Events | The Curb Center

Mark Your Calendars for January 17, 2020 from 4-7 pm when the Curb Center hosts an opening reception for its newest installation ‘The Form of Reform’.

The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy has partnered with the Nashville community on its latest installation, The Form of Reform. The show features paintings, drawings, photographs, leather work, sculpture, jewelry, and writings created by death row prisoners awaiting execution by the state of Tennessee and housed at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

The Curb Center has partnered with R.E.A.C.H. (Reciprocal Education and Community Healing),  a local group comprised of Death Row prisoners (insiders) and local professors and students (outsiders) who share a vision of a changing paradigm of social justice.  The group believes the present criminal justice system is traumatizing the lives of our youth, and those already caught in its grasp, and seeks ways to change the system for the better.

What does it mean to be human? How does one come to forgiveness? What needs to happen to heal? What does it mean to have peace?  Is our justice system really just? Should the death penalty exist?

With The Form of Reform we want to begin the difficult yet long-overdue conversation to answer the complex questions surrounding our current criminal justice system, prison reform, and the death penalty.  These questions can never be answered if the conversations only include the same voices which created, and often profit from, the problem. Yet these voices cannot be left out because everyone needs a seat if real, positive, change is to happen. We hope the community will use The Form of Reform to facilitate authentic dialogue with friends and strangers around restorative and transformative justice.  True justice can only be accomplished by listening to the voices of those within the community: You.

Over the next six months (Through June 2020), The Curb Center will sponsor films, plays, guest speakers, and community discussions focused on The Form of Reform. We invite each of you to join us in these conversations so together we can effect change in our communities.

Henry, a Ugandan teenager, was losing hope, languishing in prison for two murders he didn’t commit.

Jim’s comfortable life as a Los Angeles lawyer and law professor nearly ensured he and Henry would never meet.

REMAND tells the firsthand, true story of how Henry and Jim, separated not only by an ocean and thousands of miles, but also differing cultures and life experiences, met and worked together to inspire justice reform for an entire country.

Join us for a screening and a QA session with producer Randy Brewer.

The dawn of a new decade brings with it the paramount duty of progressive minds to engage a Sankofa moment. Sankofa, from the Twi language of Ghana, is represented by an Asante Adinkra symbol generally depicted as a bird with its head turned backward taking an egg from its back. Its metaphorical significance is drawn from the Akan people who stress the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress. We are in that moment.

Stirring the Waters Across America is a multimedia touring production illuminating the Civil Rights Movement. Conceived by American composer Nolan Williams, Jr., the production combines captivating music, spoken word, and dance with stunning visuals to highlight seminal moments from the Movement (1954-1968), connecting the past with the present.

Stirring the Waters Across America is one of the first works to be developed through The Kennedy Center’s newly-inaugurated Social Impact Arts Residency. The touring production is produced by NEWorks Productions and Edgewood Ventures.

“Through its images, music, dance, and overall narrative, STIRRING THE WATERS… offers a multi-sensory, inspiring experience that… is brilliant, stunning, and stirring… [It] links the past to the present, while offering a solution-oriented blueprint for an improved future. Williams and his team have set the mark high and America is better off for it!” ~ROBERT J. PATTERSON, Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University and author of Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality 

Following the performance Nolan Williams, Jr. and Ethnomusicologist, Dr. Alisha Lola Jones will engage the audience in a talk-back about the production. Clergy, Musicians, Youth groups, Community groups, Activists, Organizers and all concerned citizens will find this event inspiring.