This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. How can we create intentional spaces to build together and dream together? What are the formats we might create or return to in times of escalating crisis? How can the act of gathering build solidarity and coalition?

Our own rebuilding process as an organization revolved around a series of listening sessions in New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, and online, where we gathered artists, practitioners, and community partners to discuss the needs of the field and the types of models needed to meet them. Participants repeatedly emphasized the deep desire to be together—to think, to build, to rest. Our programs developed out of this feedback, centering support for artist-led gatherings in both our monthly microgrant program, Field Funds, and our fellowship program, In Fellowship. Our Field Funds cycles for artist-led gatherings consistently see the highest spike in applications. Across the country, artists are building schools, organizing festivals, hosting meals, and carving out space, both physical and virtual, to be in community together.

This past year also represented the introduction of our reimagined fellowship program, In Fellowship, which gathers a working group of artists, practitioners, and cultural organizers to collectively explore key facets and processes of socially engaged art. Over a year of virtual meetings dedicated to group reflection and mutual learning, cohort members shared the joys and challenges of collective work within the context of interconnectedness and shared power. Being able to convene regularly with this cohort, even virtually, offered a balm to our team during a year of unending crisis. “This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move,” Alison De La Cruz of Great Leap recently reflected during a group call. “There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together.”

To kick off the issue, we’ll hear from each of the cohort members, both individually and together in conversation, to offer learnings and resources that have emerged from their time In Fellowship. Each issue of 

engages a guest collaborator, and the cohort is assuming that role for the first set of contributions. Later this year, we’ll be welcoming the second cohort of In Fellowship and will invite those members to contribute, as well.

We’ll also be in conversation with artists from across the field who have built practices around the act of gathering, offering a glimpse into their work and process. What models are they developing? How can gathering unfold safely and accessibly right now? How can we build more channels of support for this crucial aspect of socially engaged practices? Welcome to the third issue of 

, a roving exploration of these questions and more from artists, practitioners, and their circles of collaborators and networks. It’s an honor to gather their voices and to share them with you.

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. 

A Circle of Circles

In the first iteration of In Fellowship, we gathered a working group of three collectives and artist-led organizations to reflect on the strategies and challenges of shared power and collective work. This first cohort included What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD), a community of people living with and/or impacted by HIV, joined in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis; Great Leap, a multicultural arts organization that uses performing arts, cultural practices, and community engagement to empower diverse voices, deepen connections, and transform our relationships to each other and the Earth; and Wild Path Collective, a QTBIPOC-led land stewardship project that is establishing a commons for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, queer and trans folks, and poor and working class people to regenerate soil and our cultures by connecting with rural land.

Over a year of group calls, cohort members shared insights into the origins and transitions of their groups and the questions they hold. This time was meant to be open and flexible, providing a container for group thought and reflection, a rest from day to day operations.

To kick off this year’s issue of 

, we sat down with members of the cohort to introduce their forthcoming contributions and reflect on the year shared together—what each member will be taking away from the experience, what they’ve learned from each other, and how this moment has impacted the ways they are thinking about collective structure.

Alison De La Cruz from Great Leap; Duaba Unenra from Wild Path Collective; and Daniel Sanchez Torres, Michael McFadden, and Theodore (Ted) Kerr from WWHIVDD joined A Blade of Grass’s Lee Heinemann for a conversation early this year.

– A Blade of Grass

How did you approach the contributions you’re including in 

 was a really great opportunity to think about what the stories are that we tell through Great Leap because we’re in a leadership transition period, moving from a founder to a new leader and looking at new possibilities. At the time we were invited we had an intern who had a very different generational take on the work that we do, and it felt like a really exciting opportunity to use this as a reflection period and to have her interview both our founder, Nobuko Miyamoto, and the other two founders of the FandangObon program that we run, Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores. My essay is a reflection as the leader of some ongoing discoveries, moving away from a single founder model and the challenges of doing that. I’m trying to figure out how to name some of the challenges and discoveries in this moment of critical transition for the organization while we’re at this intersection of democracy, representation, equity, justice, and its manifestations impacting diverse demographics that supremacist-led culture doesn’t want to support and witnessing the backlash to it. Part of what’s happened in this last year has been a rediscovery of community and trying to figure out how to gauge what we can say, when we can say it, and how we can say it, while we’re still trying to move forward with our mission.

