Arts & Culture Roundtables

Check back soon to find details for our next two-part Roundtable with Ayisha Elliott, AKA Black Girl from Eugene.

We invite you to join us for a series of Arts & Culture Roundtables addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in our local arts community, focusing on racial justice. 

The arts are an integral and powerful tool in helping communities reflect, grow, and heal, but first, we need to examine how our local arts community excludes some of the most relevant voices. Through this series of roundtables, we want to better understand and acknowledge the inequalities that exist in Lane County’s arts community. We are striving to:

  • Take an honest look at the issues and challenges in our own arts communities
  • Identify strategies to improve equity, accessibility, and representation in our own practices, programs, operations, and organizational cultures
  • Recognize gaps and identify existing resources and support for artists and arts professionals
  • Cultivate space for the voices of black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and other underrepresented community members to be heard

Arts & Culture Roundtables are planned in response to the larger need to address harmful systems of power. It is our responsibility to acknowledge our community’s history and actively gather to have courageous conversations about its current state of exclusion, inclusivity, and representation.

The roundtable series began with two community-guided conversations to get a sense of the perceptions and realities within our arts community. Following roundtables have been planned in response to the needs that arose from those initial conversations. Ultimately, we hope participants will gain new perspectives and information, find inspiration to create change in their organizations and communities, and garner a newfound connection with other artists and arts professionals for support and resource-sharing. 

Previous Roundtable Topics & Presenters Included:

  • Roundtable Kickoff Community Conversations, led by Ritu Roy and Eric Braman
  • Empowered Spaces – a Panel Discussion with BIPOC Artists and Advocates, led by Michael Najjar
  • Finding Our Why, led by by Sarai Johnson

The 2021 Arts & Culture Roundtables are a partnership of Lane Arts Council, Arts & Business Alliance of Eugene, Florence Regional Arts Alliance, Minority Voices Theatre, and