How do we meet this fraught electoral moment with grace and resolve to deliver a more just America? Join us for an evening of joyous civic engagement featuring three visionary artists and activists—Joey Soloway, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and Patrisse Cullors—who share the visions of brave souls such as Alexei Nalvany, bell hooks, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and others who have inspired them toward action.

Accompanied by a heightened soundtrack, curated and performed by artist and scholar DJ Lynnée Denise.

Conceptual performance artist and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova is the creator of Pussy Riot, a global feminist art movement. She was sentenced in 2012 to two years' imprisonment following the anti-Putin performance "Punk Prayer." "Punk Prayer" was named by The Guardian among the best art pieces of the twenty-first century.

Tolokonnikova's "Putin’s Ashes" art installation at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in January 2023 propelled her into a new criminal case and put her on Russia’s most wanted criminal list. On June 21, 2023, her debut museum exhibition, RAGE, opened at OK Linz, Linz, Austria, and the eponymous performance piece performed at the Neue Nationalgalerie on July 4 of the same year.

Tolokonnikova's work is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Art and Design, American Folk Art Museum, Taschen, and Beth Rudin DeWoody, among others.

Born: Norilsk, Siberia, Russia
Lives: Geographically anonymous

Joey Soloway (they/them) is best known for creating, producing, directing, and writing the acclaimed Amazon original television series Transparent (2014–2019), for which they were nominated for five Emmy Awards (winning two) and three Golden Globes (winning one). Overall, the show received twenty-four Emmy nominations and eight Emmy awards during its run. Transparent made history as the first streaming series to win a major award as Best Series.

Other awards include Best Director at Sundance Film Festival in 2014 for their first feature, Afternoon Delight, as well as Peabody, Bafta, and SAG awards and nominations for both Transparent and the iconic feminist cult series I Love Dick. Soloway is currently co-writing A Transparent Musical with their sibling, Faith Soloway, and MJ Kaufman, which is set to open on Broadway in the fall of 2024.

Soloway is also currently partnering with Maudlyne Ihajerika, Chelsea Woods, and Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw on The South Commons Experiment, a documentary feature about growing up in a racial utopia in Chicago's South loop. Soloway has published two memoirs: Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants (Simon & Schuster, 2006) and She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy (Crown, 2018), which was praised by critics and readers alike and was chosen as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Soloway is a cofounder of 5050by2020, an artist empowerment network and strategic initiative of Timeʼs Up. They launched the Disruptors Fellowship, which is awarded to ten artists of color who also identify as trans and/or non-binary, disabled, undocumented, and/or formerly undocumented. Soloway also created The Godyssey, a docu-comedy traveling the globe to discover the story of Amtlai, the mysterious mother of Abraham. Soloway has two sons and splits their time between Los Angeles and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Patrisse Cullors believes in the power of alchemy. The New York Times bestselling author, artist, and abolitionist has long been drawn to the unseen and is inspired by the beauty of freedom found in different planes and dimensions. Over the last two decades, her art and performances have been featured at cultural institutions across the globe including The Broad, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, The Fowler, Frieze LA, Hammer Museum, Southern Guild, and more.

In addition to her work as a solo artist, Cullors is the co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart as well as the founder of The Center For Art and Abolition, a trailblazing nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering abolitionist artists and leveraging the transformative power of art to catalyze social change. Her current work and practice is focused on “Abolitionist Aesthetics,” a term she advanced and popularized to help challenge artists and cultural workers to aestheticize abolition.

A global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, Lynnée Denise is an Amsterdam-based writer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California. Shaped by her parent’s record collection and the 1980s, Denise’s work traces and foregrounds the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture in the African Diaspora. She coined the term "DJ Scholarship" in 2013, which explores how knowledge is gathered, interpreted, and produced through a conceptual and theoretical framework, shifting the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist and cultural worker. A doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at the Goldsmiths University of London, Denise’s research contends with how iterations of sound system culture construct a living archive and refuge for a Black queer diaspora.

Inspired by the American democratic ideals of freedom and equality, the Skirball Cultural Center hosts an array of Civic Engagement programs designed to inform the public, address community concerns, and illuminate the political process. In doing so, the Skirball partners with organizations across Los Angeles that represent passionate, ideologically diverse, and open-minded constituencies, and whose mission(s) align with the Skirball’s commitment to civil rights, immigration, and pluralism.

Civic Engagement Series Curator: Louise Steinman
"Manifestos for the Moment" Performance Director: Nancy Keystone