Moving shadows projected on wall of people protesting by artist Glen Kaino

Lectures & Discussions

Echoes of History: Inspiring Civic Action and Democracy Building

Moving shadows projected on wall of people protesting by artist Glen Kaino

Lectures & Discussions

Echoes of History: Inspiring Civic Action and Democracy Building

As a growing tide of authoritarianism echoes some of the most troubling chapters in our nation’s history, history informs our response to the present. 

Join the Democracy Center at JANM and meet the thinkers, artists, organizers, and civic leaders confronting authoritarianism today. Hear from keynote speakers Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here podcasts and Glenn Kaino, an acclaimed contemporary artist. 

Panelists include JANM President and CEO Ann Burroughs; Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard; Tyler Green the host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast; and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at UCLA.

This day-long symposium challenges us to imagine how we can build a democracy that endures by recognizing the threats before us, learning from communities resisting them, and envisioning new civic spaces and shared legacies for the future. The symposium also includes shopping at the JANM Store and at a mobile “banned bookmobile” presented by Bloom Wild Bookshop. A closing performance with visionary artist-activist Nobuko Miyamoto inspires us to celebrate memory, joy, and collective action.
 

Top image: Glenn Kaino, In the Light of a Shadow (detail), 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

$25–$150

Friday, Jan 23, 2026

9:00 AM - 6:00 PM PST

Japanese American National Museum

Democracy Center

100 North Central Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90012

Tickets

In-Person

  • $150 Individual
  • $100 JANM Members
  • $50 Students with ID

Virtual

  • $25 Live Stream

Tickets

In-Person

  • $150 Individual
  • $100 JANM Members
  • $50 Students with ID

Virtual

  • $25 Live Stream

As a growing tide of authoritarianism echoes some of the most troubling chapters in our nation’s history, history informs our response to the present. 

Join the Democracy Center at JANM and meet the thinkers, artists, organizers, and civic leaders confronting authoritarianism today. Hear from keynote speakers Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here podcasts and Glenn Kaino, an acclaimed contemporary artist. 

Panelists include JANM President and CEO Ann Burroughs; Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard; Tyler Green the host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast; and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at UCLA.

This day-long symposium challenges us to imagine how we can build a democracy that endures by recognizing the threats before us, learning from communities resisting them, and envisioning new civic spaces and shared legacies for the future. The symposium also includes shopping at the JANM Store and at a mobile “banned bookmobile” presented by Bloom Wild Bookshop. A closing performance with visionary artist-activist Nobuko Miyamoto inspires us to celebrate memory, joy, and collective action.
 

Top image: Glenn Kaino, In the Light of a Shadow (detail), 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

Schedule

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Doors Open/Coffee Hour

10:00 AM - 10:20 AM

Welcome

  • Ann Burroughs, President and CEO, JANM
  • Agnès Callamard, Secretary General, Amnesty International

10:20 AM - 11:20 AM

Keynote

  • Robert Evans, Journalist and Host of the podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here

11:20 AM - 12:45 PM

Panel 1: Antiauthoritarianism: Building a Legacy for the Future

  • Damon Brown, Special Assistant Attorney General, State of California
  • Margaret Huang, former president, Southern Poverty Law Center
  • Scot Nakagawa, Co-founder and Co-Director, 22nd Century Initiative
  • Viet Thanh Nguyen, Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
  • Don Chen, President, Surdna Foundation
     

12:45 PM - 2:00 PM

Lunch

  • Lunch at MOCA and tour of Monuments curator tour
  • Shopping at the JANM Store and Bloom Wild Bookshop

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Panel 2: How Does a City Respond?

3:30 PM - 4:05 PM

Keynote

  • Glenn Kaino, Contemporary Artist

4:05 PM - 5:20 PM

Panel 3: Memory as Resistance—Defending Culture in Authoritarian Times

  • Tyler Green, Host, The Modern Art Notes Podcast
  • Rafael Gonzalez, President and CEO, Grand Performances
  • Renee Tajima-Pena, Professor of Asian American Studies, University of Southern California
  • Hamza Walker, Director, The Brick
     

5:20 PM - 6:00 PM

Performance

  • Nobuko Miyamoto, Visionary Artist-Activist

Bios

Robert Evans

Robert Evans

Robert Evans is a journalist and host of the podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here. He is the author of the book A Brief History of Vice. Over the course of his career, he has reported from war zones in Iraq and Ukraine, experimented on his co-workers with strange ancient narcotics, and interviewed hundreds of people about their baffling careers. Now he’s taking his voice, as smooth as warm molasses, and making a podcast for HowStuffWorks. His writing has appeared at Bellingcat, New Lines Magazine, Rolling Stone, Business Insider, and more.

Glenn Kaino

Glenn Kaino

Glenn Kaino is an acclaimed contemporary artist whose practice spans across sculpture, painting, filmmaking, performance, installation, and large-scale public work. He also operates outside the traditional purview of contemporary art, instigating collaborations with other modes of culture—ranging from technology to music to political organizing. His works In the Light of a Shadow and With Drawn Arms bridge the past to the present by exploring the power of collective action to forge a more just world and reckoning with racial injustice in America. An Emmy and Webby award–winning producer and documentarian, his films have been featured at the Tribeca film festival and SXSW. Kaino's work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. His critically acclaimed virtual reality work, Aki’s Market, was commissioned by JANM in 2023.
 

Ann Burroughs

Ann Burroughs

Ann Burroughs is the President and CEO of JANM. An internationally recognized leader in the fight for human rights, she is the chair of the International Board of Amnesty International. Previously, she was chair of the Board of Amnesty International USA and chair of Amnesty International’s Global Assembly. She is chair of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Consortium and serves on the board of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. Burroughs’ lifelong commitment to racial and social justice was shaped by her experience as a young activist in her native South Africa when she was jailed as a political prisoner for her opposition to apartheid. She has previously served as executive director of the Taproot Foundation and as the executive director of LA Works. Burroughs also worked as a consultant for the Omidyar Network, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the government of South Africa.
 

Agnes Callamard

Agnès Callamard

Agnès Callamard is the secretary general at Amnesty International. She leads the organization’s human rights work and is responsible for providing overall leadership of the International Secretariat, including setting the strategic direction for the organisation and managing relations with Amnesty International’s national entities. As a leading advocate for freedom of expression, a feminist and an anti-racism activist, she pushes out the frontiers of rights through her scholarship and advocacy. 
 

Tyler Green

Tyler Green

Tyler Green, historian, critic, author, and host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. He is the author of Carleton Watkins: Making the West American, which won a 2019 California Book Award gold medal, and Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and the Artists. His forthcoming book, tentatively titled Claiming Yosemite: The Civil War, the California Genocide, and the Invention of National Parks, is planned for 2025–26. He is also the cofounder and director of The Darkwater Project, which contributes to the construction of an anti-racist US art history by revealing and interrogating historical American art’s role in the construction of white supremacy.
 

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist and professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America and the novel The Sympathizer. The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), a California Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association.
 

The Democracy Center explores the rights, freedoms, and fragility of democracy, helping to build bridges, and find common ground between people of diverse backgrounds and opinions.

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