Getting in History's Way

by Claire Peeps

From Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America, a book published in 2001 by Palgrave, edited by Claire Peeps and Marie Cieri. The book offers interviews with 15 American activists who talk candidly about how and why they struggle for change. Included are artists Barbara Trent, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Lily Yeh, Mel Chin and Amalia Mesa-Bains. The authors, both with arts experience, used their investigation to learn what activists can teach artists about building a constituency in the face of political adversity, such as the arts experienced in the early 1990s. Peeps discusses her motives in this essay from the book. Activists Speak Out may be ordered from Palgrave. —Community Arts Network

We hope that this book has been both cause for celebration and call to action. As filmmaker Barbara Trent observes in the first interview, there's a chance that we can intervene in history if we move fast enough. The many individuals represented here are evidence that this is true. Through their strategic efforts to raise public awareness and marshal social and political forces, they have shown themselves to be effective at getting in history's way.

This book is also about passing wisdom to a next generation. The lessons embedded in these activists' stories resonate across time: insist on justice; believe in the possibility of alternatives; never surrender hope; do not underestimate the strength in numbers, or the righteousness of anger; pace yourself, because change may be slow in coming.

The activist's job is largely the building of social capital — the grassroots networks that enable people to move information and ideas to a broader audience, and ultimately to make change happen. The networks can be constructed in many forms, and among diverse groups of people. Migrant labor camps, parent associations, quilting groups, after-school programs and radio are among the vehicles that the activists here have tapped into to spread their message. They have engaged bus riders, bank employees, students, grieving survivors and neighbors as their partners in articulating common goals for social change.

From the long view, the accomplishments of the progressive left during last 100 years are beyond dispute: the vote for women, the legal ban on segregation, environmental protection laws, the emergence of gay rights policy. Despite their occasional misgivings about taking one step forward and two steps back, activists are pushing ahead. They have seen change.

Esther Kaplan notes in her interview that activism's struggle is to make a particular issue one of widespread public concern. That has been the task of all the activists interviewed here. Among the tools available to them in that endeavor, art has been employed as a primary method by many. Why art? Why have we included such a significant number of artists among the activists represented here?

Co-editor Marie Cieri and I came to this project as arts presenters and curators. We were troubled by what we perceived as the increasing American apathy, and outright antagonism, toward art. As the public debates about support for the National Endowment for the Arts took shape in the early '90s, we were working in our respective careers with artists who were deeply committed to their communities and to social change. It seemed to us that the arts had an important role to play in community building — as a means for the expression of identity, a catalyst for economic development and academic advancement, and a vehicle for dialogue and conflict mediation.

It was clear that our view wasn't shared by the American public at large. It was also clear that the arts community was unprepared for the battle on Capitol Hill. Our field has been built on specialization that has led to fragmentation, which ultimately has isolated us from one another. We are trained to become experts of visual arts, or theater, or music, but have largely lost the ability, as a field, to be both clear and articulate about our shared values. Consequently, we were unable to present a united front during the public debates.

Marie and I thought we might learn from activists working in other fields. How have they achieved consensus among differing groups? How have they achieved public support for their causes? How might the artistic imagination be better merged with an activist agenda, and what civic force might be unleashed in the process?

There is a broad range of artistic practice that advocates for social change. At one end, the artist may function as observer, mirror or conscience, offering us a critique of a social or political moment — as in Picasso's great painting Guernica, or James Baldwin's collection of essays Notes of a Native Son. At the other, the artist may seek to rally audiences directly around a particular issue. Think of Pete Seeger singing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" at an anti-war rally on the Washington Mall.

Across this continuum of practice, artists have contributed significantly to social reform movements in America. In the early decades of this century, documentary photographs by Lewis Hine of children working in New York sweatshops galvanized public opinion and sparked child labor laws. Photographs by Walker Evans raised public awareness about poverty in rural America during the great Depression. Musicians, visual artists, poets and playwrights brought clarity, focus and passion to public protest during the civil rights and anti-war movements of the '50s and '60s.

