Since 2013 I’ve been painting and making visual art alongside my writing. I haven’t picked up a paintbrush since last year besides for a few collaged pieces I made for a market. Recently, I’ve been exploring what’s in the way besides for being depressed and overwhelmed.
It feels like the medium of painting seems to fall short of the impact I hope to invoke.
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Why? What’s in a painted piece? How does that bring us closer to liberation?
I find it funny, because this is exactly what I’ve been teaching and facilitating about for the past few years. How art is a microcosm of practicing our values. So I basically facilitated myself in questioning my assumptions. Here was the conversation I had with myself:
I don’t want to paint.
Why?
I don't feel like that medium is helpful right now. And I'm depressed and overwhelmed. How does an abstract painting add to the liberation movement right now in this moment?
Say more.
It feels lacking. I think that writing and more specific work around collective liberation is worth my time.
What have you always said about process?
*rolls my eyes* that it's more about the process than the end result.
Ok. And...
And it's the transformation in me during the art making that is the magic. It's how I practice what I say that's going to propel me in my day to day life. It's in the showing up to transform the elements in front of me into something that helps with the motion of creating a new world...that's art. The end product is just an echo of the process. I don't create art to prove anything to myself or other people. I create art to change myself on my path towards healing, connection, and liberation.
Yes, and you have agency to paint or not to paint.
In Ismatu Gwendolyn’s essay “the role of the artist is to load the gun,” she writes:
The task of the artist is determined always by the status and process and agenda of the community that it already serves. If you’re an artist who identities with, who springs from, who is served by or drafted by a bourgeois capitalist class, then that’s the kind of writing you do. Your job is to maintain a status quo, to celebrate exploitation or to guise in some lovely, romantic way. That’s your job.
THAT. Oof that feels so truthful. Reading the essay made me reflect on what status quo I’m upholding. It is in the embodying of my values that will be reflected in my work as an artist.
I love defining art as the process of changing the form of something from one to another. For me, art is painting, writing, social media, music, relationships. Relationships is one of the most interesting forms of art, because the ebbs and flows can be intentionally curated while it being impossible to control. Actually, it’s most beautiful when it is free of coercion. Not only do I think it’s interesting to think of relationships (platonic and/or romantic) as art, but also my relationship to culture building and shifting.
In the essay, Ismatu challenges how we think about art and world building.
Art-making: not as a leisure activity, solely or simply an expression of self, but as the most important medium that we have to communicate. Art-making which hides the seeds of how to be a human stitch in the tapestry again, passed for safe-keeping in the hands of our indigenous. Art-making as a means to mobilize the weapon. If armed struggle is the first action of finding a world beyond colonization, beyond what we can see, culture loads the gun. The role of the artist is to load the gun.
I love the part about it being about mobilization through culture changing.Adapting emergent strategy into this, the change also happens on the small scale within me. I think that the art process invites me to transform within - what I want to see in the new world. Through that personal integrity, there is movement in how I show up in relationship and community. That’s one part of the ripple affect.
Note on capacity. Something I’m continually struggling with especially post October 2023, is gauging my capacity accurately. It feels like it has been changing hour to hour. I took one day more low key on IG (and felt actually pretty grounded for an hour or two in the evening), and then the next day (yesterday) was the massacre in Khan Yunis and then f*****g Trump being shot in the f*****g ear. There is this depression for this reality at all times - sometimes it peaks unbearably and other times it drones in the back.
The quote at the top is “My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is not to look away” by Nikky Finney. That was pulled from a Black Liturgist IG post. My take on it is that it’s ultimately about expanding the capacity for truth. Truth of the violence of colonialism and empire and capitalism. Expanding my capacity to look suffering in the eye. Expanding my ability to speak truth. And in the expansion of truth, is the expansion of my and our imagination for a new world. Not a revision of this world, but a completely different reality where colonization, empire, police, prisons, patriarchy, capitalism doesn’t exist. That takes HUGE capacity to hold in faith.
I can’t look away and trade the discomfort for the matrix. That is antithetical to who I am as an artist.
The practice of art for liberatory transformation is something I know that I will grow old with and something that will always be a through-line for the rest of my life. That I know for sure, and there’s not a lot that I know for sure. What I don’t know is how I can and should live day by day sustaining the vision of what could be. That part seems muddy especially alongside other messy and traumatized humans like me.
What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?
Making art will be liberated from capitalism and colonialism. Community can come together to create with possibility, curiosity, and honesty. No proving or comparing. There will be so much space for questions and inspiration. All the space to be witnessed and loved as multidimensional humans.
(Photo of me below with a guitar - accompanying mamayaya for a sofar sounds show last minute. It was the first time I picked up the guitar in a long long time. It reminded me of how being around inspirational people spurs inspiration within me. Super honored to have played for her!)
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