Olmeca - Acts of Radical Love: A Conversation with An Artist in Rebellion

Join the Center for Civic Education & Justice and the University YMCA for Friday Forum + Conversation Café!

This lunchtime series creates space to learn from diverse perspectives, engage in thoughtful dialogue, and connect with others across differences. Each program features speakers, panels, or interactive conversations designed to inspire curiosity, critical thinking, and action. 

Lunch is provided from the Y Thai Eatery at no cost, so come ready to eat, listen, learn, and join the conversation!

This week's speaker: Olmeca

In this lecture, Olmeca reflects on more than two decades of work across art, organizing, education, music, and community practice to explore a central question: what does it mean to live rebellion, not only resist?

Drawing from lived experience, ancestral knowledge, cultural memory, and social movements, Olmeca examines Radical Love as responsibility transformed into action—through protest, teaching, art-making, care, spirituality, collective work, and joy.

The lecture considers how everyday practices can become acts of resistance, how ancestral knowledge continues to shape the future, and how joy itself can become an act of rebellion in systems that depend on isolation, dispossession, and powerlessness.