We’re trying to bring people in at a time when people feel so overwhelmed, when people feel so pressed, when people are managing the siege from ICE and Border Patrol in the cities where many of us are located. We’re seeing how we as culture bearers, artists, culture producers, community gatherers, and healers are deeply impacted. 

 became an opportunity for us to ask what the story is that we want to tell people to help them in this time. Great Leap comes out of these responses, and now more than ever so much of this work is important. What it shows us is that we have to be strategic in a different kind of way than I think we used to in the foundational periods that informed my leadership, which were the ’92 rebellion in LA, 9/11, the housing market crash, and now what we’re witnessing as the rise of presidential authoritarianism inclinations.

You were talking about how this is the moment when we’re all under siege and the people who you’re working with are currently under siege. It’s really distilling why things have been so difficult when I’ve been trying to work with people to make things happen, but also illuminating why I’ve been so frantic in some ways, as well. Oh, yeah, because there are all of these very specific targets that are being put on myself and my community, and there’s not a lot that I can do about it except try to keep things going.

For our 

 contributions, one group is doing a reflection on grief. One of our members, Alexandra Juhasz, made a documentary on grief, and it spun out into an exhibition and different facilitation groups. Alexandra gave us a bit of backstory and a brief of the documentary that they made, and then each member pulled in documentation of their process through the whole experience.

We have a conversation led by JD Davids on the HIV Complexities Project with Gabriel San Emeterio, which I thought was really fascinating from the perspective of adding an additional medical layer of people living with HIV and other things. It also has a layer of the socio-political of all of these things happening in the world that make trying to get care complicated.

Beto Pérez’s piece, “The Cure Is Always in Someone Else’s Hands,” was thinking about the colonial relationship of Mexico and the United States using HIV as a lens to think about the politics and how life has developed under American imperialism. It was quite an interesting piece for me to edit because he originally wrote it in Spanish, and even though he’s translated it, he was very clear that the English was a rough translation and you should go experience the piece in Spanish. It was a negotiation between the two of us about who the audience is and his commitment to trying to speak to his community and from his context. We know that United States American history has been whitewashed, and that means that Americans don’t have all of these references that the rest of the world does. I should also say that Beto and I are really close friends, so we talk to each other a lot, and it’s been an interesting jumping off point for conversations around what it means to write and edit for an American audience. How do I want to help the reader get there? Even as events are unfolding—a cartel leader was killed recently in Mexico and it has kind of exploded, and Beto asked me if I had heard about it. I told him what I had heard based on American news, and he was like, whoa, that’s not what happened. So the piece that ended up coming out of it continues to be something that we’re able to talk about and think about and integrate.

The last piece that we’re doing is the Collectivity piece, which was a prompt where we asked members participating in the A Blade of Grass gatherings to think about collectivity. As Ted likes to say, it fed two birds with one scone because we also had to figure out a way to split the funds, and I think this ties into how we make decisions. There was a lot of discussion within the group, and we ended up sending a survey out to everyone and asked them if they wanted a split; if they didn’t want a split, but to put the money back in the pot to split with everyone else; or they didn’t want to split, but they wanted to keep the money in the doula bank account to be used for some future thing. This was the process that we settled on when thinking about what we wanted to do with the unrestricted funds from A Blade of Grass when this fellowship started.

Riffing off what DeLa shared about being and transforming while under siege, the communities our collective is accountable to in Minnesota are also experiencing an occupation. The safety and viability of being a queer Black, Native, and Brown-led collective on rural land has become more dangerous because of ongoing raiding by ICE in our region. At the same time, we’re in yet another period of activation and there is a resurgence of interest in collective action and community welfare (an alternative term for mutual aid being advanced by Zede Harut) because once again we’re seeing that only neighbors can keep neighbors safe. My submission to 

 is a two-part essay on the life cycle and formation of a collective, informed by the last six years of organizing Wild Path Collective. Given the collective and cooperative response to the siege we’re under in our region, maybe the essay is more relevant now than it would have been months ago.

We got into—or rather are attempting to return to—the practice of commoning because it was an ancestral tradition which was destroyed in order to make way for the kinds of economic, physical, and psychological violence that is now being deployed across the planet to advance corporate and elite interests. It was practicing collectivity and commoning that gave our ancestors lives with dignity. When I talk to people about what we’re doing, they react as if the project of sharing stewardship of land with fellow cultural workers, artists, and farmers is impossible because of some social defect in the human condition. Sometimes they can also see that the indignities we live with under capitalism—things like never knowing or witnessing the process of the food you eat being grown or never experiencing safety inside or outside of your home—are horrible, too. But it’s almost like they see the indignity of their oppression as easier to deal with than the uncertainty of trusting the people close to them to be good cooperators. My hope is the article helps heal some of that alienation from our collective traditions.

