Young People's Art Works Toward Social Change: Performing Visions of Utopia

I have always been concerned with “voice”: Who has the power to speak, who stays silent, who listens, for what reasons and to whose benefit. As a public-school teacher, I wanted to use the arts as a tool for dialogue with my students and their various communities, so that they might raise questions about social issues that affected their own lives and the world around them. Yet I had not been trained as a teacher or artist to do so and I did not have the professional network or resources to assist me.

I had seen professional artists create thought-provoking political work that questioned what a better world might look or held in tension concerns about the present. I toured various museums and watched their performances. I saw Guillermo Gomez Peña and Coco Fusco become the “Couple in the Cage,” performing a native tribal couple in order to comment on the historic exoticization and objectification of people of color (Fusco and Heredia). I enjoyed Banksy, whose graffiti art paints the streets of London to comment on the function of art in public places, along with issues such as public health, police abuse and youth rights. I enjoyed listening to Michael Franti, who uses hip hop to discuss issues of racism, war and poverty.

Yet I had not personally encountered artists like these working in school environments to help young people develop their creative voices and methods to communicate their concerns. I wanted to find the spaces in which artists did work with young people to explore their visions and critiques. I wanted to learn what their art works said and the ways the young people employed different art mediums and aesthetic tools to communicate their visions.

This paper represents an overview of that (re)search, which will develop into my dissertation. Here I focused on the art works of politically minded young people who care about their world today and its future. These young people have participated voluntarily in community-based projects that address social issues of personal interest. I analyzed how they construct visions of “utopia,” functioning as creative experiment of possibilities (Hansot) to express messages of hope and concern. I focused on issues of identity (such as race, gender and class) and social justice (access and equity for historically marginalized people) as elements of their utopias. The art works I selected have been exhibited, performed and/or published for consumption by the general public.

In the larger research project, I located and analyzed 30 art works from six organizations that explicitly and/or implicitly engage questions of identity and/or social justice. These art works were produced from 2002 to 2007 across several arts disciplines, including mural painting, photography, performance, hip-hop music, literary journalism and film. I selected organizations across the U.S. whose goals were, at least in part, to utilize the arts as a means for communicating the concerns of young people who had been historically marginalized by U.S. society — particularly populations in poverty, as well as those dealing with racism, sexism and/or homophobia.

In selecting specific art works for analysis, I was guided by bell hooks’ idea that art is “a realm where every imposed boundary could be transgressed” (xi). Put another way, I was “provoked by astonishment” (Neilsen) as I identified particular art works. Neilsen explains this provocation as his own instigation to research: “astonishment is a lived-through experience of something unexpected, something not usual, something outside convention and therefore rarely experienced in lives governed by convention…” (56). I wanted to find art works that compelled me to listen to their messages, to understand their aesthetic languages, to be excited and/or disturbed, and to desire change in my own world.

In my analysis, I looked at the internal narratives of individual art works, as well as the collective narratives constituted in the body of works for each organization. I was interested in how the art works create gestures toward utopia (pointing toward possibility) and educate us to desire some better world. I relied not on traditional methods of critique that seek to answer the question “is this good art?” but on arts criticism methods that look at the subtle, multilayered and situated experience of viewing a piece. In my analysis I considered the contexts of my own viewing and that of the art works’ creation, such as my interest in feminism or the artist’s concern with the gentrification of her community. I also analyzed the ways that artistic tools relate to the values and beliefs communicated in the narratives of the art works (Bowden, Harper).

I looked for ways that the art works expressed utopian moments, themes, messages. As part of my framework on utopia, I applied different critical lenses, including feminism and critical race theory, that question traditional assumptions and implicitly engage visions of a better society in their frameworks. I organized the analysis in terms of four facets of utopian literature: individual experience, aesthetics, space/time and social development (Spencer).

Individual experience: The art works generally express young people’s concern with personal identity and how subjectivities interact with various communities. They are concerned with ideas of sameness and difference, often exhibiting a tension between wanting to be treated the same as other people even when they are different and delineating a boundary around their identity/experiences as being different and even separate from others. These concerns reflect the questions: What does it mean to live in a pluralistic society? In terms of the looking toward the future, what should a pluralistic society look like and how should it treat sameness and difference?

