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The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in “Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition.” Photo: Paul B. Goode.

For its September 25-October 1 issue, “Time Out New York” anointed “The New York 40.” Some readers wrote in, wondering why TONY’s list of movers and shakers was almost entirely monochromatic. The editor published a response, including the following:

“…for better or worse, that list is also a reflection of New York in the past dozen years—a city whose cultural elite have been mainly white. Our Top 40 was never meant to endorse that fact, but it can’t help but reflect it.”

That, um, didn’t go over so well. Angry emails began circulating. Some of those emails were forwarded to me, and I started thinking about the state of racial politics in the arts these days: what issues are artists of color facing, what do they think of Obama’s historic candidacy in relation to their own work, what frustrates them, what are they heartened by?

I was curious. So I asked. The artists I chose to interview aren’t meant to represent any kind of cultural elite (though “The Art.Cult Five” has a nice ring to it). In fact, they aren’t meant to represent anything other than themselves: five interesting artists whose work I admire and am intrigued by, and who I thought might have thoughtful things to say about art, race and the election.

They did. And then some. The piece I did for WNYC airs today at 5:50, I am told - I’ll publish it once the link becomes available (Here it is.) Meanwhile, below you’ll find more of these artists’ thoughts, and a few of mine - after all, I’m the token white girl …

Yasuko Yokoshi in “what we when we.” Photo by Ryutaro Mishima.

Yasuko Yokoshi was born in Japan, but she has lived in America since 1981. She is the only foreign-born artist I spoke with, and it was interesting to hear her different perspective: “If I were American Asian, lived here and tried to blend into the so-called white dominant country, I would definitely, I have a feeling, I would definitely feel depreciated. But that’s not what my identity is, I guess, so I have a little different take on it.”

Her elegant dances trace complex fault lines through identity. Here she talks about the own complex lines she walks:

And how she sometimes uses - is forced to use - her own identity:

Alex Escalante in his recent work “Clandestino.”

Alex Escalante is a first-generation American, whose parents came here illegally from Mexico (they now, along with Escalante, have dual citizenship). He is fiercely proud of his culture, and his charged, political dance-theater works sometimes deal with Latino issues. Indeed, he says his last piece, “Clandestino,” was made for Latinos. It dealt explicitly with immigration and even included a trio of undocumented Mexican musicians he met on the subway.

But Escalante says he has a hard time explaining his work to some of the people who are closest to him:

Isabel Lewis, right, with her siblings, who perform as Lewis Forever.

People often don’t know quite what to make of Isabel Lewis. Her mom is Dominican, her dad is Jewish and, like Obama, she’s often reduced simply to black. She and her siblings (plus an impostor!) will be performing “Lewis Forever” Freak the Room” at P.S. 122 at the end of November. They are bedeviled by assumptions and expectations. But they also have a lot of fun playing with them:

Lewis discusses how language isn’t up to the task of describing race or performance right now - and how Obama is changing things, at least on the race front:

She and I discussed how the conversation is a lot more sophisticated here than in some other places:

But she wonders where all the dance-artists of color are:

Reggie Wilson, left, performing in “The Good Dance” with his collaborator, the Congolese choreographer Andréya Ouamba. Photo by Antoine Tempe.

Reggie Wilson is one of my favorite people to interview (and not just because he makes delicious Moroccan tea and plies me with baked goods whenever I stop by). I find him to be such a smart and generous thinker when it comes to thorny issues of race:

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in “Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition.” Photo: Paul B. Goode.

Bill T. Jones has been in the trenches of the culture wars - as the choreographer quipped when I interviewed him, he’s got the scars to show it. His work is often reduced by his critics as being narrowly focused around provocative social issues. But Jones is a much smarter artist than that, and more slippery:

These days, he has quite a task in front of him: he’s working on a commission to make a dance-theater work about Abraham Lincoln for the Ravinia Festival’s 2009 bicentennial celebration. The commission came long before this election heated up, and Jones says “I have been trying to be very careful not to make a piece that’s going to already be old news in a year from now. Yes, the country will think very differently about the collision of race and aesthetics and politics in this work in a year, but it won’t be because of what I am doing.

“I am really trying,” he continued, “to take the discourse to a level I think that the best thinkers of the 19th century would have understood, and I think the most visionary thinkers of the 1960s would understand, and the bravest and most sincere forward-thinking progressives of this era will be able to feel. ”

Stay tuned.