The Work of Art is to expose truths – often hard truths. To embody and embolden hidden realities – undeniable realities – of our cultures, our histories, our injustices, our resistances, our prevailing strengths, our joys, our excitements, and our celebrations – the realities of what it is to exist on this planet in the bodies and times that we are in.
The Work of Art is to hold up a mirror and to focus a lens, to examine ourselves and each other, our world, and our place in it. The Work of Art is to challenge – often to defy – structures of power, of opposition, of dominance, of oppression, of the odds that push up against us, both small and large.
The Work of Art is to be our voice, our voices, abounding and in conversation, in contrast and contradiction as much as, if not more than, in agreement. To speak and to listen and to ruminate and to respond. To understand. To create understanding. And to continue that ongoing work of more deeply understanding as time marches on.
The Work of Art is to be a home for and a record of our existence – our shared existence. To be an agitator of growth, of change. To bring about debate – and not debate of whether the Art itself is good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, this or that, but debate of what we are seeing, how we are seeing it, and what that way of seeing says about who each of us are.
Art is not binary. Art is a brilliant spectrum. Art is an infinite space where all people, all experiences, and all truths exist – coexist – in the chaotic harmony of life and living. Art is aware and self-aware and forces us to be self-aware, too.
Art is not a zero sum game – it is not pie – the voice, experience, and truth of one does not cancel out, diminish, or reduce that of another. Art is the layered, prismatic, interconnected, interdependent, tensional push and pull of the pressure-filled nature of the universe.
Art is not isolationist. Art is communal. Art is connected and connection. Art forces us to acknowledge and confront our inescapable relationships with ourselves, each other, and our natural world.
Art does not silence. Art is a loud and echoing voice, encouraging more voices to speak, to be heard.
Art is education. It has lessons to teach us and we have lessons to teach through it. It is a multidirectional dialogue of learning, of deepening, of expanding endlessly beyond our conceivable bounds. Art pulls us into our full selves, embodying and engaging the vitality and enormity of all of our senses and all that we are.
Art is the vital and revolutionary balance of critique and feedback, support and nourishment, directing and flowing, holding tightly and letting go. It is the delicate, life-giving and life-affirming, exhausting and inspiring maternal work of conceiving, creating, nurturing, shifting, organizing, reorganizing, breaking, building, birthing, and raising over and over and over again.
Art is us. We are Art. Every single one of us – individual and collective. So we must speak – really speak. And we must listen – really listen. And we must take moments to suspend our own current opinions and look through the experiences and perspectives of another as if they were our own, and expect and embrace that we might very well be changed by them. We must be in conversation and self-aware reflection. Because all of this that is Art, that is us, is our truth. And we must take action, before it’s too late. Before all of this – all that we are, all that we and our children can be – is beaten down into submission, is censored, is silenced, is dismantled bit by bit and sold away for the power and profit of a few.
And for fucks sake, shut down the weaponized propaganda filters whose only intention is to remake each of us into an unquestioning good little soldier. Be an artist. Break that fucking box.
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