Naming oneself and struggling with identity groups and labels are important to the youth in this study. For example, Qspeak is a teen theater group from 1n10, a nonprofit in Phoenix, Arizona, that works with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth, as well as their straight allies. In their 2006 show “Steppin’ Out,” which was devised by the young people themselves, various characters explore their identities as they form a Gay-Straight Alliance club at their high school. All of the characters are based on real life stories, although the youth did not necessarily play themselves. In one monolog, a character steps toward the audience and says in direct address:

Throughout the show, characters struggle for acceptance, both from themselves and from others, without having to compromise what they believe, think or feel. This struggle is sometimes difficult, as when a character talks about helping a boy who had been sent to “straight camp.” She said, “Queer youth, we have to stand up for ourselves and each other.” But the characters also take up this sense of solidarity and independence in celebration, as they break out in dance, moving in unison and individually to songs like “World Clique” by Dee-lite.

Knowing oneself is part of the struggle for survival about which these young people communicate, including what decisions they should make in the face of their peers. For example, Youth Movement Records is a nonprofit in Oakland, California, that mentors young people in poverty to produce their own hip-hop records. In both songs analyzed for this research, the artists name themselves in the songs and take the listener through their struggles until they reach a turning point. In “Impossible is Nothing,” Nok sings about the life he is ready to leave (or has left already):

In “True Story,” Chuck Webster talks about the clarity he experiences in the face of struggle:

In both cases the songs talk about how these struggles are not heightened or impossible to overcome. Instead they are imbued with a sense of hope through a refusal to be tired or defeated by violence and poverty. Here, the speakers are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. At the end of “True Story,” Chuck Webster laughs, an effect that further expresses his individual response to the circumstances or context that informed his song. It may function as a release from the tension in the song or a congratulatory to the self, in either case ending in the joy of someone singing.

Aesthetics: All of the art works emerged from a common approach toward devising/creating: participatory action research in a community-based setting. This affects the aesthetics of the art works directly. As Cohen-Cruz suggests, traditional valuations based on the individual artist and the end product may not apply when criticizing community-based performance. She suggests that a community-based aesthetic considers qualities like the process of production and foregrounding the group’s participation, as well as the performance’s engagement with bearing witness or facilitation of strength through/in struggle (111-3). Cohen-Cruz’ community-based aesthetics combines notions of art as experience and art for social transformation. Considering how aesthetics are employed in different contexts does not mean that all judgments and valuations are equally valid, but that different communities of practice develop their own aesthetic practices around production, perception and evaluation (Wolff 138).

So, when discussing the aesthetics of the young people’s art works, the context of the production informs the analysis of conventional tools of the art medium and metaphors of experience. I looked at the ways juxtaposition, sequencing, layering, etc., helps the viewer access experiences and messages in the art works. Such a context-bound approach to aesthetics raises the questions: Are the communication of struggle and the process of art-making itself a performance of utopia? What do the aesthetics of struggle look like for young people?

The artists sometimes used framing as a tool in their work to structure the audiences’ gaze as well as that of people/characters within the work. For example, Venice Arts is a nonprofit interdisciplinary arts organization in Venice, California, that in part teaches young people in poverty how to use photography to explore their lives and that of their community. In the exhibition, “Girls’ Lives through Girls’ Eyes,” one photo is a close up on the torso of a young white woman. She has her hands on her sides (one with a ring and a bracelet), pressed against her flat stomach. The word FAT is written in some kind of marker or eyeliner above her navel. Her bottom waistband is barely visible and rolled over, showing a little bit of extra fabric over the top of the band. The cups of her bra are just showing at the top of the frame. In another photo, a young Asian woman looks directly at the camera through two different people’s hands whose fingers are touching, forming a triangle of negative space. One hand is dark, the other is light. They are slightly out of focus. The face is slightly off-center, one eye partially covered by the hand, the other eye in the center of the triangle.

In both of these photos, framing allows the camera to isolate the part of the body that is important to the work’s meaning. Segmenting the body emphasizes two ways of looking: an objectifying look at the body and a subjective gaze back at the viewer. Both are connected to issues of power: The gaze has the power to mark the body or to reclaim power from those who are looking to you.

The art works also use contrast and juxtaposition to communicate conflict and tension about issues of importance. For example, Free Street, a nonprofit theater organization works with young people in poverty through theatre and digital media. In the series “Future Perfect,” a short film, ”Without,” presents the viewer with a young woman’s voice-over as the camera travels in extreme close-up along a series of abstract images, colors and textures. The young woman talks directly to her unborn daughter, whom she is worried may have the physical disease she has, a disease she had contracted genetically from her own mother. She imagines what her life would be like with her baby, but says ultimately that she would rather have a “blank refrigerator door” than give her daughter a life full of “pain and uncertainty.” In closure the young woman says, “Even though I know that I will not bring you into this world … you will always be my daughter.” The camera pulls back to an empty tire swing still swinging slightly. The final image is a still, silent shot of a young woman in a hooded sweatshirt standing in front of stained glass windows, perhaps in a church, wiping a tear from her face.

