AfroSolo Arts Festival 17

	When:		Thursday, July 29, 2010, 5:30-7pm
	Where:		Commonwealth Club (595 Market Street), SF)  map

From the iconic peace sign, to singer/songwriter John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance", to AfroSolo Artistic Director Thomas Robert Simpson's solo performance piece There Is No Hatred Here, artists throughout the years have used art as a medium to promote peace. The Commonwealth Club joins AfroSolo Arts Festival 17 in hosting a lively panel discussion about using art to envision, promote, and celebrate peace, examining the role the arts have played in peacemaking movements of the past and present.

PETER CARPOU is a muralist and the Art Program Manager at Larkin Street Youth Services. He has an extensive history of painting murals. As the Art Program Manager of Larkin Street’s Youth Art Program, he oversees a comprehensive arts education program that provides a variety of hands-on visual and performance art activities for the youth they serve. The program also features artistic and cultural outings to Bay Area theaters, museums, galleries, and community centers, as well as, collaborative arts projects with San Francisco’s noted arts institutions.

Brad Erickson

BRAD ERICKSON is Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area, a membership and service organization with some 400 theatre, dance, performing arts companies and individuals in an 11 county area. He is also president of California Arts Advocates and is active in a number of other state and national committees and task forces designed to promote and strengthen the role of the arts in society. Erickson is a playwright, and has a number of performances to his credit.

Jewelle Gomez

JEWELLE GOMEZ is a writer and a leader in a variety of community activities. She is the author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel The Gilda Stories and her fiction, essays, criticisms, and poetry have appeared in periodicals including San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, ESSENCE, The Advocate, Callaloo and Black Scholar. She has had published Don't Explain, a collection of short fiction, and Forty-three Septembers, a book of personal and political essays.

Michael Morgan

MICHAEL MORGAN, conductor, Oakland East Bay Symphony, also fills key roles with the Oakland Youth Orchestra, Sacramento Philharmonic, Festival Opera in Walnut Creek and the Peoria, Illinois, Symphony, and teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He began his conducting career at the age of 12 in the public schools of Washington, D.C. and has been a guest conductor with many of America’s major orchestras and a number of major opera companies. He is known as a champion of arts education and minority access to the arts.

Arisika Razak

ARISIKA RAZAK is a dancer, choreographer, and performance artist. Her performance art is equally grounded in the cross-cultural tradition of spiritual dance and her 25-year study of African, Asian, Native American and Neo-Pagan religious systems. She appears nationally and internationally as a guest lecturer and workshop leader on women’s issues and is the Program Chair of the Women’s Spirituality Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies.