Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins and Disentanglements by Gina Athena Ulysse is a multisited public art project and series of creative gatherings and offerings at the Institute for Arts and Sciences and across sites at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz. The exhibition builds on a large-scale installation at the Dakar Biennale (2024) and marks a decade since Gina Athena Ulysse’s call for rasanblaj. This decolonial organizing principle takes its meaning from a Haitian creole term translated as the assembly, compilation, enlisting and regrouping of ideas, things, people, and spirits.

In Libia Posada’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Everything is Going Right, new and existing artworks from the Colombia-based artist and medical doctor emerge within a vernacular and aesthetic of disease and infection, symptoms and treatments. With maps made of medical gauze, prison uniforms sewn with delicate surgical thread, and crutches blooming with plastic flowers, the exhibition renders bodily the current conditions in which everything seems to be going wrong and moving right.

Poet and visual artist Ronaldo V. Wilson’s multimedia exhibition poetically and viscerally explores modes of blurring verbal and nonverbal languages to push against the boundaries of perception where notions of race and identity take shape. Emerging at the intersections of Black poetics, performance and art, the works in There Are No Words, But Melodies move between freestyling (improvised voice/rap/lectures), drawings, song, writing, and video in a kind of dance—a melodic and embodied critical resistance to oppression and lived realities of pain, exile, and loss. Critical histories and experiences of death, life, blood, family memory, and psychic loss are navigated in form and composition.

Sabine Blaizin, DJ, Music Producer, and Event Curator, champions African diasporic music. Founder of Oyasound, she spins Global Soul: House, Afrotech, Afrobeat, and Haitian Roots. With 10+ years in NYC’s music scene, she is also the Deputy Director & Head of Programs at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. www.oyasound.com