The role of art

Questions:

• How do we do art and engage with art for self and community nourishment?
• How can and does support our activism and our communities?

Discussion

• Desire for art as a tool for engagement and solidarity;
• Vehicles for art engagement: open spaces (post it notes on wall), stencils,
• poetry infusion –unamplified, public open mics – utilizing public space for actions
• Very important forus to bake-in art time into our day, not just do it when our to do list is done
• Art is inspiration and needed; inspire people to be more brave and speak out more
• Exercise options:Free association of words- – one person says a word, the other person says another word and it could continue. This could be in a pair or more people.
• Bay Area FlashMob: Gust – flash mob. Get up street theater. Art as both propaganda and organizing.
  • This is an example of art by community, not art by action.
• Participatory theater – Theater of the oppressed. Form of the theater that community folks create the pieces and engagement.
• Documentary improv theater. Documenting reality and using art to amplify those realities.
• Artists are always the visionaries and organizations could do better at focusing on engaging those who are aligned.
• What about going back to analog – using flyers and offline vehicles.
• Things can be political without being intentionally political; telling a story is political.
• “I feel like we're getting a lot of messages that technology is more important than humans”
• We have to embrace the fact there is a tomorrow and there is light now and will be.
• We need to do more together and create more together, especially when there is hopelessness.
• In Costa Rica we did many stencils and murals with youth and had images to challenge stereotypes – like girls as scientists.