Organize Your Own

The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements

Organized by Daniel Tucker, Organize Your Own is a multi-format curatorial platform that invited poets and artists to make new work in response to the archive of  the organization of working-class neighborhoods the October 4th Organization and the Young Patriots Organization in Philadelphia and Chicago respectively (the exhibition takes places in those cities as well) that heeded the Black Power mandate derived from Stokely Carmichael when he wrote “…almost all white supporters of the movement…are afraid to go into their own communities – which is where the racism exists – and work to get rid of it.”Organize Your Own: The politics and poetics of Self Determination Movements is organized by Daniel Tucker taking place in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House and in Chicago at The Averill and Bernard Leviton Gallery. The works specifically ask contemporary artists and poets to respond to the archives of The October 4.

Source: Robert Herst

Source: Matt Neff

Many of the events and panels in the Chicago portion of the exhibition center on the Young Patriots Organization (YPO), an organization of working-class whites in Uptown Chicago focused on self-determination and racial and economic justice.  YPO, along with the Chicago Black Panthers and the Young Lords, a Latinx organization, formed the Original Rainbow Coalition, which for its short life in the late sixties and early seventies, worked towards a shared vision of racial justice and self-determination. Organize Your Own has connected this work to contemporary organizing such as #FightFor15 and discussed this coalition as a unique model for the politics of a common life.