Here contrast and juxtaposition are tools that open the narrative to the audience, asking them to fill in the gaps from their own experience. The contrast of a realistic story narrated over abstract imagery and the juxtaposition of the empty tire swing with the statement “you will always be my daughter” call attention to the lack of a child body in the piece, particularly in the (moving) swing. The audience might wonder: Is there a ghost child? Has a child recently left the frame? If not, why is the swing in motion?

Space/time: The young people in this research have constructed art works from/in specific cultural and geographic spaces along specific historical trajectories and patterns of social relationships. In the art works and their contexts of production, space and time are not fixed or predetermined but are fluid and changing. This view of space/time informs the art works’ aesthetics as well as ways the artists have produced/affected space and time in their lives and their art works. Through imagination and ideology, the art works construct new public spaces that (re)form social messages about young people and generate new conceptions about how young people “spend” their time. This raises the following questions: How does space affect identities and how do identities affect space? How do the artists use space conceptually and corporeally? How do young people engage their temporal locations?

In several of the art works, memory functions as a tool of space and time to articulate “better worlds” across generations. For example, Voices, Inc., is a nonprofit multi-media organization in Tucson, Arizona, that mentors young people in poverty to produce an on-going community newspaper and special ethnographic projects. A team of young researchers created the book “Don’t Look at Me Different/No Me Veas Diferente,” about the history of the housing projects in Tucson. Through interviews and photographs they gathered from 20 current and past residents, the young people hoped to dispel negative stereotypes about living in the projects. One of the authors, Aracely, writes an “Open letter to people who are against public housing.” She critiques an article published in the Tucson Weekly in 1997 that “painted a picture” of public housing that was inaccurate and full of stereotypes. Aracely quotes the journalist, Tim Vanderpool, as saying, “There is no mental leaping, no aesthetic sleight of hand that could paint Connie Chambers as a pretty place. It is not.” Aracely replies, it “might look ugly from the outside. But why? Because you guys make them look like that. We weren’t the architects. On the inside, the projects look pretty because we decorated them our way, our taste” (142-3). She may be referring to the murals, altars, home environments, even the way the socks hang in holes in the fence and laundry sways in the breeze on the line. (The interviewees mention the laundry many times in the interviews). Here, the art work functions as a tool to “talk back” to older generations and bring awareness to their point of view and social criticism. Through her letter, Aracely crafts her own social space and delineates how the social space of the town might benefit from the residents’ input into the architectural design and structure of the projects.

The art works also use physical bodies as symbols of crossing/closing geographic space and building interconnectedness in social space. For example, Qspeak’s 2007 show, “On the Move,” is a modern dance piece that combines devised dialog and choreography. The theme of the show was how identities change based on where you are and who you are with. At one point, a character is alone on stage and tells the audience how he sometimes needs to scream on a mountaintop by his house after reaching a breaking point. As he yells, “Aaah,” the rest of the cast runs out on stage and crouches around him. They form a long two-person car and begin dancing to different music. Different characters state:

Then the original character of this scene yells, “Fire drill.” They all run out and change places in the car. Sounds of car horns honk overhead. They drive the car around stage, moving slowly, quickly and slowly again. They stop and go to the music, dancing with hips swaying and hands pumping and waving through the air: “We like the cars the cars that go boom.” As they circle the stage, two by two they get “dropped off” at home until there are only two left. The car functions as its own physical and social space, one that moves, creates safety and allows the characters to resist controlling ideas outside the car. The characters play loud music, yell out the window and stop movement to do the fire drill. This emphasizes how young people desire to redefine what is acceptable or “out of place.”

Social development: The art works in this study generally employed a critique of social institutions and practices that affected them personally. Experience of the individual prompted and contextualized ideas of social development and/or social change. In particular, the art works commonly emphasized issues of race, class, gender and sexuality, critiquing specific policies as well as ideologies that affect institutional decision making and practices. Often the art works embedded such critiques implicitly through individual responses to these ideologies, so that I inferred social critiques and ideas for future society building. This raises the following questions: What social developments/changes to young people hope for? Who are the young people looking toward for the change to occur? What is “progress”?