DeLa, you’d also shared something with us before about the intergenerational nature of the conversations you’re having.


I definitely feel that there have been moments intergenerationally because we work with elders. Our founder, as a toddler, was incarcerated as part of Executive Order 9066. That history in itself really lays a foundation of where the organization is. Multiple folks within our process have been part of social justice movement work. We had a couple moments last year where Gen X people who are facing targeted police surveillance or feeling targeted in their workplaces because of the nature of their work, not even at Great Leap, were discussing having to form an exit plan and figure out if they should go to Mexico or Canada. I think there have been moments with elders where I’ve witnessed the, “Oh yeah, we’ve seen this, so it sucks,” knuckle up, baby boomer generation response of, 

. But also witnessing conversations and the compassion of seeing that that elder’s also trying to manage their own feelings of, 

We’ve been doing a lot more work around preparing for our convening and in talking history and vision, the thing that became clear is our FandangObon practice is very much grounded in social justice movements, because some of the connections that started weren’t just arts and culture connections, but were also progressive movement connections. Part of what I’ve discovered is there is something deeply in the bones of not just Great Leap, but also FandangObon, that is very much rooted in justice movement work.

We have to be loving with each other as we do this work, and I see we sometimes become stand-ins for people’s frustration. They finally get to a place where people will listen to them, and so sometimes they misplace their feelings of trauma and frustration against the supremacist system or anti-immigrant culture and come at us because we’re leading and we’re here. A colleague reminded me like, dude, you’re so open-hearted, you’ll listen. Supremacist institutions are just like, yeah, whatever, so the fact that you’ll listen, they come even harder, because nobody will listen in that structure. And so I think that’s the caring warrior, the caring accomplice, both C-A-R-I-N-G and C-A-R-R-Y-I-N-G, as I’m saying those words. The poet in me is feeling that moment. The caring person is the first filter for people’s trauma responses or frustration. The varying reactions to the thing that’s hurting them.

For me, recently, part of what I’ve been trying to unpack is as a queer woman of color non-binary leader, there are times when I realize, oh, I’m just a punching bag because you’ve never been listened to before. It’s taken me a while to understand these moments in my career as a community-based person who facilitates, who listens, who’s reflexive. Trying to hold compassion for people, but then also realizing as a soft-hearted person or a tender queer, as a leader who listens and is reflexive, how do I become comfortable with a boundary that allows me to be as open as possible but also, for survival, have a wall.

This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move. There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together. That part of doing it together is also us having to work through all of the things that make us inhale and exhale deeply and that are challenging. If I want to be in community with you, I have to figure out how we can be in community when we’re also trying to survive capitalism and the suppression that is coming. Words that we use to describe ourselves or our communities are being taken down and we’re witnessing a layer of language erasure as a means to erase us all.


You were talking about being the caring and the carrying person in trying to facilitate work forward, and how you develop that boundary. A friend of mine and I have a joke of, listen, we can’t have a meltdown on the same day. We have to switch off or else we’re not gonna make this happen. I’m not gonna text my friend today because they just unloaded on me, but tomorrow is my day.


One of the most beautiful aspects of our collective was its intergenerational character combined with the cross-cultural composition of our collective (just had to make a quick alliterative nod to DeLa). Over the years, I witnessed a Black queer elder mentor younger Black, Native, Asian, and white people. As mid-thirty-somethings in the group, members in my age range frequently showed up as bridge-builders, mediators, and administrators for the collective, while the twenty-somethings focused on caring and carrying the needs of the land and community. It reminded me a lot of the ways age-grade systems in indigenous communities are described: as a person and their age-cohort mature, they “graduate” from one set of responsibilities to another. I don’t remember us intentionally operating the collective in this way, but we just fell into that rhythm organically.

