Call to Artists.......

 Now is a time of anger and frustration and of demand for civil liberties and equity among races, genders, and other sub-divisions of the human species. It is a new time of global accessibility and a time when small, unassuming voices can be broadcast and ideas can ‘go viral.’ I am saddened and frustrated by our long standing systems that seem exclusionary and built for a nation that is radically different from its foundation. I am equally saddened and frustrated by our collective response to these issues. Protesting injustice is a right and a freedom that is granted to us as a part of this nation. A freedom that others have fought diligently for and continue to fight for overseas and here on our soil. We negate the power of that freedom and the toils of all that went before us when we abuse it and exercise it in a way that is destructive. When you respond to hate and fear with more hate and fear, it only perpetuates the cycle.
 I have been recently convicted that, not only is it our ability as artists to respond to the existing and changing world and comment on it through creative displays, but it is our responsibility as creative beings to document and reflect the nature of our time. We are the key holders, the owners of the symbols, the cartographers of the human condition. Historically it has been the poets, writers, and visual artists that have been the challengers through their commentary and therefore posed the greatest threat to the status quo. It has been seen that these creative individuals can change the world through words and images, not through destruction of property and violence against others. Why do you think Stalin made it a priority to purge the writers and poets from Soviet Russia, certain texts are banned from communist China, the Catholic church maintains a list of books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum) that are forbidden and political cartoonists like Charlie Hebdo are targeted for their ideas? These texts and images challenge the moral, political, or societal ‘norms,’ bring light to what ‘could be instead’ and are therefore deemed dangerous.
 With our country divided into primary colors and civil liberties being threatened here and across the world, I want to challenge the artists, the writers, the poets, to respond with our most powerful tool—our accessibility to bring into existence the non-being through symbols, words, images and structures. To reflect to the world what it is, and what it could be. I want to challenge you to bring attention to injustices by raising awareness and connecting people through language and through visual images, not violence and destruction. Rollo May (The Courage to Create) stated that ‘Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.’ We have a choice. Respond with anger, hate, frustration and violence; or use our intellect, our creativity, our understanding of history, and our knowledge of the world to interrupt the cultural and political landscape and be the ‘menace to society’ that we all know poets and artists can be. We know beyond doubt, from looking at our history (Thomas Paine, Langston Hughes, Fredrick Douglass, Picasso, Politkovskaya, Eliot, Tolstoy, Kundera…etc.) that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. I challenge everyone to pick up those pens, computers, paintbrushes, chisels… whatever your medium, and choose to not contribute to the path of destruction but to change the world in a way that is proven to be pivotal and lasting!

Respond with artwork #artrespond2016