Lunch on Fridays: M. Carmen Lane

Lane will discuss the role of place and systems thinking in their practice as an interdisciplinary artist, founder and director at ATNSC: Center for Healing and Creative Leadership, a socially engaged, multidisciplinary and artist-led residency, retreat, research and exhibition space in the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood of Cleveland—an ongoing work sited in a multi-unit residential home that was slated for demolition and reawakened in 2020. It centers the life and practices of Indigenous contemporary artists and artists of color.

Lane will share an overview of their work in conversation with the 1962 John F. Kennedy essay, “The Arts in America” as theoretical conversant to explore the potential of the artist as leader and the strategy of placed based arts interventions as both companion, answer and mirror. A city’s arts and culture ecosystem directly reflects the landscape it inhabits—storytelling and sound will be a part of this experience.

M. Carmen Lane (b. 1975, African-American, Mohawk,Tuscarora) is a Cleveland-based artist whose work explores Black/Indigenous identities, two-spirit and non-binary masculinities, intergenerational grief and settler colonial behaviors within human systems. They are the founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Healing and Creative Leadership, an artist-led incubator and exhibition space for socially engaged Indigenous artists and artists of color. They also work with arts and culture leaders on equity leadership and change through their consulting firm MC Lane Consulting. Carmen has designed anti-oppression learning experiences for activists/organizers, taught and lectured at university (including The New School of Social Research, Chicago Theological Seminary and Yale); published their poetry in numerous journals and anthologies and has exhibited their work in galleries and museums regionally and nationally. They are a recipient of the 2023 Artist2Artist Fellowship from the Arts Matters Foundation and 2020 Joyce Awards as well as several artists residencies. Lane is the author of Calling Out After Slaughter (2015) and is a current contributor to the Museum o Transgender Hirstory & Art book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects.