Call & Response 2021

Call & Response is a cumulative project that gathers a community of artists who share a commitment to the radical Black imagination as a means to re-examine the past and imagine a better future. We build the Call & Response community through residencies, exhibitions, performances, educational and public programs, and collaborations and site visits with new artists. While the pandemic has forced us to cancel or postpone most public events at Lynden over the past year, we have continued our work both onsite and virtually, taking advantage of the opportunities to work quietly on Lynden’s 40 acres or to erase geographical distance through virtual collaboration.

In addition, the overlap between Call & Response and HOME, our refugee-guided work with displaced communities, has grown through the efforts of Kim Khaira, artist-in-residence and Lynden’s community engagement specialist, and Arianne King Comer who, like Portia Cobb, sits on the Refugee Steering Committee. Among the HOME programs that directly address the intersection of refugees and Black residents in Milwaukee is the bimonthly series HOME: Conversations on Black Lives Matter.

In 2021, most projects will continue to combine the virtual and the in-person. Returning Call & Response participants include textile artist Arianne King Comer, choreographer Reggie Wilson, interdisciplinary artist Portia Cobb, and chef and food scholar Scott Alves Barton. After two years of preparation, we launch In the Healing Language of Trees: a natural act of transformation restructured for curing many ills, a project with visual artist Daniel Minter that will unfold across two summers. Minter will be in residence at Lynden multiple times beginning in June, when he arrives to install an exhibition, Root Work, in Lynden’s gallery. We will be announcing public events and workshops as they are confirmed.

We continue to plan for the future of Call & Response. Several of the projects postponed during the pandemic stretch into the future. We now expect to produce POWER, the third piece in Reggie Wilson’s trilogy in the summer of 2022, bringing Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group back to Lynden for an extended residency next summer.

For information on past Call & Response programming: 2018, 2019, 2020