Unfortunately, because there wasn’t a clear and intentional way of honoring intergenerationality, that beautiful dynamic was also lost as deep and longstanding conflicts tore our collective up. Unfortunately, it was a conflict that took on age, race, and gendered dimensions, but the root causes were very, very small misunderstandings that were lost to differences in communication styles, maturity, and lack of clear alignment. Now that the conflict has ended, and we are rebuilding our group, I’ve just realized how important clear distinction and boundaries around age-appropriate expectations for responsibilities are. While we strove to have a balanced distribution of decision-making power in the collective, we didn’t carefully define with each member what they truly had the maturity and capacity to be responsible for. So the presence of intergenerationality in a collective is not something that can be left to chance. And as the “middle child” of the collective, we’re of an age-grade that has to hold itself, younger people, and much older people accountable to their word and work. It can be really really challenging.


Is there anything you’d like to add about how your group makes decisions around responding to opportunities and participating in things?


Daniel’s hard work over the last few weeks is a good example of how through A Blade of Grass and this fellowship we’ve started to work on our leadership transition. There is no doubt in my mind that had the work connected to the 

 publication launched a year ago—whether I had the capacity or not—I would have been steering it. Witnessing how other collectives function created an opportunity for us to shift our practice around how we handle opportunities, responsibility, workload, and capacities. Watching Daniel, I see how the work is so fundamentally different based on who’s steering the ship. I think that the change in how work gets done has been meaningful, and then that changes the work we have going forward.

And what this leads me to think about is how I’m excited to think about how we may still be a collective in the future, but are we actually an ecosystem full of these little collectives or little pairs? Maybe this idea of a collective has outlived its function for us, and we need to find new language to talk about who and how we are together.


Yeah, I definitely resonate on the way the collective is led. Depending on who the leader is impacts the relational practice. Great Leap, we feel like we’re a circle of many circles, we’re an ensemble of many ensembles. I feel like lots of the people we work with, myself included, can sometimes be ensembles of one. We’re seeing it show up in some of our ethnic and racial organizing, having a Japanese American lead organizer or lead artist. That’s where a lot of our base is, and so there have been moments where I’ve had challenges where I feel like people are like, oh, we don’t need other Filipinos here, because you guys are part of Little Tokyo. Well, I still want to do the dance that my community does when we show up to a circle. If I’m helping to lead a circle, eventually, it’s important to me that we get to do something from the Philippines. Yes, I’m in deep community with Japanese American practice and I can do a lot of the cultural protocol, but there still comes a point where as an ally and an accomplice, I need to feel reflected and I need to hear my language. I need to dance in our rhythm. I need to hear our music.

I hear these resonances around the places where our identities and our paths create bridges and opportunities and open pathways for people. How can collective help us make sure that we’re covering everybody? Who are we authentically? How do we manage the complexity of the diverse communities that are engaged in our practices and, at times, their competing narratives or desires or needs? It reminds me that part of my practice is not just blanket generosity, but it also has to be founded in this place of, what does this community that I say I want to uplift authentically say that they need? And how do I help facilitate or manifest that and get out of the way of it?

I also really appreciate the way that my mind has exploded in great ways thinking about what it means to have a collective so big and not all in the same place. I do so many place-based things that I also am appreciating the opportunity to be invited to think more broadly about community, and how to positively use digital community for people. Seeing the way that you all digitally organize, and the way that you digitally flow with each other. And so how do we honor the adaptation of analog to digital?


If Great Leap is an ensemble of ensembles, then I think What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a process of processes, and that really speaks to what you so generously witnessed of us, so thank you.


So then is Wild Path Collective a nature of natures?


Hahaha, Wild Path Collective is a seed of seeds—our logo is a stylized acorn, actually. One small seed that can make an entire cooperative ecosystem when planted in conditions that allow it to thrive. Having been in a deep and fairly well-defined practice of decision-making as a collective, the decision-making aspects of the work actually became the least technical thing we did together. Basically, you could just bring a proposal to the group where you asked for permission to pursue a specific opportunity that was aligned with the group’s purpose. Most times these requests for consent were granted. The person bringing the proposal forward then had to bottomline its implementation.

As I share in my essay, though, it wasn’t the decision-making that was challenging, it was the shedding of the toxic narratives and oppression that we carried into the collective soil of our group. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to deal with those in a generative way—our collective failed in that process and fell apart. It was slow and difficult work, but remediating poisons, composting, and building up good healthy soil takes a long time and a lot of work to maintain. We live in a microwave culture whose agri-culture is controlled by supply chain cartels in the food and media system. The people who are too big to fail fail little people all the time—they just get more support. But this society sees failure as final if you’re poor or Black, Native, or Brown. It makes a mountain out of making a decision together quickly, and undervalues the slow and deep process of healing through cooperating together. We say we want a liberated society. That work isn’t going to come from deciding with one another, but with providing one another with welfare and mutuality. And also with the hard realization that not everyone is in a place to contribute to that.


