Office Hours is free and interactive.
What is Office Hours?
Office Hours is a platform that shares information and resources by and for BIPOC cultural workers and students worldwide. Framed as “how to” sessions, our topics are led by notable BIPOC practitioners at the forefront of art, architecture, and design.
Each 75-min. session is advertised on our Instagram account (IG: @office_hours.nyc). The first 200+ BIPOC students and practitioners who sign up receive a link to the free online event. During our discussions, our speakers describe their professional journeys, share their innovative methodologies , and offer advice in an interactive Q&A.
Our platform abides by community agreements to create a respectful space of communication, reciprocity, and exchange. We ask that all attendees turn their cameras on and arrive accountable to the group dynamic. Our group discussion format enables us to practice multi-racial and multi-ethnic solidarity and active listening as powerful tools for imagining how we might reconfigure the culture industries and our world together.
Office Hours is guided by values rooted in intersectional justice.
Increase representation
Office Hours is a platform where a range of BIPOC cultural practitioners in the fields of art, architecture, and design can share information and resources with a broader audience. We value and prioritize the different perspectives of BIPOC cultural practitioners with diverse social identities based on race, ethnicity, class, gender identification, sexuality, disability, age, and immigration status. We encourage our speakers to discuss how their overlapping social identities and lived experiences have shaped their approaches and insights.
Increase access to knowledge.
We seek to cultivate the free exchange of knowledge and resources by and for BIPOC creative practitioners in an intimate format. As this project grows, we are committed to supporting and engaging in more inclusive and accessible forms of participation for our audiences, ensuring everyone can learn and contribute.
Encourage self-determination, accountability and mutuality.
Our programming views the future as a realm of possibilities. What if we could re-imagine the culture industries through values such as emancipation, accountability, and interdependence? We aim to empower each other through anticolonial methodologies of worldmaking and storytelling that can both heal and innovate.
How we started
Office Hours is an artist project created by Esther M. Choi, which transforms video conferencing software, social media, and the Internet into a platform for radical pedagogy. Instead of promoting a mandate of neoliberal individualism and capitalist success, Office Hours was conceived as a way to offer resources and information through "radical hospitality"—a concept from Anna Deavere Smith.