Hellos and Goodbyes at the OOI

The Office of Instigation (OOI) is the USDAC’s Organizing Team—the folks who plan and coordinate our national actions, shepherd our communications, cultivate partnerships, raise funds, connect and grow the network of Citizen Artists, create resources and learning opportunities, and do so much that’s needed to sustain and amplify the people-powered department’s work.

Today we are delighted to introduce three new people who are joining Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz and Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard in the OOI; and to express our gratitude to those who have given so much and are now moving on.

Please welcome:

Minister of Collaboration and Activation Gabrielle Uballez is a cultural organizer, educator, and art omnivore. Her passion for equitable arts access is rooted in 20 years of experience, at every level, in community-based arts and platforms that support artists of color. She most recently served as the executive director of Working Classroom, a grassroots arts organization of which she is an alumna.

Gabrielle will be working full-time on the USDAC’s organizing efforts, reaching out to Affiliates, Outposts, and in all the many ways individuals and organizations make the USDAC work for their local communities and for cultural democracy. "I knew I had to be a part of the USDAC when I saw the visionary Cabinet and network of affiliate organizations and Citizen Artists,” she told us. “These are people I will roll up my sleeves with to build a nationwide, grassroots movement toward cultural equity and belonging!" 

Gabrielle has served at and is associated with: the Studio Museum in Harlem; Crescendo Cultural at the National Museum of Mexican Art; the Western States Arts Federation Emerging Leaders of Color network; the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture Leadership Institute; the Creative Facilitation Gathering design team at the Academy for the Love of Learning; apprenticed under chef Zarela Martinez; grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts; and served on local community boards.

Gabrielle received her B.A. in Art and Art History from Pomona College and a certificate from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business Executive Program for Non-Profit Leaders. She is a proud Latina, wife, and mother of a Chinese-Chicanx child, currently living in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Tiffany Bradley is the part-time Chief of Implementation, helping with systems and social media to ensure that all of the USDAC’s moving parts work together. Her career reflects her lifelong love of the arts across disciplines and cultures. She is the founder of Colored Criticism, a media platform for cultural heritage stories. Her focus is intersectional, interpersonal, and interdisciplinary. Tiffany has worked in audience development at Race Forward, Americans for the Arts, and Fractured Atlas. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, Colorlines, Racialicious, and the Americans for the Arts blog. As a Fulbright scholar in Museum Studies, she worked with a variety of nonprofits in Israel and Palestine. She has studied at the American University in Cairo, the University of Haifa, and Al Quds University. Tiffany holds a B.A. in Africana Studies from Brown University.

"Since my first encounter with the USDAC,” said Tiffany, “I've known this group was committed to equity. I'm looking forward to connecting Citizen Artists across the country through social media, in-person events, and more!"

The USDAC is thrilled to be in a consulting relationship this year with Minister of Abundance Ericka Taylor, a writer, facilitator, and consultant based out of Washington, DC who has been helping us explore and develop systems that individual donors, foundations, and other funders can use to support the people-powered department’s work.

Born and raised in Nashville, TN, Ericka has spent the bulk of the last 20 years working for social justice organizations. Her career has spanned community organizing, philanthropy, and fundraising. She earned her BA in English from Cornell University and an MFA in Creative Writing, with a concentration in fiction, from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors or Steering Committees of the National Organizers Alliance, Progressive Technology Project, Youth Education Alliance, and the National Priorities Project and is currently a board member of the Western States Center, and La Clínica del Pueblo.

Why consult with the USDAC? “When I was growing up,” Ericka explained, “my dad was a photographer and painter, while my mom sang, my sister drew, and I wrote. There was never a question about the value of the arts. As an adult, I've maintained strong links to cultural work, but the social and economic justice fields I found myself in often didn't incorporate the arts. The USDAC's commitment to arts, culture, and justice made it clear that these were my people and this was work I could enthusiastically support.”

Welcome new OOI members Gabrielle, Tiffany, and Ericka!

Please join us in expressing heartfelt gratitude to our colleagues whose USDAC tenures are ending.

Mo Manklang, who has been USDAC Chief of Making Things Happen since late 2016—and has made so many things happen, from organizational systems to social media to our website redo—has been loving her work in Philadelphia as Communications Director with the U.S. Federation of Worker Coops so much, she’s made it full-time! This isn’t goodbye, because we hope and trust Mo will stay active and engaged as a Citizen Artist. Feel free to stay in touch with Mo at  mo@usworker.coop, and follow her on Twitter @momanklang.

