Free Guild Resource / Webinar

Anti-Racism as Organizational Compass Series: Ashé Cultural Arts Center

Published: 2020-11-02

 The “Anti-Racism as Organizational Compass” series will offer the opportunity to listen to intimate conversations with six BIPOC-led arts organizations that center anti-racism in mission and practice.

For our second conversation in the series, our dialogue facilitator, Masharika Prejean Maddison, spoke to key personnel of Ashé Cultural Arts Center, including their executive director, Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes and their chief creative officer Frederick (Wood) Delahoussaye. Centering the arts of the African diaspora, Ashé believes in the arts’ ability to be a catalyst for social change and in the power of a civically engaged community, specifically in their neighborhood of Central City located in New Orleans. As their co-founder Mama Carol says, their charge is “to fly in leaps and gusts of provocation, instigation, inspiration and aspiration...to call for and exhibit the higher standards of justice, integrity, and kindness for all...to be brilliant concoctors of opportunity, creators of vision, navigators of bs, advocates of culture, and defenders of children... to make real the majesty of dreams, to make plain the magic of being, to manifest the difference between perceiving and seeing!”

ASL interpretation provided by Rorri Burton and Selena Flowers from Pro Bono ASL. Verbal Descriptions will be provided by speakers in the introduction.