Karen Reece
Dr. Karen Reece is co-President of Urban Community Arts Network (UCAN), a Madison, Wisconsin organization that has spent 15 years building equity, opportunity, and recognition for Hip-Hop culture and for artists and entrepreneurs of color. Since co-founding UCAN in 2010, she has helped grow a grassroots response to institutional bias into a respected community organization and a nationally recognized model for music equity.
A scientist by training, Karen holds a Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and brings deep experience in research, program evaluation, and community-academic partnerships to her work. Through UCAN's research with UW-Madison and public-private partnerships with the Greater Madison Music City initiative, she has helped document the music and entertainment sector's roughly $600 million annual economic impact on the region and advance Madison as a more inclusive music destination. She has also helped develop and implement Mad Lit, UCAN’s Hip-Hop-rooted summer arts series along with other programming.
In-Person | PM Session A
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
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Facilitated By: Karen Reece, Rob "Rob Dz" Franklin, and Pacal "DJ Pain 1" Bayley
Audience: Open to Everyone
Arts and culture shape a city's image. Who gets included, and who gets left out, is never an accident. Plans and visions for an inclusive creative community are easy to write. In this session, we'll show you what it actually takes to build one from the ground up with the artists and community members already doing the work.
This session speaks directly to the summit's pillars of Abolition, by dismantling extractive practices, and Solidarity, by working toward shared power and mutual accountability for Madison's music scene. We'll open with a live DJ and emcee set giving a look at Hip-Hop's roots in mutual aid and collaborative culture-building, then discuss why the genre still gets misread as risk instead of recognized as infrastructure. From there we turn to Greater Madison Music City, UCAN's own effort to grow an equitable, community-built music economy in Madison, and what it takes to protect that kind of work once it becomes valuable enough for other people to want a piece of it. We'll talk about who gets credit, who gets a seat at the table, and what changes when the people who built something hold onto their own story. We ground the conversation in research, including the City of Madison's Task Force on Equity in Music and Entertainment and independent economic impact analysis of the local music scene.Aims of the session:
To understand how racial bias in arts and culture shapes economic opportunity for artists and the broader cultural identity of a city
To examine what happens when a community-built effort like Greater Madison Music City becomes something an institution wants to formalize, brand, or take credit for
To learn the mechanisms UCAN uses to hold onto its own story and keep driving systems change in Madison's arts economy