A year of piloting our Regional Envoy model— three individuals reaching out on behalf of the USDAC in multi-state regions—taught us that we need more firmly established central infrastructure to scale sufficient resources into organizing and engagement at the regional level. Envoys Devon Kelley-Yurdin in the northeast; Yvette Hyater-Adams in the southeast, and Katherin Canton on the west coast have assisted local cultural organizing, offered workshops and trainings, researched local cultural development needs, and connected people to USDAC National Actions, all the while learning and growing together. We are grateful for their creativity, commitment, and critical contributions to the USDAC over the last year as we piloted something new. Their experience will be invaluable to our incoming Minister of Collaboration and Activation, and we look forward to connecting regularly with these powerful Citizen Artists.

You can too! Find Devon at devonkelley-yurdin.com, via email at devon.kelley.yurdin@gmail.com, or on Instagram @moodhair. Reach Yvette at  YHyater@gmail.com or by phone at (904) 372-3771. And find Katherin via LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/katherincanton  or on Twitter @streetscapes_KC .

Thank you Mo, Devon, Yvette, and Katherin! May the next steps on your path lead exactly where you want to go!

The Kudzu Project: Cultural Organizing Spreads!

Note: In November, Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard interviewed Margo Smith, of Charlottesville, Virginia. As a Citizen Artist, Margo originated The Kudzu Project, a guerrilla knitting project. Kudzu is a fast-growing perennial vine introduced to the U.S. from Japan more than 150 years ago. In the southern U.S., it’s not uncommon to see entire landscapes covered in kudzu; in fact, the vine can cover trees so completely that they die from light deprivation. Participants in this project followed patterns to create knitted kudzu leaves and vines that were assembled into a blanket to be draped over Confederate statues. Read on to learn how a work of art created for a USDAC National Action inspired the project and where it is headed.

Arlene Goldbard: How did The Kudzu Project come to be?

Margo Smith: Around the time of the violent white supremacist marches in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12, 2017, some people I'm friends with on Facebook in the arts community posted Art Became the Oxygen: An Artistic Response Guide. The little image that came up with it was by Dave Loewenstein.

Arlene: Yes, Dave originally created a series of “Defunct Monuments” postcards for our national action #RevolutionofValues (click the link and scroll down to see them) last April. They show the Wall Street bull (materialism), a tank (militarism), and a Confederate statue (racism), all completely overgrown with a green vine. We thought they’d be useful for people who were contemplating artistic response to the marches in Charlottesville and their aftermath.

Created by Dave Loewenstein for #RevolutionOfValues 2017.

Margo: That image stuck in my mind. I'm a knitter and even before August 11th and 12th, I’d been thinking, is there some kind of knitting intervention we could do with the Confederate statues? I was driving to work one day and it just all of a sudden hit me. The image popped in my mind. I thought we could realize the vision that this artist had of vine-covered statues. And then I thought, “Kudzu, oh my God, it's got to be kudzu because that is just so Southern!”

It flooded in my mind, all of these ideas. Call it The Kudzu Project and get people to knit the leaves and put all this Kudzu together in a way that we could blanket a statue. Before I even had any partners or participants, I just thought to grab the social media for The Kudzu Project. I don't think I slept for two nights because I was so energized by the idea. Then I went and got some advice from some people who I knew did guerrilla knitting.

I shared the idea with a few people close to me. Not everybody liked it at first. Partly I think because of the Confederate statues, the idea that well, they're not all bad, you know? I had ancestors who fought on the Confederate side of the Civil War and on the Union side as well. After August 11th and 12th, I went to a meeting that was held over at the University of Virginia where we discussed Art Became the Oxygen, a kind of brain-storming session about how artists could respond.

[Note: This discussion followed the USDAC’s Citizen Artist Salon on artistic response; folks in Charlottesville tuned in, then had their own planning meeting. You can enter your name here to access the Salon recording and do the same!]

I alluded to the idea just briefly in the meeting, but I didn't explain it yet because I wasn't sure just how it was going to happen. A guerrilla knitter advised me to try to keep the idea a secret; that would be part of its impact. I did a little bit of knitting to figure out how to make a kudzu leaf and came up with a pattern. I circulated that through my own knitting network. I went the yarn stores and asked them to help circulate it, but just among people we knew so that there wouldn't be any risk of it being made public prematurely.

