How Contemporary Art Organizations are Responding to Seismic Cultural Shifts of Our Moment and Reimagining the Future of Institutions.

What’s in a name? What does institutional care look like? How do institutions hold and withhold stories and shape the stories we tell? These questions and others are at the center of I is for Institute, a new podcast launching October 20, 2021 from the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. Each episode illuminates the challenges and opportunities within arts organizations while emphasizing ways in which each responds to the seismic cultural shifts of our moment—from urgent calls for racial justice and equity to the possibilities for decolonization and increased accessibility within arts institutions.

Connecting arts leaders locally and from around the world, I is for Institute investigates and reimagines the role of arts organizations today. Guests include: Sepake Angiama, Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London; Lulani Arquette, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) and Flint Jamison, Yale Union, Portland; Linda Goode Bryant, Project EATS, New York; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; and Ken Lum and Paul Farber, Monument Lab, Philadelphia, among others.

What initially began as a self-reflexive project and the need to think critically about ICA’s own trajectory and internal structures soon turned to face outward. I is for Institute is a collaborative project that focuses on the many individuals who are working to reimagine the structure of arts institutions. Above all, the “I” in I is for Institute acknowledges that institutions are composed of people and rooted in places.

The inaugural episode with podcast host, Alex Klein, ICA’s Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE ’60) Curator, alongside co-interviewers, focuses on process with Sepake Angiama, Artistic Director of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London, and Gee Wesley, ICA Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow (2014 – 2017). Angiama draws on her background as a curator and educator to reflect on the shifting definition of the global and how contemporary art institutions can play a role in reorienting the ways that knowledge is produced and how learning occurs.

To read the full press release, click the link above. Listen to the first episode of the podcast here.