Office Hours is free and interactive.
How It Works
Office Hours shares professional and experiential knowledge by and for BIPOC artists, architects, designers, storytellers, and cultural workers in an online setting, free of charge. Since 2020, we’ve offered 44+ interactive Zoom sessions on various topics in the expanded fields of art, urbanism, and design.
Our 75-minute session topics and speakers are advertised on our Instagram account (@office_hours.nyc). The first 200+ BIPOC students and practitioners who sign up receive a link to the Zoom event. During our discussions, invited speakers describe their professional and personal journeys, share innovative methodologies and advice, and partake in an interactive Q&A.
Our community agreements allow Office Hours to function as a respectful space for communication and exchange. As an act of reciprocity, we request 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—rather than the tenets of singularity, extraction, and competition—as powerful social tools for imagining how we might live and work together.
Office Hours is guided by values rooted in intersectional justice.
Increase representation
Office Hours is a platform where a diverse range of BIPOC cultural practitioners in the expanded fields of art, architecture, and design can share their ideas and insights with a broader audience. The project values and prioritizes the perspectives of BIPOC cultural practitioners who belong to diverse social identities based on race, ethnicity, class, gender identification, sexuality, disability, age, and immigration status. We value and encourage our speakers to discuss how their overlapping social identities and lived experiences have shaped their insights.
Increase access to knowledge.
We seek to cultivate the free exchange of worldmaking knowledge 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 imagine and inhabit a world that is based on 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 a social sculpture created by the Canadian multidisciplinary artist 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 is based on the ethics of "radical hospitality" - a concept from Anna Deavere Smith. Since 2020, the project has been promoting creative ideas to reconfigure our social fabrics and institutions into systems that can collectively nurture, repair, and liberate.