Ready, 2024

A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container, at Southern Exposure, September 14 - November 16, 2024

Ready is an artistic platform created to gather artists in collective expression by making and deploying creative interventions that can be used to interrupt systems of marginalization, exploitation, and erasure, large and small.

In this iteration of Ready, commissioned originally for the exhibition Climate Changing at Wexner Center for the Arts (curated by Lucy Zimmerman), artists were asked to respond to a series of questions adapted from the poem “Understanding Readiness” by Amiri Baraka with instructional actions.

How do we know who we are?
How do we know who can lead?
How do we know we must struggle?
How do we speak to them now?
What do we need to do now that we have not already done?

Artists’ handwritten notes were printed both as large format posters, installed in the gallery exhibition, and free postcards available to be taken and disseminated more widely.

Related Tactics with contributing artists: Pablo Andres Cristi, Al-An deSouza, Katie Dorame, Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, Caroline Garcia, Ghana Think Tank (Maria del Carmen Montoya, Christopher Robbins, John Ewing), Sonia Guiñansaca, Taraneh Hemami, Sara Jamshidi, Nanea Lum, Nicole Marroquin, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Gina Osterloh, Related Tactics, Roberto Sifuentes, Tosha Stimage, Christine Wong Yap, and visitors to the Berkeley Art Center.

Exhibition history: Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment, Wexner Center for the Arts (2021)