Cities’ identities are made and remade over time by their cultures, but is a city’s cultural identity integral to its survival? When infrastructure is crumbling, public education funding has flagged, and the world of art and culture is accessible on any device with an Internet connection, is there still a specific, irreplaceable value inherent in the cultural identity of a metropolis? And even if there is, when the issue becomes one of numbers—and specifically one of money or jobs—how are we...

Any city would be lucky to have an artist in its corner like 2016 Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence Theaster Gates, whose work embraces activism, cultural preservation, and community development. Since he began work on his now famed Dorchester Projects in 2009, Gates’s transformation of a once-neglected South Side neighborhood into a thriving cultural hub has yielded an enclave of buildings that offer an array of cultural programming, from gardening to youth art classes to Black Cinema. Last...

In 1957, George Balanchine and his fellow Russian émigré Igor Stravinsky astonished audiences with their revolutionary ballet Agon for the New York City Ballet. With a score combining French Renaissance dance melodies and twelve-tone invention, Agon's diverse cast wore simple black-and-white practice clothes and performed with unadorned clarity on a spare stage, laying bare the tensions of the civil rights movement, the struggles for gender equality, and the anxiety of the Cold War era. The...

What was the best script you read this year that still hasn't been made into a feature film? That was the simple question to film-industry executives that catalyzed the Black List. Since 2005 the Black List has helped generate over 300 films, including The Revenant, Spotlight, Slumdog Millionaire, Juno, The King's Speech, Argo, and The Social Network. Those films have earned over $25 billion worldwide and won 35 Academy Awards, including eight of the last fifteen screenwriting Oscars. Black...

“Truth,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “belongs, like the earth, to all the earth’s inhabitants.” In the search for truth, how do storytellers of all types “pay honor to the full humanity” of the communities they seek to represent? That is the obligation that author and historian Sarah Lewis described in a survey of photography of the black experience that she edited for a special issue of Aperture magazine. She called it “a project of vision and justice.” As the multiplicity of identity issues...

How does the woman at the helm of the largest symphonic organization in the United States view the role of orchestras at the dawn of the 21st century? Deborah Borda, who spearheaded the appointment of Gustavo Dudamel as LA Phil Music Director, is renowned for her creative leadership, relentless search for innovation, and her progressive outlook on the responsibilities and functions of orchestras in American life. She will speak with Michael Eisner about her continuing commitment to...

Speakers: Aquil Charlton

Whether it is #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite today, or whether it was All in the Family and Ms. Magazine in the past, America’s identity crises have always insinuated themselves into every aspect of our daily lives. And as politics grows more fractured and divisive, these difficult conversations have often found a more reasonable and humane airing in popular entertainment. Last year 1.32 billion movie tickets were sold in N. America, and the average American adult spent about half their...

Journalists Michele Norris, Jose Antonio Vargas, and Amar Bakshi have all worked to create global megaphones for sharing experiences and stories that too often go unnoticed. Norris’s Race Card Project, Vargas’s #EmergingUS, and Bakshi’s Portals provide egalitarian podiums where the most difficult conversations around race, immigration, religion, and identity can happen. Norris, Vargas, and Bakshi will explain the theories and practices behind the creation and curation of their projects, and...

When the ranks of a cultural institution or a creative field tend toward high levels of homogeneity in terms of race, class, and/or gender, what are the challenges and opportunities faced by the people who are placed in gatekeeper positions within those institutions or fields who don’t fit that homogenous mold? Speakers: Franklin Leonard, Thelma Golden, Chris Jackson, Michele Norris

Debating immigration is a perennial favorite in presidential elections, perhaps never more so than in 2016, when border walls and banning Muslims push the boundaries of what proposals are considered acceptable to American voters. The artists on this panel vary in their mediums and perspectives, but they all contend with the immigrant experience. Guided by Eric Liu, we have asked them to explore individually and as a group how we can realize the aspirations promised by the words adorning the...

David Skorton became the 13th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution on July 1, 2015. A board-certified cardiologist who previously served as president of Cornell University, Skorton entered the institution at a time of transition and renovation, with new museums like the National Museum of African American History and Culture slated to open soon and major overhauls on old favorites like the Castle and the National Air and Space Museum waiting on the near horizon. The Smithsonian is founded...