Create+Engage: Creativity As An Asset
September Month of Action: how creatives add value to social movements.
If you subscribed to this newsletter, then most likely you believe that creativity has value. In fact, if you don’t, I’m rather surprised that you’re here. But even those of us who see the value of creativity in our own lives can come up against that pesky little question, “is this even important?” To draw something, to write a poem, to strum a chord on a guitar can sometimes feel like “not enough” when we’re staring down “more important” things.
And yet, consider where society would be if the creatives, the artists, the dreamers, had not offered up their gifts. If they had not expressed their frustration and resistance through creative means. If they had not met moments of darkness with imagination, joy, love, and beauty. If they had not dared to dream of something different.
A creative society is a robust society. It is a more open one, a more empathetic one, a more resilient one, a more connected one.
All this month we’ve been exploring how creativity intersects with political and civic engagement. We’ve looked at political art, public art, and even the history of art and design in the voting process. In our final week of our Month of Action, we wanted to do something a little different: remind ourselves of the power of creativity itself. We’ll also highlight some upcoming programming, as well as a small win that we’re celebrating. And finally, we’re bringing you a short interview with Washington, D.C. based artist Rose Jaffe.
We’re hoping that this series of essays this month has inspired you to rethink your own creative actions in a new way. If you want to gather with this creative community, we would love to see you at this Thursday’s Create+Engage Studio Session. More info on that below.
Go make some art. It matters.
-Anna
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Creativity As An Asset
When we launched Create+Engage earlier this year, we were looking for a way to channel our (anxious? nervous? frightened? apathetic?) energy into meaningful action. We set out to explore how art and creative solutions can motivate us to engage in our local communities.
Through the virtual, free workshops, we have seen how creativity adds tremendous value to our communities. Our creative practice is a lifetime practice, so is civic engagement. We may ebb and flow in our intensity with that practice, we may change our mediums and our ways of engaging, but with creativity as well as civic and community engagement, there is no hard stop or hard start—instead, it can be woven into the fabric of our lives.
Here are a few ways creativity benefits all of us—ways that feel particularly poignant in our current context.
Creativity builds community.
In moments of desperation, of frustration, of worry, creativity offers us the chance to build community and connection. Remember the January 2017 Women’s Marches? Women across the country picked up knitting needles and pink yarn and created a hat that became an icon, connecting them with others they’d never met. Feelings of rage, snark, and power were channeled into creative messages on hundreds of posters. In that moment, we witnessed a glimmer of how we can each be creative with a small action or small message—a collective action for good.
Those of us who teach or take part in creative workshops have most likely felt the sense of relief that comes not from solving a problem, or finding an answer to the world’s unexplainable difficulties, but in sharing the load together. There’s power in creating in community, and even just in knowing that someone else is also taking their pen to paper, their brush to the canvas. The power of creating something, together. Consider projects like
’s recent DrawingTogether in Action—there are so many ways to channel an art practice into action and engagement, and it’s all the more robust when you know other people are doing the same.“Great protests are great art works.”
Creativity encourages us to imagine different realities and futures
As Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books once said in an interview:
“I think if a civilization or a culture does not take its own works of literature seriously it goes downhill. You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.”
We all know the importance of imagination in the creative process, but think about how essential it is for our own communities, for society as a whole. And how is that communal imagination shaped? Many years ago, I attended a talk by artist Favianna Rodriguez, and she put it incredibly succinctly: “culture shapes our imagination.” Similarly, writers like N.K. Jemisin write to remind us that we have the freedom to imagine otherwise. What we see, what we read, what we listen to—it all influences how we think about our everyday lives, but also about our future lives. It allows us to rethink what is possible.
Change is not a top-down endeavor, it rises upwards, stemming from all kinds of acts of creativity, imagination, and resistance. To believe in the power of art, to believe in the power of creativity, is to believe in the power of the people.
“I am invested in illustrating the possible.”
