Idea Lab Conversation: Arts + Community with April Parker
Friday, April 16 at 1 PM
How can organizations and artists work together to support vibrant communities? Join April Parker, Arts Administrator in Residence at Elsewhere, a museum and artist residency set in a 3-floor former thrift store in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is an activist, community leader, and a Creative Catalyst Fellow in partnership with the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts. Free and open to the public via Zoom.
https://www.elsewheremuseum.org/news/april-parker-becomes-managing-director-of-elsewhere
https://www.elsewheremuseum.org/elsewhere-people
https://triad-city-beat.com/unveiling-monuments/
April Parker (she/her) was Elsewhere’s inaugural Creative Catalyst fellow is now embedded in the administration of the organization as an Arts Administrator In Residence. She is a cultural worker and architect of black spaces using public scholarship, radical librarianship, performance art, and direct action. As a community organizer and archivist April centers the lives, histories, legacies, resiliency, and magic of queer and trans-Black people; while working exhaustively at the intersections of social justice movements to create opportunities for institutional accountability, intergenerational relationship building and creative expressions of resistance. April is a black queer femme, a revolutionary mama, and a twin. Her heart work of grassroots organizing emphasizes the liberation and prosperity of Black folks. Parker drives movements forward, agitating public discourse to address systemic oppression and institutional racism to uplift Blackness.
Since 2011 April’s been at the forefront and front lines in Greensboro, serving as a founding member of Black Lives Matter Gate City, Trans Kindred Emergency Fund & Trans Reparations Project, NC Queer TROUBLMakers, Queer People of Color Collective of the Triad (QPOCC) as well as the Anti-Racist White Folks and Bayard Rustin Center LGBTQ Symposium.
April’s organizing credits include Juneteenth Jamboree, Black Power Town Hall, Black Girls, and Women Matter Town Hall, #SayHerName Defend Black Womanhood, Midnight March, Black Minds Matter Rally and Raised in the Revolution Youth Summit. She served as a Greensboro Delegate to the NC Black Women’s Roundtable Leadership Council as well as Working Group Strategic Facilitator for Democracy Greensboro. During which she co-authored a progressive political platform to push campaigning city councilors toward antiracism.
As a surveyor of landscapes, both socioeconomic and political, she created “intersectionality in action” workshops and intergenerational support groups, centering the lived experience of trans and queer people of color. She holds a B. A. in sociology from Kean University and an M.L.I.S. in Library Science from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.