Panel

An international summit to consider the role of art and culture after crisis in cities across the globe, organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

What are the arts of emergency? How can image and text echo in the silence and sound of devastation? What role has culture in the work of reconciliation and rebuilding after violence?

For the second year, Cities, Art + Recovery brings together artists, writers, architects and scholars from Lebanon, Rwanda, South Africa, Vietnam, and other countries around the world as well as from the U.S. in direct conversation with each other to ask and answer these questions.

From Sarajevo to New Orleans, from Kigali to Beirut, artists have commented forcefully on their contemporary political and cultural predicament. As a witness, as a way of mourning, as indictment, as critique, as documentation, as an olive branch, and as a herald of hope, art forms the bedrock of recovery. New York, as a cultural capital, cannot afford to overlook the perspectives of artists in any process of rebuilding.

In a series of public programs, including performances, exhibitions, films, roundtables and a public art competition for downtown New York, Cities, Art and Recovery explores the work of art in the wake of catastrophe.

Friday, September 15, 2006
11:00-12:30 pm
Artists in Conversation 
Annabel Daou (Lebanon/USA) and Atef Hetata (Egypt)
in conversation with Noha Radwan (Egypt/USA)

2:00-4:00 pm
Resurgent Cities: On the Lost Balkan Highway 
Dragan Protic (Serbia), Marko Sancanin (Croatia), Yane Calovski (Macedonia) and Zoran Pantelic (Serbia) in conversation with Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (Serbia/USA)

4:15-5:45 pm
Artists in Conversation 
Yolande Mukagasan a (Rwanda/Belgium) and
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) in conversation with
Brent Hayes Edwards (USA)

A project of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Visit www.lmcc.net/recovery for venues and program information.