Something that Wild Path Collective offered our shared group as part of their collective work is the idea of composting, and I remember that resonating. I wonder if you each would take us back to thoughts about compost in this work and at this time.


The conversation that we had as a group about composting was really powerful for me and has stuck with me quite a bit. I think there are some parallels between what you have shared from an HIV movement perspective, where there’s a lot of historical stuff that has gone down that has been really problematic and challenging and hard. Being able to pull from and learn from those lessons historically and try to make good out of them is the fertile ground with which we are currently in. The current time that we’re in is also incredibly problematic and challenging, which is what you had shared, too, about describing the current political landscape, and even what it means to be in relationship with each other. It’s both being able to learn, look back, and pull those lessons to be in communion with each other in a way that allows us to think through and process things differently, and to know that whatever we’re doing now becomes the foundation for the future.

We’ve been having conversations about needing to imagine a future. By coming together as these collective groups and taking space and even, DeLa, what you shared was really important from a somatic perspective—you are dancing, you are using ritual, you are using music, you are getting people into their bodies—which is both a way of grounding, but also a way of remembering. There are things that are stored in our bodies that we can’t think our way out of, and there are ways of knowing that are different than just our frontal lobe. Being able to access some of that is really powerful from a somatic perspective.

One of the things that Wild Path Collective was really generous about and comes up a lot for me is thinking about conflict and how we deal with, show up for, approach conflict in a collective in ways that may be different than what we have inherited, learned, are taught. From a decision-making perspective, as simple a thing as how we are dividing up payment. There are lightning rods or triggers that we represent that compound the ways in which we’re interacting with each other. What are the things that we represent, and how can we honor that and process that together? The composting analogy, I think, is a really powerful one, and it’s been really important in our year together. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about as the doulas is wondering where we go from here. We are taking some time to think about the impact of this fellowship and the conversations that we’ve been having and not just move on to our next projects, but to really pause and think and use the fertilizer from this past year to make sure that the ways in which we’re moving forward are the most fruitful or intentional.


Yeah, that’s super resonant. Part of what I appreciated in hearing about the Wild Path story was the metaphorical composting of helping this white family with good justice intentions shift their understanding of what good justice work or gifting looked like and to be able to break it down even more. What are we breaking down? What is helpful to pass on in terms of nutrients? Depending on how you compost, time is an important part of composting and stillness is an important part of composting. And in these moments, I realized that’s part of what last year was, too—trying to figure out the moments when we were frozen in fear and when we were trying to be quiet and still and figure out what was happening. Figuring out how much more waste was going to be dumped on us. Even to discover—which is often the power of composting—the thing that’s been buried the longest, the surprises that are possible when you actually sit still and let an intentional process happen. And in this moment, I want to distill some information to the next generation of people in my legacy line to really explain the cyclical nature of supremacist culture backlash.

There’s a Japanese composting methodology called bokashi, and when I was working on that project it was interesting to be able to say to people that they could actually put meat in there. So just trying to honor our different or cultural approaches to composting, the different microbes that each of our composting practices offer. In composting, even the stuff you try to bury deep down, at some point, somebody’s gonna take the pitchfork and pull it up to the top, because they have to rotate. And so, in that process, who am I? Am I the pitchfork person? Am I the person who’s been dumping all my waste? And ancient wisdom. As much as we try to speed ahead with AI, the more I feel like we’re coming back to the wisdom that I know to be true. Queer people were shamans, gender non-binary people existed. We come from tribes of people that had solutions for some of what we’re experiencing, and because supremacy culture erased it from our composting practices, we’re now in a crisis.


I’m thinking in the context of how long I’ve been part of the group, where it did feel like for the first couple years I was just just sitting in the room, listening to everybody, and now am in this position where I feel comfortable asking a very uncomfortable money question to some of these people 

 I’ve spent that time with them. I feel comfortable facilitating towards a decision that feels correct for the person, not necessarily for me. There were some people who felt like they didn’t deserve the money because they weren’t as involved as other people, and so it was just having this conversation with them that felt like I was pulling from my experience of being part of the group for as long as I have. Look, I’ve seen many iterations of this group, and in all of those iterations, there have been moments when somebody was doing a lot and there have been moments when somebody wasn’t doing anything, but it ends up all balancing out. It felt like it enriched the whole experience of being with the group for so long because I’ve had this understanding of how it ebbs and flows over time.

