Courtney Surmanek

May 12, 2019
11:00am

Join us at the cHURCH for an interactive discussion with artist Courtney Surmanek about their Resistance Mapping project. This is a free event. Bagels and coffee will be served.

Resistance Mapping is an interactive exercise designed to lead to conversations about gentrification and displacement, safety and perception, and bias. During the workshops, Courtney works with groups to create individual maps that document what, whom, or where we avoid in their cities or neighborhoods, whether the avoidance is real or imaginary, and what the consequences might be of successfully avoiding these people, places, or things. Working in small groups, we shift the conversation to reflect on how we can move our maps from avoidance to resistance. To do this, we consider the following prompts:

Are there issues or constraints the group is experiencing in common?
Is there something we can do as a group to collectively shift the maps?

The goal is for the maps to inspire people to move differently in association their neighbors and in the environments we walk through daily. In doing so, we implement a micro-space of justice within the context of the workshop space, with the hope that these new insights leave the room with us. The ultimate goal is to enact a radical, new vision which empowers us to re-­make our city landscapes and rethink community.

Courtney developed the Resistance Mapping workshops as an Artist-in-Residence at MacEwan University’s Mitchell Art Gallery in Alberta, located on ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ, Amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty 6 Territory, Canada in August 2018. The workshop was led for and with transgender and gender non-conforming people at the Pride Centre of Edmonton’s Trans Camp, and for a general audience at the Mitchell Art Gallery.

Courtney is excited to adapt this work to alternative audiences, in particular, communities in suburban environments through a project called Object Permanence that attempts to explore and unpack what suburban identity is, and how the health of the regions we occupy influence that identity. This project asks: What if divided neighborhoods were causing public health problems? What if a new approach to planning and design could tackle both the built environment and collective well-being at the same time? What if neighborhoods could help each other?

Courtney seeks to make art born of their roots: Work that uplifts queer communities, and work that is for working class communities, with an overarching goal of building unity across historic lines of division. They are committed to working within complicated, racially segregated suburban and rural areas to foster conversation on whiteness as a construct with white-identifying people; and to help foster alternative ways of being in relationship to our world and one another that serve our changing climate. This means deconstructing racist policies that have and continue to rip apart communities in favor of a white and wealthy overclass: urban renewal, planned shrinkage, mass incarceration, the foreclosure crisis, and gentrification, to name a few. Courtney spent the bulk of their youth in Western Suffolk County, NY, not far from the first Levittown, a hamlet that is at once a symbol of racial segregation, and a symbol of the “American Dream”. Their draw toward urban and regional planning comes from a lived recognition (having grown up working class and white in a region where redlining is blatant) that these exclusionary systems must be uprooted. Courtney also believes this work requires artists and community workers committed to fostering social repair and creative, hopeful dialogue to collectively envision solutions for just and equitable futures. The dynamism of art and theater is where their hope lies, because as Augusto Boal proclaims and as they have witnessed: “the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution.” Art can serve as a bridge toward understanding and building strategies that break down these seemingly impenetrable systems.

Courtney Surmanek (they/them) is a queer, Ashkenazi Jewish, multidisciplinary artivist with roots in colonization and liberation. As a theatre and visual artist, poet, and community organizer, Courtney views the arts as an invaluable social justice tool, believing that the same tools and capacities that artists use to make art can be utilized to make systems more equitable and improve the impacts of community-driven policy and planning efforts. They are a 2018-19 Social Practice Artist-in-Residence at the Queens Central Library with ProjectArt, Fellow of The Performance Project at University Settlement, and recent Participant in Theater of Change: Artistry, Law, and Activism with the Broadway Advocacy Coalition at Columbia Law School. From 2017-18 they participated in the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ EMERGENYC program, the Mitchell Art Gallery at MacEwan University’s Summer Artist-in-Residence program, The Art & Law Program, and the Center for Artistic Activism’s Art Action Academy. They are a member of Streaks of Lavender, a collective of LGBTQIA+ identified people dedicated to writing as an act of sociopolitical resistance, emerging out of the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s Creative Writing from Queer Resistance workshop.