Enjoy this episode with our Empowerment Grant winner, Monica Rodriguez. Monica "Mo" is a Chicago-born multidisciplinary artist whose work centers on healing, transformation, and emotional evolution through creative practice. Raised in a family where creativity was deeply valued, she has been making art for as long as she can remember, using it as a way to process experience, move through challenges, and understand herself more deeply. @by.mo.mo by-mo.com

Stephanie Lampkin, PhD, is the Curator at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has 12+ years of experience specializing in museum collections, museum education, exhibitions, and historical interpretation. Her research examines the early Black and indigenous histories of Florida, the southbound routes to freedom, and geographies of freedom. Enjoy this engaging conversation.

This week we're doing something a little different by offering you a weekly update, insight on images that lend themselves to Valentine's Day and a reminder of what's on exhibit and what's up next.

Mina Morita is a director of vital new plays that champion creative rebellion. She creates worlds where audiences and artists face uncomfortable truths and discover possibility together. Mina is a recent recipient of the 2026 United States Artists Fellowship. You can find more information at: https://minamorita.com

Kalada Halliday, our 2025 Empowerment Grant winner, is a Nigerian-American photographer and educator living and working in the Brox. For more than a decade, he has made pictures of his daily life, centered on putting a compassionate lens to the spaces he inhabits, and the communities he is a part of. Particularly those that are overlooked at marginalized. Enjoy this episode as Kalada discusses his passion and process.

Katherine Ryckman Siegwarth is the Executive Director of Cincinnati's FotoFocus. She joined the organization in 2021 as the Biennial Director with 15 years of experience in art museums and archives. Siegwarth has a range of experiences and is an alumna of the Museum Leadership Institute’s NexGen 2020 Executive Education for the Next Generation of Museum Leaders program. You can find more information about Fotofocus at: https://www.fotofocus.org and IG: @fotofocuscincinnati

Miguel Luciano discusses the upcoming Fall of Freedom movement, happening November 21 and 22, 2025. Fall of Freedom is an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. Our Democracy is under attack. Threats to free expression are rising. Dissent is being criminalized. Institutions and media have been recast as mouthpieces of propaganda. November 21–22, 2025, galleries, museums, libraries, comedy clubs, theaters, and concert halls across the country will host exhibitions, performances, and public events that channel the urgency of this moment. There is still time to participate.

Miguel Luciano is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture and social justice through painting, sculpture, and socially engaged public art projects that are featured in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. He lives and works in New York and is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University School of Art.

https://www.falloffreedom.com/

https://miguelluciano.com/

Enjoy our conversation with Black Art Speaks President and CEO Alandes Powell. In addition to her role at the Cincinnati-based arts collective, Powell is renowned for her extensive community advocacy, including the creation of Cincinnati's Black
Lives Matter Mural, which draws inspiration from her poem, "We Want What You
Want." www.blackartspeaks.com IG: black.art.speaks