EmergeNYC is an incubator and affinity network for socially engaged artists to develop their creative voice, explore the intersections of art and activism, and connect to a thriving community of BIPOC, migrant, and LGBTQIA+ practitioners who challenge dominant narratives through cultural resistance.
Housed at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange in partnership with Abrons Arts Center, EmergeNYC fosters a brave space for experimentation, risk-taking, and community-building. Through in-person and virtual annual programs, Emerge has activated a strong network of artivists—in NYC and beyond—who have built solidarity across differences and engaged in artistic world-making since 2008.
The real power, as you and I well know, is collective. I can’t afford to be afraid of you, nor you of me. If it takes head-on collisions, let’s do it. This polite timidity is killing us.
—Cherríe Moraga
Refusing to contain yourself and giving in to sprawl can be a political act. Forcing yourself into a conversation with the past version of yourself and creating a new road instead of building on top of the old one is, almost always, a political act.
—Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies.
― J. Jack Halberstam
Our charge as spectators and actors is to continue disidentifying with this world until we achieve new ones.
—José Esteban Muñoz
