"Art can help provide a visual vocabulary for the futures we want for ourselves.”
"Art can help provide a visual vocabulary for the futures we want for ourselves.”
The powerful billboards from For Freedoms.
Hello friends,
Here we are. THE day.
Some good words that I’ve appreciated this morning are
writing about the anger that comes for rights you already had and ’s essay from a few days ago on art as “private prayer made public.”There is nothing that I can write that can assuage the complex tangle of intense emotions that the last few weeks (years?) have served up. But what I can do today is offer up some creative encouragement, remind us all that we can hold on to art as our lifeline.
A few weeks ago, we hosted a Create+Engage workshop with taylor brock and Autumn Breon focused around how art and creativity allow us to imagine different realities and futures.
brock, who works as the Associate Director at For Freedoms—an an artist-led organization that centers art as a catalyst for creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action—framed this well:
“…how can we infuse artistic thinking into our civic and political lives?
Politicians run on this four-year timeline where they have to get things done within that timeline to prove that they were successful. It becomes this kind of sports game, us versus them. There’s no creativity, no long-term thinking. It’s very binary, very competitive, and it’s very narrow-sided and short term.”
Art works on an entirely different schedule. It isn’t confined by same guidelines of feasibility and viability, which is exactly what makes it so powerful. As brock put it:
“Artists are often building something out of nothing, imagining something entirely new and dreaming it into reality. Art is almost always inherently collaborative”
This idea of “artistic thinking” isn’t solely about how we feed issues through an art lens, or take a creative way at communicating an issue through a political poster. It’s a bigger and broader approach to how we address problems, how we build what comes next.
One of the core components of this kind of artistic thinking is imagination, the ability to dream up something above and beyond our current context and reality. As Breon said, “art can help provide a visual vocabulary for the futures we want for ourselves.”
To do that, we have to think beyond what is and challenge ourselves to imagine what could be. Yet as brock pointed out:
“We’re in this moment right now where I think there’s very little imagination… a lot of that has to do with this obsession with productivity and also a lot of fear and individualism. Art is typically against all of those things. None of those work with a creative practice.”
Let’s repeat that for good measure: NONE of those work with a creative practice. Which means that art and creativity offer us a pathway around those usual forces, and to get us back on a path to envision different routes forward.
“The role of art is… expanding our minds. It’s by storytelling. It’s by connecting—connecting to ourselves, connecting us to one another, connecting us to the world around us in a way that capitalism does not do. In a way that our current structures do not do. It helps us expand to imagine something beyond what is feasible. And when we stop thinking about feasibility, what’s possible becomes so much more expansive.”
-taylor brock
Art isn’t just the medium we use, or the work that we create. It is how we live our lives. Art is a way of being. That way of being helps to inform our imagination, allow us to dream and build something different.
For the last few years, For Freedoms has partnered with artists on enormous billboard campaigns, giving them this creative brief: “where do we go from here?”
Taking up the space normally reserved for commercial advertising or candidate ads, these billboards plant seeds for what could be. They offer up words, phrases, and images intended to get the viewer to think beyond what they see right in front of them, to reframe an idea, to embed an artistic way of thinking into the public consciousness.
Today I wanted to share an assortment of some of those billboards with you. They remind us that we all have the power to wield our creativity in imaginative ways, that we can approach art as a way of being, infuse it into our lives, our relationships, our connections, our values.
We need artistic thinking. Today, tomorrow, and every day after.
Take care of yourselves and your people.
-Anna
A portion of this month’s proceeds will be donated to For Freedoms.
If you’re inspired by these billboards please be sure to check out the new For Freedoms book featuring more of their stunning work.
A REQUEST!
is working on a project for her graduate program in Engaged and Public Humanities and gathering testimonials from Create+Engage participants on the impact of creative programming. She’s gathering testimonials from people who have come to any of these workshops, so if you’re willing, please help her out by filling out this survey. NEXT CREATE+ENGAGE WORKSHOP
Wednesday November 13, 5-6:30pm PT: Create+Engage November Session
No matter what happens today, we have work to do tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after. We’re called our post-election edition of Create+Engage “Continued Action.” Come join us.
Do you enjoy Creative Fuel? You can support this work by becoming a paid subscriber. You can also order something in my shop, attend one of my workshops or retreats, or buy one of my books. Or simply share this newsletter with a friend!
I dreamt she won in a landslide. 💙🌊
wondering if Herr dumpy cheated---how difficult would it be to have Russia interfering with the 2024 election--he seemed overly confident, a bad sig, and continuously calling out the opponents as being cheaters. Something kind of suspicious about the name-calling...maybe he is one who cheats; not atypical for the drumph.... not surprised but still disappointed--------uneducated white males!!!