Providence artist Jordan Seaberry asks: ‘WTF Can Artists Do During a Fascist Takeover?’

“A local artist poses the question “WTF Can Artists Do During a Fascist Takeover?” – that’s the title of a new web comic by Providence-based artist, educator and organizer Jordan Seaberry. He joined me in the studio to talk about the inspiration of the comic and his advice for artists.

James Baumgartner:  So, Jordan, what’s your answer to the question? What can Artists do? 

Jordan Seaberry:  The first thing we can do is we can choose a side and we can choose to put our artistic practices to service for that side. People think, a lot of artists in particular think about polarization as the enemy, as an obstacle, and I would love to be polarized against fascism.

Baumgartner:  You published a web comic about this recently. Can you describe it for me? 

Seaberry:  This was a part of a project called Vital Conversations, which is a project of an organization I work with called the US Department of Arts and Culture, which is not, thankfully, a federal agency. We are not DOGE-able. We essentially are a performance piece. We’re a group of artists and cultural organizers who are prefiguring what we would want that agency to do if the federal government had ever actually made a U.S. Department of Arts and Culture. And so a lot of us on that team, we looked around at the world and felt really confused and hopeless about the political situation and how our own individual artistic practices, how our communities and networks might fit into that. And so we decided to each take on a project where we follow our own interests and connections and questions to have conversations about what can we do to actually stem the tide of the authoritarian takeover we’re living through.”

Listen to the full interview at The Public’s Radio / NPR’s Artscape.

Jordan Seaberry’s nod to the WPA is a labor of love

“In these days of image inundation, it’s hard to appreciate the time and labor it takes to make a painting. To the painter, the artwork may represent a relationship more than it does a commodity. And Jordan Seaberry’s watercolor paintings at Steven Zevitas Gallery are all about the work of relationships, and its fruits.

Seaberry is also co-director of power and possibility at the US Department of Arts and Culture, a grassroots network based in Providence that encourages “creativity and social imagination,” according to its website. He considers the roles artists play in society, and what a robust federal cultural policy might look like. The compositions of these paintings were inspired by photographs from the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, which put tens of thousands of artists to work.”

Read more at The Boston Globe

USDAC, the Arts & Mutual Aid: “Artists and Healers as Essential to Recovery from Crisis: A Reflection on Trying Times”

“As we have seen time and time again, when the governments fail us, it’s the people who come together and help communities survive…”  —Raquel de Anda, panel facilitator

ZOOM — Presented by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, the discussion centered on the intersection of arts and mutual aid and what it means to create and be in community with one another. Emphasizing the ways that are anti-oppressive and that uplift and respect one another in community, the panel featured jackie sumell of The Solitary Gardens & Prisoner’s Apothecary, Kristina Wong and the Auntie Sewing Squad, Ana Rodney of MomCares, and interdisciplinary artist Taja Lindley. All whose work exemplified art, healing, and mutual aid efforts through the lenses of abolition, radical care, reproductive justice, transformative justice, and racial justice.

With one newscycle crisis after another, Artists and Healers as Essential to Recovery from Crisis was a timely discussion of how artists and healers have taken action towards mutual aid efforts on local, national, and global scales. In a role reversal between politicians and artists, many politicians have brought spectacle and drama while artists have coordinated the emergency care, activism, movement, and mutual aid efforts for their communities. 

Entering the Zoom space with 121 attendees, we were welcomed by the USDAC staff with somatic breath, land acknowledgement, and framing of mutual aid. Brienne Colston, USDAC Co-Director of Community Healing and Transformation, introduced to attendees this statement:

“Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. These systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse.”

Read more at New England Theatre Geek

Artists Transforming Society: the People’s WPA

Despite its name, the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) is not a government agency.

Rather, it is an independent organization formed around the importance of arts and culture to the health of communities (and, by extension, to any nation), gave themselves the name of governmental department — in part, to make the point that there should be such a department and also to demonstrate what it looks like when we get the work done instead of waiting for the government to form it.

The USDAC holds that artists, art and culture are important beyond their entertainment or decoration: “Art and culture can build empathy, create a sense of belonging, and activate the social imagination and civic agency needed to make real change. When we feel seen, when we know that our stories and imaginations matter, we are more likely to bring our full creative selves to the work of social change.”

Recently, the USDAC released the “People’s WPA,” an inspiring and visually rich compilation of essays, toolkits and 25 real stories of artist-led and community-led efforts in cities and towns across the US to advance change, health and well-being. These change stories span a wide range of issues, concerns and dreams, and have been clustered within the publication into 7 themes: Healing, Nourishment, Regeneration, Remembering, Liberation, Truth Telling and Deepening Democracy. A poster accompanies each story to illustrate and celebrate it while tying it to the larger transformative theme the story has brought to life.

Read more at Abundant Communities

A Bipartisan Bill Aims to Assist Arts Workers

A new bipartisan bill in Congress proposes a $300 million federal grants and commissions program for art workers. The Creative Economy Revitalization Act (CERA) is a joint effort between hundreds of cultural organizations to stimulate the creative economy through public art projects across the United States.

Introduced in the House of Representatives on August 13, the CERA is modeled after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), two of the largest federal jobs programs of the 20th century. The bill amends the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2017, which stimulated public employment by $3.3 billion, to incorporate the program for fiscal years 2022 to 2024. The Department of Labor, in consultation with the National Endowment for the Arts, will award select individuals and organizations with payments dependent on required labor, with a 5% cap on administrative costs.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), who brought the bill to the House floor, is backed by Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA), with Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA), Rosa Delauro (D-CT), and Chellie Pingree (D-ME) signed on as co-sponsors. On September 28, the bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM). It has received endorsements from 175 arts organizations, including the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Freelancers Union, AFL-CIO’s Department of Professional Employees, PEN America, and the US Department of Arts and Culture.

Read more at Hyperallergic

All D65 meetings may start with ‘Land Acknowledgement’

The District 65 resolution uses some of the same wording as the Norton measure, but the key group advocating for land acknowledgements around the country is something called the U.S Department of Arts and Culture. That may sound like a government agency, but it’s not.

Instead, the group describes itself as “a people-powered department,” a grassroots organization of activists with the long-term goal of “nothing short of a paradigm shift from a consumer to a creator culture, from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ to a society rooted in equity, empathy and interconnectedness.”

The organization has a “Cabinet” with Secretaries titled, among other things, the “Minister of Public Sentiment” and the “Minister of Moral Imagination.”

The organization’s website offers an “Honor Native Land Virtual Resource Pack,” which includes virtual backgrounds for online meetings. Some District 65 board members had logos behind them during Monday’s meeting that match ones offered by the group, though no one on the Board indicated where the logos came from or if the District had received any information from the group.

Read more at Evanston Now

The People’s WPA Isn’t Waiting Around for a Future 'New Deal'

As Inauguration Day inches closer, so does the reported promise of a “new deal” presidency to combat the devastation of COVID-19 and the proposed cuts in arts funding from the outgoing administration. But rather than waiting on a promise that may never be entirely realized, artists and community organizers across the country have coalesced around a grassroots new deal of their own—the People’s WPA.

Conceived and organized by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC), the People’s WPA is a project designed to address the creative needs of culture workers and change-makers with more immediacy than any official government program could provide. Since 2013, the USDAC has specialized in creating toolkits and policy papers for community-based creatives to apply to their own projects. By assuming the trappings of an official government entity (which it emphatically is not), the USDAC makes a compelling case for the importance of the arts as community and capacity-building hubs.

Read more at KQED