By the late '60s, artists were engaging audiences as collaborators in their work. Bread & Puppet Theater staged anti-war processions on the streets of New York's lower east side, enlisting bystanders as performers in large-scale spectacles. El Teatro Campesino, under the direction of Luis Valdez, mounted performances on the back of flatbed trucks in the fields of Salinas, California. Their provocative work rallied Chicano farmworkers around César Chavez's pro-union cause. Visual artists played a key role in the Chicano movement, too, partnering with community members in the design and painting of murals. Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco and many others used mural-making as a forum for popular education, chronicling a community's untold history and articulating its vision for the future.

While the catalytic issues have shifted over time, artists have continued to engage non-artists in the production of powerful, change-oriented work during the past decade. Bill T. Jones, a choreographer living with HIV, brought together long-term survivors of HIV infection in his controversial, 1994 dance narrative "Still/Here." In the same year, performance artist Suzanne Lacy's created "The Roof is on Fire," a performance/media installation in which 200 Oakland teenagers sat in cars on a garage roof and talked about media stereotypes about youth and their troubled relationship with the police.

The artist-activists in this book have chosen to use art as an organizing device, more than just as a slogan or a logo for a cause — but those functions are important, too. I once heard Bernice Johnson Reagon deliver a lecture on the history of the civil rights movement through song. She described how, during a march, the sound of protestors' singing preceded them as they walked, so that by the time they reached their destination their voices had already occupied the space in a way the police could not reclaim. It wasn't just the message of the music that was important, but its ability to give physical presence, visceral force, to the movement.

The power of art to influence public opinion and mobilize dissent is demonstrated by periodic efforts around the world to silence artists. Art is usually among the first forms of expression to be censored under repressive regimes. It gives voice to multiple perspectives, eliciting response in the form of reflection, discussion, debate — the sort of civic discourse and public exchange of ideas that are elemental to a flourishing democracy.

The role of art in American democracy has been complicated by the forces of our market-based economy and by our traditions of arts education. We have trained our artists, by and large, to seek inspiration in isolation, rather than in collaboration. This is not true in other parts of the world, where the arts are better integrated into the social and economic fabric of society. When American opera and theater director Peter Sellars traveled to Indonesia in 1998 to meet with musicians and dancers there, he asked one of Bali's preeminent choreographers what makes a great dancer. The master artist replied that a good dancer is one who knows all the traditional repertoire and can recall it from memory without error; that a very good dancer is one who knows the traditional repertoire and can infuse its performance with spiritual insight; and that a great dancer is one who knows the traditional repertoire, can perform it with spiritual insight and who is also a farmer.

We have difficulty, in this country, in accepting multiple identities; witness the ongoing debates over ethnic designation within the U.S. Census. The notion of being both artist and farmer, or artist and activist — like being Latino and Korean, or black and Jewish — runs contrary to our categorical way of thinking. But it is art's ability to be multifaceted, its capacity to communicate a plurality of meanings, that gives it its power in activism. Art may be simultaneously overt and subtle. Its impact may be immediate, or may linger in the afterimage.

What artmaking nurtures — reflection, and the ability to acknowledge contradiction — may also be a good counterpoint to activism, as Esther Kaplan observes. Activism can be physically and emotionally exhausting, and Kaplan describes a movement's need to care for its members. In addition to being a catalyst for action, art may provide relief from the tyranny of the day-to-day. Artists can transform our dissatisfaction with the world into the image of something better, as artist Amalia Mesa-Bains suggests, and it may be in this imaginative transformation that we find hope, and rejuvenation.

You can feed and clothe a person, but to what end? The arts are where we discover and express our humanity, privately or collectively. They provide us the language to share our common joy and grief, to find communion with one another, to pass our stories and wisdom from one generation to the next. If everything is taken from us but life itself, what remains? Our voices, our bodies. With that alone, our humanity may be preserved, and we may carry on the struggle.

Copyright © Marie Cieri and Claire Peeps

Claire Peeps is director of the Durfee Foundation, a Los Angeles-based organization that supports projects in community development and the arts.

Original CAN/API publication: August 2001