UpsideD0wn Culture TOUR "art is a Weapon!"



UpsideD0wn Culture TOUR "art is a Weapon!

What: Detroit’s art and activist collective UpsideDown Culture will be touring the Midwest, Southern US and East Coast to promote the release of All the Days After: Critical voices in poetry and artwork, as editors and contributors.



Who: To sum up the collective we would simply say the two words that work best are creativity and revolution. Our website is upsidedownculture.org.



Why: To sum up the book that took our collective a year and a half to bring into being we would use these words: Critical. Contemporary. Uncompromising. All the Days After is an exciting new anthology of poetry and artwork that offers a survey of events and experiences since September 11th that can be found nowhere else. Tearing through the monotonous drone of news reports and political speeches, the collection opens up visions of the recent world that are questioning, passionate and raw. Besides the anthology itself, All the Days After also contains a statement of ideals by Detroit's Upsidedown Culture Collective, a resource guide for activism and radical arts, an introduction by Seth Tobocman, New York artist and editor of World War III Illustrated, and a foreward by life-long political activist and co- founder of the Women’s Liberation Movement Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.


The tour will feature readings from the book and will call on local poets and spoken word artists to join us and share their own words on how these times make us feel, what we see happening and what we are doing about it. Aside from that, we will be taking our version of a cabaret event. So expect everything from skits from alter egos, to shadow puppetry, to radical art history workshops to music. It should be a lot of fun and we hope at each stop to have equal participation from locals. At Robin's Bookstore that will include featured readers Lamont Steptoe, Theadore Harris, Euware Osayande, Samantha Barrow, Cassendre Xavier, Maleka Fruean and the Upsidedown Culture Collective.

We are not going on tour as entertainers, but workers for the builders of a movement of creative resistance to those things that isolate and oppress us and hence are a destructive force in the world; one that needs to be countered and fought. "Art is a weapon," said Paul Robeson, and we aim to uphold such traditions and spread the word, to turn it upsidedown.!

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