Senior TED Fellow and an artist-in-residence at The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA.

About The Blackwood
 
The Blackwood is a contemporary art centre at the University of Toronto Mississauga dedicated to open, public research. We present curated exhibitions featuring the work of local, national, and international professional artists in on-campus gallery spaces; program off-site projects throughout the GTHA; support artistic research, commissions, and residencies; and foster transdisciplinary strategies for knowledge production and circulation via a robust publishing program.

Acknowledgments

Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power is commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. The Blackwood gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga. Additional support is provided by the Jackman Humanities Institute program for the arts.