The Art of Protest and Protest Art

Get Up, Stand Up
Stand Up For Your Rights
Get Up, Stand Up
Don’t Give Up the Fight
- Peter Tosh

As I look around at current events and try to make sense of the incredibly surreal state of national politics, I don’t know that I can even begin to make sense of the recent election, or our national mood. As I mentioned in my last post, we must not lose hope. Artists are a great source of hope AND a great source for showing us who we are and what is happening in our world.

I woke up this morning feeling very much as though I did not want to get out of bed. There are some things going on at my workplace that have me extremely worried and on high alert for my own professional future, and when you combine that with the national mood, it makes one feel very much like not wanting to rise. So I did the one thing that I do want to do everyday – I made some art.

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With that in mind. I’ve been feeling that the most effective means of protest for me is to continue making art, and to make sure that art reflects what is happening around me. There have been plenty of times in my life when I did not want to be a political being, but more and more, I realize that there is no escaping politics, and burying one’s head in the sand is not an effective means of living in this world. We must rise up, every day, especially on the days when we least feel like it. Life demands our resistance, living demands we rise.

Being a woman in a world that is dominated by misogyny – misogyny so pervasive and so embedded in our culture that many do not even see it – has given me a unique perspective. Being a white professor in a black university has given me experiences and insights that most white people will never have, and has made me aware of a world that many will never see, and many will never even know exists. There is so much inequity in the world, and sometimes I despair that the majority of Americans are completely oblivious to it.

I am sharing all of this because this is where my passion resides right now, and probably for the next four years. I am going to continue to make art that is not only about all the things happening around us, but also about women being strong, humans being unified by the human experience and not by color or gender or sexual orientation. I am going to make art about Goddesses and Gods, about different ways of seeing and different ways of being in the world. Every day, I want to rise up and I want to make images that will make other want to do the same.

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When one of us rises, we all rise. May we rise together.

Namaste. Ashe. So Mote it Be.