Participants of this workshop made their own Zine with Culture Push Fellows: Six L, Sara Zielinski, Nora Almeida, Nifemi Ogunro, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, and learned about Culture Push’s online zine, PUSH/PULL. Part of the Culture Push Show Don’t Tell Symposium 2024.

The event began with a quick intro to PUSH/PULL, and distribution of free copies of past issues, then current Fellows led different zine-making stations using their unique approaches to design and content. Materials (and snacks!) were provided. Participants were encouraged to bring themselves, their ideas, and any images they’d like to include.

Culture Push is an arts organization that creates programs to nurture artists and other creative people who are approaching common problems through hands-on civic participation and imaginative problem-solving, primarily through our Fellowship for Utopian Practice program. The Fellowship is a process-based program aimed at artists and other creative people who are seeking to test new ideas through civic engagement.

The PUSH/PULL zine is a multimedia online journal, a virtual venue that allows Culture Push Fellows to present a variety of perspectives on civic engagement, social practice, and other issues that need attention. 

Masks were required for the entire duration of this event, except when eating and drinking. Masks are available to all guests at CTHQ. If you are feeling sick or have tested positive for Covid-19, we ask that you please refrain from participating in CTHQ programs in order to care for fellow community members.

Anna RG (she/they) makes work in composition, traditional music, sculpture, and community organizing. Based in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, her experimentation is rooted in a decade of apprenticeships in communities of traditional song, fiddle and banjo in Appalachia; and more recently in her experiences with long covid and disability justice community.

Toeing the line between utility and style, Brooklyn based designer Nifemi Ogunro approaches their design process with equal consideration for the bodies that rest on objects and the forms of the objects themselves. Wood being the medium that they primarily approach their art and furniture making practice, Ogunro uses photography, film, performance and movement as sources of inspiration and application for their work. They define their work as functional- sculptures.

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, writer, performance artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn / Lenapehoking. Her art explores intersections of archiving, environmental investigation, and spatial disruption. Recent public artworks—Last Street End in Gowanus (2021), Land Use Intervention Library (2022), and Open Water (ongoing)—focus on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed, post-industrial waterfront spaces.

Sara Zielinski is an artist and activist based in Brooklyn. She often combines several techniques to create immersive environments. Zielinski has organized projects with artists in Chicago and New York and interviewed artists for The Huffington Post from 2015 to 2017.

Six is a multi-medium designer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They often explores themes including the concept of self, phenomenology, epistemology, collective imaginaries, and futurity. Interrogating established “realities” against alternative potentialities, their work challenges accepted knowledge, embraces contradictions, and subverts expectations. They encourage individuals to question everything and to seek themselves as valuable sources of knowledge. Six aspires to continuously be the dreamer and the dream, and in doing so, inspire others to be the same.

Photo by Jordan Leonard.