But I also think that in terms of composting, there were a lot of ideas, and what I love about what we’ve done as a group is that none of the ideas of any of the pieces that we’re presenting feels like it was an original idea. And that’s not shade. We feel like we’ve had a thousand versions of this conversation about this particular topic, but this was the moment that we could finally put into a shape that made sense. A lot of the things that are in the piece I feel like existed six years ago in some of our earlier conversations, so it didn’t feel foreign, it just felt like it was different moments of maturation that felt really nice.


How do we place financial value on contribution? Particularly when it comes to being in collective, and, Daniel, you mentioned this too, that there was no original idea, right? Because we are in community and in this collective approach, maybe there was a spark, but then it got molded and meshed together and morphed into something else. Who’s to say that somebody who contributes one sentence deserves more than somebody who contributes three paragraphs? And I’ll use myself as an example. I could sit and listen to DeLa talk all day long, because the things that come out of your mouth are incredible, and I learn and I get chills. It takes me three hundred words to say something that you say so succinctly in a couple, and I’m getting choked up because, true story, I feel very lucky and grateful to have spent this year with you. It’s been such a valuable year in a really tough year.

As mentioned earlier, the doulas went through an extensive process around the money which I never would have wanted to have done any differently. I thought it was super valuable. We really didn’t want folks to have to out themselves of needing money and have to request it. We tried to respect that the doulas have existed before. They’re existing in this current project. They will exist in the future, and those contributions are valuable, regardless of whether you’re showing up in that moment. There was this other really tricky component that the doulas have done this work primarily without funding for most of its existence, and there have been little pockets of money for different projects for an installation or for photocopies or to make a sticker, but to my knowledge we’ve never never had a big chunk of money, and we jokingly, but also very realistically, talked about what would an HIV doula do without money because the money was getting in the way of us being able to even connect, be with each other, work, and feel like our focus was on things that were important. Just a really interesting overlap of capitalism onto collective work and really fascinating to be a part of the experience and think about, particularly as it relates to some other collectives that each of us are a part of.


I want to avoid saying that it was the perfect solution from the perspective that sometimes when collectives have to make decisions it’s not about making everyone happy, it’s just about, well, this is the one that’s gonna make the least amount of people upset. I have this real aversion to saying that the process needs to be enjoyable. Sometimes the work is the work, and the work is just annoying. From a project management perspective, where this was really one of the first projects where I had to have a real intimate conversation with everybody about how to split the money, it was not as bad as I thought it would be. But I do think it was because it came out of these growing pains and that we did have this process and that we’d done this before.


It’s really affected me to learn about how much that metaphor and our story has resonated with you all. I talk about composting at-length in my essay, so I won’t bore y’all with all that here—sike, just kidding, DeLa mentioned bokashi! I think what’s most poetic about the questions they’re asking is that in the composting process our “waste” ultimately becomes nourishment. It’s not only that we’re the hands turning the soil; our selves and the scraps of our existence become part of what will feed us again in a future season. Do with that image what y’all will. All that to say, I think taking up a composting perspective in group work is to see that nothing is a waste. Nearly anything under the right conditions can be broken down and redistributed to nourish the larger group.


To close out, is there anything else you’d like to share that you’re taking away from your time In Fellowship with the cohort?


DeLa, your vulnerability is something that I will always cherish. It is a seed that you planted deep inside of my psyche, and I think it did impact my relationship to the collective. It helped me see the ways in which vulnerability already exists within our group and honor that and witness it, and then also remember that if the person doing most of the talking and most of the emailing is also being vulnerable, then that is going to have lots of beautiful rippling effects.


Being a part of the pilot cohort was a very important part of last year for Great Leap. It gave me an additional internal litmus test and collective to bounce ideas off of because of the shift in our ensemble with having Dan join us early on and then after medical things Dan and I made choices together about his participation.

I feel like the doulas have helped to lovingly open my mind to the way in which some of what we’re trying to do is possible. Sometimes in Great Leap, and because I come out of this training, there are certain protocols you have to follow if you’re within a cultural or traditional folk practice. So it was really helpful to realize that you can also engage people in this new way that helps to expand protocol and creates a protocol for when we’re an ensemble of ensembles, or a collective of collectives or a circle of circles, which is how I think of Great Leap a lot.

