06/04/2026
What if “vagabonding” were a strategy—a fluid approach to engineering escape routes from dominant systems?💃🏿
On May 21, , in community with and , hosted Searching for Collective Memory—an embodied program inspired by Sir Issac Julien’s two-channel installation, Vagabondia (2000), during Third Thursdays at .
With ’s Vagabondia as a guide, we brought urgent questions about stewardship, memory, and erasure to life through guided tours, performance interventions, and conversation.
Nina Osoria Ahmadi, Cecilia Benitez, Darryl Brown, Gabri Christa (mentor), Lisa Kusanagi, Arsimmer McCoy, Nicole Pedraza, and Hattie Mae Williams—all performing artists-in-residence with Pioneer Winter Collective’s 2026 Grass Stains program—responded to public artworks surrounding the Miami Beach museum. Unwittingly flirting with the idea of “vagabond” in their very presence as movement artists, they freely intervened and interrupted guided tours led by practitioners (and conspirators) Lauren Baccus, Lauryn Lawrence, and Veronica Pesantes.
In the panel that followed, photographer and scholar Vanessa Charlot, filmmaker Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, writer Lise Ragbir, and moderator Corey Davis of Maven Leadership Collective interrogated the role of institutions in shaping our historical records.
As the conversation unfolded, we found shared language with the protagonists in Julien’s film and, by extension, the site-specific performances with Grass Stains artists and guides. Moving beyond the margins and in a world of one’s own, there is spaciousness for self-determination, self-actualization, and rest.
🫂 Searching for Collective Memory was made possible through Art Bridges Foundation Access for All Program with The Bass, and with community love from ’s Black Miami Weekend. Grateful for thought-partner Maven Leadership Collective, an ideas lab that cultivates ecosystems of support for q***r and trans innovators and creatives of color and allies.
