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

This land is your land: US art world acknowledge Native American land rights - The Art Newspaper

Situated at the so-called Indian Beach Park, it is hard to forget that the Pulse Art Fair, like most enterprises based in Miami, is sitting on lands formerly inhabited by people from the Cherokee, Miccosukee and Seminole tribes, among others.

This is why the New York-based gallery Accola Griefen noted in an Instagram post that “we gather and work this week on the traditional land of the Seminole and Tequesta people, past and present” before opening their Pulse booth for business this week. Although the gallery’s co-founder Kat Griefen acknowledges that it is “a very small gesture”, the act of land acknowledgement, which can be as simple as noting the tribes indigenous to the region out loud or in print, has been gaining traction among art dealers and organisations across the US.

Read more at The Art Newspaper

On This Land: Dance Presenters Honor Manhattan’s First Inhabitants - The New York Times

Routine at public gatherings in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the custom of Indigenous land acknowledgment, or acknowledgment of country, has only recently started to gain traction in the United States outside of tribal nations. In New York City the practice is sporadic but growing, occasionally heard at high-profile cultural and educational institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and New York University. A land acknowledgment of sorts has even made it to Broadway, embedded in the prelude to Young Jean Lee’s play “Straight White Men.”

Read more at The New York Times

The USDAC imagines an equitable, sustainable economy for all - Creative Exchange Blog

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) is a grassroots cultural organization with a national network of citizen artists, affiliate organizations, and outposts. The work of the USDAC is expansive and ranges everything from national policy platform development to neighborhood-focused local initiatives, but the overarching vision of the USDAC to be a “people-powered…action network inciting creativity and social imagination to shape a culture of empathy, equity, and belonging.” Creative Exchange spoke with USDAC co-founder and “Chief Policy Wonk” Arlene Goldbard for more detail about the NEC member organization’s many-pronged efforts at shaping and promoting an equitable and sustainable creativity-powered economy.

Read more from Creative Exchange

Art meets Activism in Dave Loewenstein’s Works - Lawrence-Journal World

Even if you don’t know who Dave Loewenstein is, it’s highly likely that you’ve come across his murals, which often stretch the length of the walls of Lawrence parks, schools, buildings, passageways and elsewhere. In 2017, Loewenstein, responding to a call to action from the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, which is not a federal agency but a “loose collective,” as he describes it, created a series of three postcards inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s antiwar speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." 

Read more at Lawrence-Journal World

Alum Chalks it up at Imagining America on Campus - UC Davis Arts

“Talking Heart” is a chalkboard mural I painted live at the People’s State of the Union, a storytelling event hosted by Imagining America at University of California, Davis, on the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 2. This annual event, held in concert with the grassroots arts organization US Department of Arts and Culture, invites people across the United States to define the “State of the Union” — near the time of the presidential speech by the same name — in story circles, where they share experiences from their own lives.

Read more from UC Davis Arts

Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, Explained - Teen Vogue

By now, many know that the colonization myth we learned in school doesn’t tell the whole story of how the Americas were settled. In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but what he discovered was not a “New World” — it was one inhabited by millions of indigenous people. Living in villages, bands, and confederacies, their traditional territories spanned the entire continent. Indigenous people still live among us, yet how many of us could name the specific tribe or nation whose land we live on?

Read more at Teen Vogue

People Urged to Relate Experiences Sunday - The Marietta Times

The State of the Union is being re-imagined as something more personal, more local, more community-oriented by a Marietta artist organizing an event coming Sunday. Based on a project called The People’s State of the Union, the event — called Social Justice Sunday — will invite local residents to tell their stories, any stories of their lives in the Mid-Ohio River Valley, in a setting inspired by the Native American story circle.

Read more at the Marietta Times

The Arts Center unveils People's State of the Union Next Week - Corvallis Gazette Times

The president of the United States gives his State of the Union address next Tuesday. Mid-valley residents can have their say the next evening at the People's State of the Union. Community members can tell their stories or listen to others from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31, at The Arts Center, says Jen Hernandez-Cornelius of the center.

Read more at the Corvallis Gazette Times

Parrish Art Museum To Host People's State Of The Union Story Circle - The East Hampton Press

Friday at the Parrish Art Museum, local residents attending the People’s State of the Union Story Circle will break off into small groups, each with a notetaker and poets. Sitting in a circle, one by one, the participants will share with their group a two-minute story that speaks to the state of the nation.

Read more at The East Hampton Press & The Southampton Press

 

Share your story for 'People's State of the Union' - National Catholic Reporter

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture hosts a People’s State of the Union. I only recently learned that there is a U.S. Department of Arts and Culture. Well, it is people-powered, not a government agency. Its purpose is to incite creativity and social imagination "to shape a culture of empathy, equity, and belonging." 

Read more at National Catholic Reporter

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