Because we came from a model of one person holding the torch, it’s been really awesome to witness another model and be in community with you all. With Wild Path, witnessing the real struggle of seeing their progression from 20-ish people to five people, and knowing that sometimes in this work it goes small and it takes a group of people to carry it forward until it can go bigger or you can connect to the next group of people. I think in this moment, as I try to find more people to be with us, I’m trying to figure out what the ask is, because so many people are so inundated. At any given moment people are having to survive whatever the new trigger or issue is, and so people’s capacity is different. I’m grateful for the divine timing that in a year where things went the way they went this was a really helpful opportunity to show up in a digital space with folks. To be able to show up and be around other people who care about not being isolated, not in a hierarchy. We jump in circles because leadership can change in a circle, but there’s not a hierarchy in a circle, and so part of what this fellowship opportunity and these conversations have offered is a deep affirmation that there are so many ways that we are building together.

Part of what I’ve discovered is I’m always in training, because anytime I’m in a group, anytime I’m in a collective as a lifelong learner it’s an opportunity to learn and witness leadership. I’ve been thinking a lot about what my 21-year-old leader self would have to say to my 51-year-old leader self right now. There’s a lot of judgment and anger, but there’s also a lot of compassion and discovery. Now I understand some of the leaders that I had judgment about, now I get it. I get why you were tired, and you weren’t even dealing with ICE raids. They hadn’t even revoked Roe vs. Wade. They weren’t assaulting trans rights and trying to police bathrooms. We’re continuing to be a part of the generation who grew up with AIDS and HIV awareness, and what that life experience is like, being in community and family folks. I have a lot of gratitude in this time right now. What is the wisdom we can give that isn’t about a foundation dollar, but trying to make sure when I’m in community with people, when I’m in leadership with people, I’m accountable, I’m vulnerable, I’m receptive, and I’m proactive with where we want to go.


Affirmation. Being what feels like the youngest group in terms of members—but also at a point of maturation as a collective—coming into the fellowship emerging from conflict and being able to discuss that openly with fellow collectives was really healing. It’s taken a lot to metabolize the pain and grief that was stirred by what our group endured. Many people have felt entitled to our story, our attention, our future visions, and even the land we care for as a result of this transition. All that contributed to this self-protective stance of remaining quiet and not asking for outside help. We were worried that people wouldn’t see us in our fullness, or that what we learned from that experience was nourishing. But you all have already been through that full cycle as a group. So it felt healing to experience that knowing nod, and to have the feelings of grief we were moving through just be normalized. Honestly, it sometimes feels like failure cannot be an option for you as a racialized person. There are some cases where failure on even just a mundane activity can mean death. We still don’t really have a safety net for the work we do, we’re still healing from the transition, as well. Knowing that we’re not alone in this experience and that we’re not exceptional failures in what we experienced has been really lifegiving. We could lay that burden down finally and get back to the creative work we set out to do.


I include A Blade of Grass as a collective as well, given that you’re a collective in a different format but still a collective, and thinking about size, numbers, physical location, and proximity—to be able to spend the year thinking through some of the elements of collectives and what makes them strong, work well, effective. What are some of the challenges that come up? This goes to the idea of circles of circles and even collectives of one. I’m in these meetings as a representative of the doulas, but I’m also in other spaces as a member of different collectives and as an employee and in my relationships. My family is a collective. And so these conversations have benefited me in a lot of other spaces, and I think about the ripple effect that this fellowship, these conversations, this money has had in terms of really being able to have a wider impact beyond my time with the doulas. It’s impacted my work at The Center. It’s impacted my work in a photo collective that I’m in. It’s impacted my work with my relationships and my family. So again, really grateful to be able to think through some of these things throughout the year.

Instagram

Website

Wild Path Collective

Great Leap

What Would an HIV Doula Do?

This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move. There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together. 

A Process of Processes

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Director Lee Heinemann, Program Manager Allie Linn, and Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Dan S. Wang

explores the destabilizing collapse of public and private spheres in the U.S. today. Guest edited by artist and writer Dan S. Wang, varied contributions from artists and practitioners will unfold throughout the rest of the year. Does the crumbling of the U.S. political systems we've known open space to—in Dan’s words—“reinvigorate our imaginations regarding government and what it can do”?