by Evan Bissell

“In doing this, lets create some love through the work and be able to accept our differences and the conditions of our lives…Whatever we create with those eyes on that paper, let that be acceptance of our experiences and move to that point of forgiveness.”

– Vonteak, a participant in the What Cannot Be Taken Away project

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

– Audre Lorde

Vonteak, one of eight collaboratively designed portraits. 5′ x 8′ Acrylic and oil pastel.

In a short cinderblock room at the San Francisco jail, eight fathers and I told the life story of fresh satsuma mandarins that we held in our hands. As we told the story, from the burst of smell in the sterile room to the farmer’s hand, from the bud on the tree to the sunshine making it grow, I asked the men to slowly peel the orange and arrange the peel in a way that they found pleasing. After drawing the peel without looking at their paper, we continued to eat and draw the orange, talking about the pores in the skin, its jewel-like quality when held to the light, the number of segments and its history. When finished, I asked the men, dressed in their orange sweat suits and shoes, to share their own stories. (This exercise is inspired by a teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh that was brought to my attention by the artist Brett Cook.)

Drawing of a mandarin orange using blind contour technique by participant.

This exercise, which included art, reflection, and storytelling, was part of the early stages of What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project, the collaborative art project that you may have read about earlier this year on Tikkun Daily. After visiting the exhibit and talking with me about it, Tikkun’s assistant editor Alana Price invited me to write more broadly about my pursuit of art as a force for social transformation. Creative processes like the one described above fall into a number of disciplines, but they hold a common purpose of facilitating the sharing and telling of stories as an action of connection and love — their architecture is not designed solely to hang new stories or pictures for an outside audience. Instead, through a designed inclusivity, and a flexible dialogical process, the creative framework can provide fertile ground for planting small seeds of self love that grow to provide shade for others through the actual, through the physical creation of new realities and visions in the work and process. When something is made from this positive volition of interpersonal connection and personal growth, new elements of life are created. And as I have seen in others’ work, when supported, planned and carried out skillfully, art becomes a place of gathering, a place of planting and tending, a place of commitment and a place of power beholden only to the limits of our compassion and imagination.

As I wrote and reflected more deeply on the project, the distinctions between what was “art” and what was “social transformation” became less clear, and seemingly less important to tease out. Of the eight people who made up the core of What Cannot Be Taken Away, there may have been only one who identified as an artist. It’s an intimidating and often limiting title. Artist, or art, usually conjures a range of narrow definitions – somewhere on a spectrum of weirdo to genius or luxury to propaganda. While the field of art has long been open to experimenting with forms, approaches, materials, concepts and virtually anything else, it remains that art as a process of social change and/or healing is largely cordoned off into a smaller box with a dimmer light over it. To me, the problem with that lies less in its “victimization” as a field, but more importantly in the way that the categories drawn around “art,” “artist,” and “social change” dampen the imagination of the ways that creativity can support or spark social transformation.

Participants work on their eyes with other participants’ eye paintings as inspiration.

A personal commitment to radically open love is an idea that I grafted onto my dream to be an artist through an ongoing study of transformational social movements. It was only after expanding my own notion of what could go into an “art” practice that I fully committed myself to becoming an artist. The spark, fanned by genre-smashing mentors like Gina Ulysse and Brett Cook, was a shift towards prioritizing a personal practice as the foundation of the work, instead of an art practice that filled a specific and often intellectualized role in movements for social change. By coming from a place of “strong and demanding love,” as called for by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the work becomes strong and demanding enough to redefine itself according to the needs and relationships formed during the work.

I do love to make objects — I continue to teach stencils, printmaking and murals as forms of art and of social change. But, when eating oranges with a group of men and youth who share life experiences, writing a never-to-be-sent letter to an ancestor on mirrored paper, asking questions one never had a chance to ask a father, placing personal stories in a timeline outlining the larger context of the prison boom or creating larger-than-life paintings of one’s experiences, the work is ultimately grounded in an intention to embolden love as a force of change. That’s it. Love is the opening for imagining the infinite possibilities of that process, the measuring stick for when things might get off track, and the fuel for a creativity that aligns intention with process. And with love at its center, we were able to implement a creative process that was both relevant and flexible enough to address the specific needs of the group.

Participants responding to letters and questions from the second group.

Many art objects hold a magical ability to shift how I see or experience the world, but this is often a singular and solitary experience. And while a viewer may relate to the final paintings from What Cannot Be Taken Away in a similar way, the project is built through the creation of relationships in a setting where such relationships are meant to not be possible. The relationships provide the grounding for community building rooted in accountability and a framework of dialogue. The paintings don’t just hold a magical ability for the viewer, they are created through a process that according to the participants, was incredibly healing.

Participants reflect on forgiveness during a forgiveness workshop led by Sujatha Baliga in conjunction with the What Cannot Be Taken Away exhibit at SOMArts.

Project Row Houses started by Rick Lowe, Brett Cook’s Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life, Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From and Pepón Osorio’s Home Visit, are just a few examples of work rooted in visual arts that expand deftly past the impact of objects through processes that are actions of social transformation. In each of the works there is a commitment to a process that is transformative as well as the creation of high-quality works. These are not works made by the artist alone in a studio — they begin with themes and then evolve quickly through the direction of collaborators and artist alike. They heal by identifying specific needs through dialogue and then use art and the creative process to access power related to those needs. And wonderfully, they also take extremely different forms — the creation of an artist residency and low-income housing in a rapidly changing area of Houston, community celebrations and collaborative murals created with diverse and otherwise disconnected residents of a shifting community in Durham, the acting-out of wishes for people who can not perform them because of the sociopolitical realities of Palestine, or the connecting to experiences of loss through storytelling and recreation of events.

The trend is also present and growing in the performing arts world. Life is Living festivals by Youth Speaks, the currently shuttered. Project 2050 of New World Theater, and the Art Sanctuary program of the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia engage community in the creation of works through multi-disciplinary educational and transformative processes. Unlike many performing arts organizations, Youth Speaks is working to keep up with the demand for its services and the Project 2050 performance was a consistently sold-out event during its tenure at UMASS Amherst. Again, these are processes that develop through dialogue, reflection on experience and a strong commitment to people and the work. Through Life is Living — a national campaign of eco-festivals that include spoken word, performance, graffiti art, dance and more, Youth Speaks is expanding the focus of the Green movement to include creative expression and culture at its core — a belief that without celebration of Life, without the people, relationships, and lived experiences that make up this world, the movement will remain elite and disconnected. Project 2050 offered a radical educational model that consistently evolved through youth — adult dialogue to provide leadership training through the arts for the changing demographics of the United States. It culminated in a performance each summer, but the dialogical process and summer retreat held much of the transformative power.

But just as What Cannot Be Taken Away didn’t actually destroy the walls of the San Francisco Jail, Jacir’s work doesn’t actually destroy the apartheid wall in Palestine. And while not a substitute for long-term organizing, art has the capacity to use creativity to reveal sources of power and possibility that are otherwise unseen. These are openings — often moments of healing, of preparing soil and planting seeds — that can then grow quickly. In the Zapatistas’ mask-wearing, in the Satyagraha movement’s harvesting of salt despite British laws requiring the importing of it, in the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for School Children Program and police patrolling, it is the creative revealing of otherwise unseen sources of power that the larger movements are built upon. They are movements that creatively unify the symbolic and the real. To me, they are beads on a long string of examples — complete with imperfections — that remind me that it is the source of the personal commitment to that work, not how one’s work is defined by others, that holds the potential for transformation.