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How Do We Hear America? A Special Evening of Music by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer Raven Chacon | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

How Do We Hear America? A Special Evening of Music by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer Raven Chacon

Americans learn the Pledge of Allegiance as kids, reciting it day after day in public school and seldom giving it meaningful thought.

But what would we hear if we listened—really listened—to the pledge? What would it mean to reimagine it through the unique histories and perspectives of the musicians performing it and the place in which it is performed? Can experiencing …

Must Artists Be Activists? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

Must Artists Be Activists?

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work,” a friend told Toni Morrison in a fraught political moment, “not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” Is this true of every artist, and must it be the case all the time? Great art and true democracies are built on freedom of expression—but when …

How Should Arts Institutions Navigate the Culture Wars? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

How Should Arts Institutions Navigate the Culture Wars?

Polarization has engulfed arts organizations—like every other institution in 21st-century American and European life. But rather than finding themselves pulled apart by political parties doing battle, museums, performing arts companies, and other cultural cornerstones often face other conflicting demands, positioned between their aging donors and overwhelmingly white audience-bases on one side and younger, more diverse artists and new audiences on …

Is AI the End of Creativity—Or a New Beginning? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

Is AI the End of Creativity—Or a New Beginning?

In 1951, Alan Turing, the father of computer science, predicted that “at some stage… we should have to expect the machines to take control.” As artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT promise to revolutionize the way we think and work—and futurists talk of the technology as a next step in human evolution—“some stage” appears to be now.

For creative workers, the question …

How Does a Community Move With Music? A Diaspora Dance Party | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles | In-Person

How Does a Community Move With Music? A Diaspora Dance Party

With generous support from Atom Tickets

In Los Angeles, communities mix and mingle, collide and compound—and songs hold the DNA of their cultural traditions. Earmarked (so to say) for weddings, birthdays, and holiday celebrations, recycled and remixed for newer generations, a community’s playlists include artists that sing across decades and borders, synthesizing new Angeleno culture in unexpected ways. Stitched together, they …

What Is the State of Surveillance? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

What Is the State of Surveillance?

Early this year, an uncrewed Chinese-operated high-altitude balloon floated across U.S. airspace, stoking anxiety and fascination among Americans, who assumed it was spying on them, and ultimately provoking President Biden to order the Pentagon to shoot it down. Just as alarming as foreign espionage, though, is the fear of information-gathering turned inward. American anxieties around the “surveillance state” have only …