Creativity is collaborative and collective
To do their work, many artists work alone. But that solitary work is so often fueled by engaging with and participating in the world, and then taking those experiences back into the studio. Creativity is a collaboration with the world around us, and when we engage creatively we’re also engaging collectively.
That kind of collective sense of being is essential for thriving societies. The more connected that we feel, the less passive that we can be, but a digital age where we’re all busy and overwhelmed makes it easier and easier for us to disconnect from that collective. This comes at a cultural cost. Oliver Burkeman touches on this in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:
“...grassroots politics—the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations—are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action.”
Burkeman cites Hannah Arendt: “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” To be totally separate from one another disengages us, to be in a passive and consumptive state disengages us. But when we creatively engage, we collectively engage, directly challenge to any movement that seeks absolute power.
“My wish: use art to turn the world inside out.”
-JR
Creativity creates space for people to use their voice
Art and creativity offer a platform to people who often are excluded from the halls of power, and art is so often used as a challenge to power. As Eve L. Ewing wrote in an opinion piece about why authoritarians are prone to attacking the arts:
“Art creates pathways for subversion, for political understanding and solidarity among coalition builders. Art teaches us that lives other than our own have value.”
Mediums like zines, printmaking, and textiles have allowed people to raise their voices through creative means, especially when more traditional avenues have been closed to them.
“... art and society and politics are not mutually exclusive, but we have been told that they are, and we were told that for political reasons.”
- Rupert García in a 1995 interview
Creativity humanizes
As an avenue of self-expression, art is a direct creative channel to the personal. That makes art an excellent catalyst for empathy, and it allows us to take a seemingly insurmountable and overwhelming issue and tackle it from an individual perspective. It’s why storytelling is so essential, whether it’s through books or film—these creative mediums allow us to step into someone else’s reality, perhaps one we never would have had access to otherwise. As Dr. Sara Konrath has written, art is a kind of trojan horse, “hiding empathy in its belly.” Konrath explains:
“Interesting, beautiful, or provocative artworks can beckon people into greater compassion in a way that is more difficult to do with moral finger-wagging.”
Artists and writers also have the ability to bring us back to our emotions—particularly important in a time when so much is overwhelming that we may have started to feel less. Art has the power to reconnect us with our own humanity. “Artists can increase empathy in others through their work, eliciting that feeling from people who may be numb from all the terrible things going on in the world, making the viewer more sensitive and vulnerable,” says Joe Behen, PhD, Executive Director of Counseling, Health, and Disability Services at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
We need community. We need connection. We need imagination.
We need creativity.
A small win!
We are thrilled to share that we got our first small grant to support Create+Engage programming! Art for the Polls supports U.S. artists creatively engaging in the 2024 election. Through the project, local artists are mobilizing voters in North Carolina, New York, Ohio and beyond through campaigns that are innovative, strategic, and push the boundaries of what civic engagement activism can be. Art for the Polls is a project of People for the American Way Foundation, Center for Artistic Activism, Common Cause NC, Chinese-American Planning Council, New York League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, and Cleveland VOTES.
We are using these funds to support our remaining programming for 2024, and also to imagine what programming might look like in 2025. Is there a topic you’d like to further explore, a new idea that you think would be meaningful to learn about—please share any ideas you might have on the Create+Engage padlet or drop a comment below.
Create+Engage Studio Session: September 26th
Through this partnership with Art for the Polls, we are excited to bring Jacqueline von Edelberg as a special guest for this Thursday, September 26th’s Studio Session. This will be a little more casual than our usual Create+Engage workshops, and we’re hoping that it will encourage you to use this time to come and work on some type of creative action.
The Chinese-American Planning Council, Arts4Impact, the Center for Artistic Activism, and People for the American Way have teamed up to elevate Golden Day on October 26, 2024—the last day New Yorkers can register to vote. Together, they're launching a grassroots, collaborative GOTV arts activation to create community and drive impact for the 2024 election and beyond. Learn more here
Jacqueline will share how you can join the CPC community creating a golden fabric garland to inspire fellow New Yorkers to make their voice heard at the ballot box, or to craft your own golden fabric garland for neighbors and local businesses to amplify with a creative gold expression and use it as an opportunity to encourage voter registration and making a voting plan. We wanted to offer you insights on Jacqueline’s project in case you are looking for a creative action that might spark civic engagement in your own community!
