Mixed Taste: At Home is where even the most mismatched subjects find common ground in an interactive lecture series that can go pretty much anywhere. On Wednesday nights at 7PM, two speakers get twenty minutes each to enlighten participants on unrelated topics, without making any connections to the other. It is only as participants begin to ask questions that these talented, sometimes hilarious, speakers start to take our highly engaged audience on an adventure of words with twists and turns that eventually bring the two together in extraordinary ways. 

 Co-curated by MCA Denver and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Mixed Taste: At Home will bring together favorite speakers from years past live from their living rooms to yours.

This week:

• 8/12: Church Signs & Icelandic Hip Hop  |  Featuring Joe York & Nathan Hall

Each evening will conclude with an original poem inspired by the topics performed by some of Denver’s best poets, including Suzi Q. Smith, Brenton Weyi, Mahogany, and James Brunt.

This six-week series will be free with registration, and accessible via YouTube live on Wednesdays. Please join us for laughs, intellectual gymnastics, and community-building through a fun, fascinating cultural discourse.

Joe York is a photographer, filmmaker and video producer from Water Valley, Mississippi. His films and videos focusing on southern cultural traditions have aired on PBS and in digital publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic. His most recent feature documentary explores the traditional music of Fred McDowell, the godfather of the North Mississippi Hill Country Blues. He is the author of With Signs Following: Photographs from the Southern Religious Roadside, an exploration of public expressions of faith throughout the “Christ-haunted” South. Previous Mixed Taste lecture topics: Whole Hog Cooking in 2007, Southern Family Restaurants in 2008, Vulcan Steel in 2013, and Barbeque in 2014.

Hailed as a “seriously talented composer” by the Denver Post, Nathan Hall uses music as an artistic medium to explore a variety of fields including science, nature, the fine arts, history and sexuality. Nathan Hall is a former Fulbright Fellow to Iceland, and holds his Doctorate in Musical Arts (DMA) from the CU Boulder. His works have been performed and exhibited around the world by string orchestras, choirs, saxophones, a convention of roller coaster enthusiasts and an adult film star. Nathan has been awarded numerous grants including a New Music USA grant and the Denver Music Advancement Fund. His residencies include Mattress Factory Museum and Acadia National Park, and he was Denver Art Museum’s first Creative in Residence.

Franklin Cruz is a queer latin poet born in Idaho, raised in Texas and polished in Denver. Born from an immigrant family he works at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as an educator performer, is an MC and dances. A Tedx Mile High performer he has taught and performed throughout the southwest, Peru and Puerto Rico for universities and environmental leadership camps, and had poetry in the Denver Art Museum. His work encompasses self-love, immigration, culture, nature and more. Franklin always aims to address intersectional liberation, confronting our complicity to privilege and oppression and the pressing lesson of specificity over simplicity.