What ideas drive cutting edge creative work and theoretical practice?

Where can ideas with unrecognized revolutionary potential be explored?

Converge Detroit: a day-long convening of artists, thinkers, academics, and cultural workers that will provide a voice and a platform for new ideas and concepts in the arts. It is being developed by the Carr Center in response to the need for a nationally recognized and African American focused arts convening in Detroit.

Detroit - a predominantly black city by both numbers and association has long been a city under intense social stressors, and at the same time, a city undergoing monumental change. Converge Detroit is an artistic laboratory that focuses on the African American experience and its contributions, both in theory and practice, to the creative universe, with the ultimate goal of building a bridge that connects the nation to this city

Converge Detroit is a place for sharing: peer-to-peer and mentor-to-mentee. It is an incubator, a site for exploration and critique. It is a playground and a stage.

Converge Detroit 2019 takes its theme, Beyond Space: Unbounded Theory and Practice, from the Carr Center Independent Scholars Program’s, exploration-through-exhibition, curated and led by Carr Center resident artist and mentor Carrie Mae Weems. The exhibition is the culminating effort of a 12-month mentorship and peer-to-peer guidance program featuring early career artists and scholars from around the country. Beyond Space, the exhibition, explores the multidimensionality of space and spaces: their spirit, architecture, technology, memory, transgression, and queering.

Converge Detroit 2019, Beyond Space: Unbounded Theory and Practice, is informed by these questions and others, but contributors are encouraged to use the Converge Detroit platform as a testing and teaching site for the ideas that drive them. There will be 14 speakers giving presentations ranging from 15 to 45-minutes. Speakers include Dr. Simone Browne, Ph.D., artist Angela Hennessy, and artist Adama Delphine Fawundu.

This event will take place at the Detroit School of Arts on October 19, 2019 from 11:30 AM to 6:00 PM in the Aaliyah Recital Hall and will be followed by the opening reception for Beyond Space the exhibition at the new Carr Center Gallery.