Check out previous installments from our Create+Engage Month of Action: political art, public art, and voting.
Creative Prompt
We keep reminding friends and family that Nov 5th is the absolutely last day to vote—and that’s now just 6 weeks away. Early voting has already started in a few states. You can click here to make a plan to vote (and vote early if you can)!!
Now, let’s think about voting in a more creative way. Here’s your challenge for the week.
Set a timer for 5 minutes: Write “Vote” in the middle and create a mind-map reflecting on why do you vote?
Review your mind-map, what sticks out to you as important words, actions or phrases—circle them.
Take one of those words, and use it to create a checklist of how you might talk about this issue with others in your community. Use the words as a creative prompt: make something visual or written out of them.
Share your reflections with the Creative Fuel community on the Create+Engage padlet!
And as a reminder, it’s not too late to register to vote, check your voter registration status, and get ready to vote this fall!
Painting Murals: Q&A With Rose Jaffe
Rose Jaffe is a visual artist based in Washington, D.C. Her mediums span mural painting, printmaking, and digital illustration. She has painted over 30 murals nationally and internationally, including over 20 in her hometown of Washington. Rose’s work is vibrant and often playful, with themes of political activism, natural healing and spiritual grounding. She is dedicated to harnessing the power of art to spark conversation, build connection, and create social change.
If you live in DC, you are likely to have come across Rose Jaffe’s stunning bright and colorful murals—often highlighting an important message on a political issue or bringing attention to an aspect of community wellbeing. And Rose has a solo exhibition up right now at Delaplaine Arts Center “Contemporary Innovations: Rose Jaffe—Harmonious Bloom” in Frederick, Maryland up through October 27th, 2024.
We caught up with Rose to learn a little more about her creative practice.
What inspired you to start painting murals?
I painted my first mural in 2014 for my first solo exhibition. I fell in love with painting at a large scale and out in the public for everyone to enjoy. I also began to see murals as a way for me to sustain myself creatively full time and build my own art business—something I have always been passionate about.
What does it mean to be creative?
To me, creativity means to express yourself authentically. To release judgment or expectations and outcomes and just make something—anything! I believe creativity is a human super-power and one of the strongest forces we collectively share.
What does it mean to be an artist?
To me, the label is almost arbitrary—it is a self defining term that anyone can use for any reason. “The Arts” are so vast, wide and ever expanding, so anyone who feels a connection to a creative outlet may feel moved to call themselves an artist (which I support!).
For myself, I have dedicated my life to telling stories through the visual language. Being an artist is more of a way of being. It is to approach this life with curiosity, and a seeking for new and different answers to the same questions.
How might public art raise awareness of local issues?
I love public art because it is just that: public. Reclaiming public space with art is an opportunity to bring a different dialogue and narrative to the landscape. Whether it is shedding light on a specific person, story or theme, it is an opportunity to celebrate something larger than life. With advocacy specifically, art can be a unique way to get a point across that may resonate more with a community. Images can cross language barriers and be up to broader interpretation. They are wonderful avenues to raise awareness of a variety of topics!
UPCOMING CREATE+ENGAGE WORKSHOPS
Thursday September 26, 5-6pm PT: Create+Engage Studio Session
This will be a little more casual than our usual Create+Engage workshops, and we’re hoping that it will encourage you to use this time to come and work on some type of creative action. Make and write some postcards, draw some political poster designs, etc. Sign up here.
Wednesday October 16, 5-6:30pm PT: Create+Engage October Session
We’ll be announcing guest artists soon. Sign up here.
Wednesday November 13, 5-6:30pm PT: Create+Engage November Session
The election will be behind us before we know it. Save the date for now, and more info to come.
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Congrats on the grant!
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