Lectures on Tap - Can Art Change the World? Performance, Protest, Power

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🧠 Lecture: "Can Art Change the World? Performance, Protest, Power"

🎤 Speaker: Dr. Patrícia de Nóbrega Gomes

What do you think of when you hear the word “performance”? A play, a concert, a film? In a city like Los Angeles, where performance is everywhere, we rarely stop to consider how artists have used it as a form of political action.

Since the 1960s, performance artists have used their bodies, public space, and collective action to draw attention to urgent social and political issues—from feminist movements and struggles for racial justice to Indigenous land rights and environmental activism. Performance has become a powerful way to intervene in public debates and imagine different futures.

In this lecture, Dr. Patrícia de Nóbrega Gomes will introduce key ideas, performances, and historical moments that have shaped performance art as activism. Together, we’ll explore how performance can challenge dominant narratives, make visible overlooked histories, and open new ways of thinking about social change.

Dr. Gomes is a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research examines contemporary Black and Indigenous artists whose practices center land-based performance and ancestral knowledge systems.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