We The Youth – Keith Haring Lecture Series
Kids Lecture Series
- Keith Haring Theatre
- June 6th | 2pm
MAKE ART CURE AIDS EAT BREAKFAST
with Ballroom icon, Kia LaBeija
“When I was a teenager anytime I heard the term AIDS my stomach would drop. My entire body would heat up as if maybe I was the only young person in the whole world living with HIV. I wondered, and still do, how can a word hold this much power? The art and activism born out of the AIDS crisis proves that words and how they’re used can unite people, start a movement, cause a riot or make you hold your breath. Together we’ll explore how text and images carry weight and go viral, entering the popular lexicon to make lasting impacts on generations to come.” – Kia LaBeija
Credits:
We the Youth – Keith Haring Lecture Series invites children and their friends and families to meet luminaries who talk about ideas and social issues that are often left off of school curriculums.
This series is supported by The Keith Haring Foundation in honor of Keith Haring who collaborated with children throughout his life and believed in art’s ability to create a more accepting society.
Water. Moves. Us., co-presented by Performance Space New York as part of the We The Youth: Keith Haring Lecture for Kids and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of the Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series explores the possibility that intelligence is not only of the mind, but emerges through planetary, cosmic, relational, and distributed systems—woven into the very dynamics that shape existence across scale.
Previous We the Youth lectures include:
ALOK on Gender invited by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo).
Dr. Cornel West on Justice invited by Ariana Reines.
Fahim Amir on Animals invited by quori theodor.
Whale Fall: It’s all right to cry and laugh at the same time!
The Cyborg Stork: What do you know about how babies are made? What does it even mean to “make a baby”? What are the electronic and social technologies that “make a baby”? This children’s class explores 21st century baby technologies from sonograms, IVF, to the NICU, to breast pumps, adoption, birth certificates and more, through a combination of lecture, games, blowing bubbles, and make-believe.
Together with anthropologist Dana Burton, children ages 8–18 dove into how water connects us to the cosmos and to one another. Through interactive storytelling, art, sound, and movement, participants explored how microbes survive in deserts, how tides rise and fall with the Moon, and how comets brought water across the solar system—discovering that intelligence, or the ways we sense and understand the world, lives in the flow of water, the rhythm of tides, and the connections between all living and nonliving beings.
The afternoon concluded with a collaborative art project and a cosmic dance party by SCRAAATCH, celebrating our shared, watery connection to the universe and our understanding of it.
