Dont Rhine is a co-founder of the international visual art, sound, and performance collective Ultra-red, which has experimented with practices of popular education as cultural action in numerous movement contexts, from anti-gentrification to anti-racism to gender justice. Today, the collective produces the publication, ULTRA-RED: A Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry, and continues to organize within various movements including the L.A.Tenants Union. In his presentation, Dont will map the various problematics that have shaped his practice as a sound artist, organizer, and popular educator. He will reflect on the AIDS activist movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which he participated in as a member of Act Up and Clean Needles Now, through to the tenant power movement of today with its place-based urban militancy. Through all these conjunctures, Dont explores popular education—or, in the words of Paulo Freire, “cultural action for freedom”—as a role for artists beyond the limitations of the artist as entrepreneur or as individual critic.
