One of the legitimate critiques of placemaking and planning, in general, is that it can often be ahistorical. Yet reckoning with and raising up history is a crucial ingredient in equitable placemaking. Sometimes these histories are celebratory; sometimes they are contested; they are often both, depending on who is telling the story. In this panel, we will talk about how delving into the history of places can help us understand how to move forward to collectively build shared futures.

Register to attend!

About Michelle Angela Ortiz
Michelle Angela Ortiz is a visual artist/ skilled muralist/ community arts educator/ filmmaker who uses her art as a vehicle to represent people and communities whose histories are often lost or co-opted. Through community arts practices, painting, documentaries, and public art installations, she creates a safe space for dialogue around some of the most profound issues communities and individuals may face. Her work tells stories using richly crafted and emotive imagery to claim and transform spaces into a visual affirmation that reveals the strength and spirit of the community. For 20 years, Ortiz has designed and created over 50 large-scale public works nationally and internationally. Since 2008, Ortiz has led art for social change public art projects in Costa Rica & Ecuador and as a Cultural Envoy through the US Embassy in Fiji, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Honduras, and Cuba. Ortiz is a 2020 Art For Justice Fund Grantee, PEW Fellow, Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellow, and a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist National Fellow. In 2016, she received the Americans for the Arts' Public Art Year in Review Award which honors outstanding public art projects in the nation.

About Jeremy Liu
Jeremy Liu embodies the balance between technical and systemic, and pragmatic and visionary cultivated throughout a career in community development. He has balanced complex organizations with multiple business lines and types of revenue, and also re-imagined community development for health and from the beauty of people and their cultures. Over the last twenty years, he has overcome the limitations of working in silos and status quo structures by developing unique and entrepreneurial ways to solve complex problems. He is the managing director of Creative Development Partners, an investment and real estate development firm that is creating “community benefits by design” ventures in hospitality and real estate that are grounded in regenerative approaches to disrupting systems of inequity. Jeremy guides the vision and strategy for the firm’s real estate and community development investments, including the newly launched Equitable Hospitality Accelerator.

As a senior fellow at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity, he led a successful initiative to integrate arts, cultural strategies, and creative placemaking into equitable development, economic inclusion, housing, health equity, and policy change. He co-edited the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Community Development Innovation Review issue Transforming Community Developmentthrough Arts and Culture, he co-authored the PolicyLink report Creating Change: Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development, and contributed chapters to the National Endowment for the Arts’ book How to Do Creative Placemaking and the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Placemaking.