Many of the art works emphasize the importance of knowing one’s history so that history can inform social action. For example, the East Palo Alto Mural Project is a nonprofit in East Palo Alto, California, that mentors young people in poverty in the production of murals across their communities. “Reflections Eternal” is one such mural in which a young woman sits in the middle of a field of flowers that is stopped by a wall of flames on either side of her. On the right side, a city of buildings, roads and lights stretches into the distance. At the bottom on this side are icons of a dollar sign, a wrecking ball and a sign stating, “We buy homes.” On the left side, more rural homes, farms and fields fill the wall. There are fists rising from the base of the mural on the rural side. The girl sits cross-legged between these geographies of East Palo Alto, with her head bowed in contemplation and her fingers woven. The mural is situated in the history of farm-workers’ struggles in California, gentrification occurring in poor neighborhoods throughout the Bay Area, and young people inheriting cultural memories of land and language loss. It engages often unspoken contradictions of social progress (that newly shared beliefs and space/territory have only emerged through cultural loss). It also asks the audience to recognize young people’s contributions to uncovering stories of lived tension across race and class.

The art works in this study also engage multiple ideas of youth civic participation and alienation. In Youth Movement Records’ song, “Change the Nation,” written and produced by an ensemble of artists, there is both a sense of hope and despair about social development and change, particularly in terms of young people’s role(s) in that change. In one verse:

In the first verse above, the speaker has a vision for an improved nation and world — starting from/with a different structure than that which currently exists. Yet, the final verse reverses this hope, expressing at least one moment of despair. The artists use the word “if,” signifying that the power might not be present, that change might not be possible, yet the album itself is titled “Change the Nation.” This reflects a temporal space between a present feeling of powerlessness and a future time of possible change. It may not be the artists themselves who create this change, but it may be someone affected by the music.

Young people are often seen in the public, particularly through media, as apathetic and apolitical. By presenting messages of hope and concern as expressed by diverse young people across the United States, this research contributes to dispelling such constructions about youth. By analyzing the art works from different perspectives, such as looking at the same art work in terms of gender, race and class, this research suggests that young people are complex actors in the world with multiple, often conflicted, identities that affect what they see in the world. The research does not present final conclusions about young people’s voices, concerns, and artistic languages. Rather, it is specific to each population and each piece of art. The artists used particular language(s) and concepts to describe their experiences. Focusing on such individual perspectives emphasizes that utopia is contingent on “the small narratives of everyday experience and vernacular” (Agger 177). In this way, multiple voices are necessary to construct a richer, more complex picture of what the world is and what it might become.

As an arts-and-education scholar, I position this research as a contribution to reconceptualizing curriculum theory. I am interested in the ways that young people’s art works are a form of curriculum: what their work teaches about who they are and what they want. Analyzing young people’s art works is, in the words of James Macdonald, “a creative intellectual task … to develop and criticize conceptual schema in the hope that new ways of talking about curriculum, which may in the future be far more fruitful than present orientations, will be forthcoming” (7). While this research is not about curriculum in schools, it emphasizes the importance of other ways that young people are contributing to public knowledge and experiences (Giroux).

The art works in this study employed particular “key words” (Williams) that had conflicting, layered and multiple meanings — words such as voice, naming, struggle, hope and change. This notion of “key words” has strong curricular implications. In one way, when the community organizations ask the artists to focus on a particular theme, such as “voice,” the word mediates the subject matter of the art work. In another way, as the key words emerge in/through the art works, they suggest a particular curriculum of/in the young people’s lives. I am hesitant in this paper to be reductive about the artists’ visions for utopia by, for example, creating a list of the “things” that young people want changed (racism, homophobia, etc.). This paper instead explores the “how” of utopianizing — how young people bring awareness to the viewer from their perspectives and how they demand a public debate over the issues.

From an analysis of the art works, this study provides evidence that young people are aware of their own consciousness and are interested in its development and utility. It positions young people as active participants in a world that is constantly changing (Greene). The presence of these art works is, in itself, a gesture toward utopia: young people in struggle as they read words (in the broad sense of the arts as language) in order to read the world and take action in it (Freire).

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Manjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Sharon Verner Chappell is a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University in Curriculum Studies through the College of Education. Her dissertation focuses on young people's art works across arts disciplines that address social issues. She asks about their critiques of the present and visions are of the future. She also teaches bilingual education and social studies methodology courses.

References

Agger, B. (2006). Critical social theories: An introduction, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Bowden, G. (2004). “Reconstructing colonialism: Graphic layout and design, and the construction of ideology,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 41(2), pp. 217-240.

Cohen-Cruz, J. (2005). Local acts: Community-based performance in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Harper, D. (1987). “The visual ethnographic narrative,” Visual Anthropology, vol.1, pp. 1-19.

MacDonald, James. (1975). In Pinar, W. (1975). Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. Berkeley, CA:Mccutchan.

Wolff, J. (1995). “Against sociological imperialism: The limits of sociology in the aesthetic sphere,” In R. Neperud, (Ed.), Context, content, and community in art education: Beyond postmodernism, (pp. 128-140). New York: Teachers College Press.

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Young People's Art Works Toward Social Change: Performing Visions of Utopia

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