How Do We Move in Public?

How Do We Move in Public? is the second program in Social Practice CUNY's 2026 series How Do We ___________ in Public?: a cycle of four free experimental events responding to contemporary crises shaping the cultural field, including the defunding and targeting of public institutions and the erosion of shared civic space.

This second program in the series is partnered with BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance during the Boogie Down Dance Series.

Organized by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, this event brings together dancers/ choreographers with connections to the Bronx to generate movement-based actions in public spaces in the South Bronx: Argelia Arreola (with support from Pepatián: Bronx Arts ColLABorative), Ana 'Rokafella' García, Paloma McGregor/Angela's Pulse, and Alethea Pace. Responding to escalating surveillance, policing, and state violence, particularly the terrorization of Black and Brown communities under ongoing ICE raids, the program advances movement as a counter-response to neglect, with care, and shared imagination, asking how bodies navigate, reshape, and reclaim urban space under conditions of threat.

This program will activate several points along 3rd Avenue and 149th Street, a major cultural crossroads at the heart of the South Bronx called The Hub, and is funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation.

Produced by Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY),How Do We ______ in Public?, is a new, free public programming series of four experimental events taking place across New York City throughout 2026. Organized by the SPCUNY core team of artists, educators, and scholars (Chloë Bass, Tom Finkelpearl, Catherine LaSota, Nicolás Dumit Estevez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Gregory Sholette, and Cory Tamler), the series expands SPCUNY’s existing work and reaffirms its commitment to strengthening socially engaged artistic practice, especially at a moment when culture faces sustained attacks and freedom of expression is increasingly constrained.

Since its founding, SPCUNY has centered artist-led research and projects and supported individual artists who teach, study, or work at City University of New York (CUNY) campuses through its Fellowships. Building on this foundation while making a deliberate shift, How Do We ______ in Public? is designed intentionally to engage a broader, non-CUNY public through the SPCUNY team’s collective years of producing, experiencing, researching, and teaching social practice within a public university. Framed as an open-ended, collective experiment, each program is a participatory proposition exploring methods of being, thinking, and enduring together in today’s complex sociopolitical landscape.

How Do We ______ in Public? responds to contemporary crises shaping the cultural field, including the defunding and targeting of public institutions and the erosion of shared civic space. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the series tests new forms of social practice in real time, foregrounding experimentation, solidarity, and public accountability.

Across four interconnected programs, How Do We ______ in Public? asks how we study, move, keep secret(s), and continue together in public when the infrastructures that once supported those actions are fraying. As SPCUNY assesses its organizational moment and contemplates its evolving legacy, the series will culminate in early 2027 with a reconvening of participants to reflect on the insight, tensions, and possibilities surfaced through these programs.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively through creative experiences that he helps unfold within the quotidian. He has exhibited or performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07/21, Idensitat, Plataforma Vértices, the Bee Friendly Trust, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Sculpture Center, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance BAAD!, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, City as Living Laboratory, Princeton University, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Nicolás has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field.

Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, CEC ArtsLink, The Performance Project, Soaring Gardens, Jentel, Henry Street Settlement/Abrons Arts Center, Center for Book Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Artists Alliance Inc.,Yaddo, and MacDowell. Nicolás has curated exhibitions or programs for El Museo del Barrio; Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; Bronx River Art Center; Franklin Furnace; Elizabeth Foundation Project Space; Artists Alliance Inc.; Art in Odd Places; and The Institute of Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York; as well as for the Filmoteca de Andalucía in Córdoba, Spain. Publications include Pleased to Meet You, Life as Material for Art and Vice Versa (editor), One Person at a Time (editor), Induced Labor, and For Art’s Sake, among others.

Nicolás holds an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, where he studied with Coco Fusco; an M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York; and a B.A. from The City College of The City University of New York. In 2017 he was a awarded an Archives and Library Research Grant with the Dominican Studies Institute (DSI) at CUNY. Nicolás recently served as a Senior Lecturer and Social Practice Artist in Residence in the Art and Art History Department at The University of Texas at Austin and was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow in Washington, DC. He co-facilitates the EmergeNYC virtual program with Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), and teaches with the Breath-Body-Mind Foundation. Nicolás is the founding director of The Interior Beauty Salon, an organism living at the intersection of creativity and healing. Born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, he was baptized as a Bronxite in 2011.

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