Arlene: When did you cover the first statue?

Margo: The first one we did for practice at the cemetery at the University of Virginia. It's a Confederate cemetery. We figured it was about the same size as the statue in front of the courthouse but it's not such a public space. We thought we could get it up and get it off without drawing a lot of attention. We tried that the weekend before we actually launched The Kudzu Project. It gave us an idea of how it would fit on the statue and how we could hang it and that we needed to add a little bit more Kudzu in various places. It went really well.

Kudzu installation, Confederate cemetery, University of VA, Charlottesville, 17 November 2017

Arlene: And then the Albemarle County Courthouse on November 9, 2017?

Margo: Yes. We went in the very early hours of the morning to the Confederate soldier statue in front of the courthouse. There was nobody about. It was raining, so putting it up was a little difficult. The rain made it heavier. Then—this is the part where I really learned a big lesson—we left very briefly. We were waiting for it to get light enough to take photos. When we got back someone had already taken it down. We should have secured it on the statue, wrapped it around the rifle or something.

We put it up on November 9th because that was the day that Christopher Cantwell—who's been called by the press “the crying Nazi”—he was having his preliminary hearing at the Albemarle County Courthouse. That courthouse is right in the heart of Charlottesville, just blocks away from where the Unite the Right rally was supposed to be held. I thought it would be good to send a message because the statues were the starting point for the KKK and Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville. There might be press there and it might be an opportunity to show a community response. I was also hopeful that the people at the courthouse would have their hands full and maybe not be able to do anything about it straightaway, so it would be seen by more people. We figured it would be taken down and we might not even get it back.

Arlene: Wow, that would have been a loss! A lot went into creating the kudzu blanket, didn’t it?

Margo: Yes, people from all over did this knitting and sent it in—a lot of local people and then people as far away as Philadelphia. Hundreds, probably thousands of hours of knitting all told. We got photos of the installation. But when we went back, there was just this one single strand of Kudzu hanging from the rifle. It's kind of pathetic but we got a picture of that too. Then I went home and I wrote up the press release, including the fact that it was taken down. [Note: You can find links to press coverage here.]

Even though the idea started with me, there was a group of us figuring out how to do the installation and actually assembling the project. We ended up sewing all this knitted Kudzu and vines onto netting to get the drape you want but still be able to see the statue underneath. A few people helped in such an enormous way, but don't want their names out there.

Arlene: Say a little more about guerrilla knitting. What is it?

Margo: Guerrilla knitting is the unauthorized installation of knitted projects in a public setting. I wasn't aware of it until a few years back, even before I started knitting, when I saw some knitted tree trunks in Melbourne, Australia. I thought they're charming, they're fascinating, wonderful. I guess my first experience with this kind of political knitting and protest was the pussy hat project for the Women’s March last January. I put out on social media that I’d knit pussy hats for the next four people who tell me they want them. I ended up knitting seven pussy hats.

Arlene: And the future?

Margo: I'm interested in future projects like this where we can make a statement and do things collectively that'll be really impactful because of the number of people that they involve and the number of people that they reach. It can be a big visual sign of resistance or support.

I haven't heard from anybody yet who wants to do a Kudzu installation in their community. A lot of people here want to be a part of it going forward. I want to propose this to Charlottesville City Council, to see if they would allow us to cover one or both of the equestrian statues with kudzu. That would be a larger project that would involve more people and put it out there as an authorized project. So it wouldn't be a guerrilla knitting project so much; it would be an authorized art installation involving people from here and those elsewhere who might want to send in their kudzu in solidarity with the people of Charlottesville.

I don't know whether or not that's even possible. I do know the city council was entertaining ideas for ways to cover the statues other than the black plastic bags that are on them now which just look like giant garbage bags. So we'll see. Because we still have the original Kudzu Project blanket, we are hoping to deploy it again.

I'd love to see The Kudzu Project have more use in other communities too. If there are people reading this who might be using art in an activist way and have an idea, get in touch! Just write to thekudzuproject@gmail.com.

Arlene: You might want to have that as one of your website’s menu items, right? “Invite The Kudzu Project to blanket your objectionable statues.”

Implicit in what you're saying is the threshold here is different than other kinds of activism because you do something that gives you pleasure and that you have skill at and that you enjoy and is pretty benign—knitting. But then you get to deploy it in a way that can awaken awareness and interest other people in the issues. That seems really fun and effective and important. I just love that you did this. Thanks for talking with us!

Note: for the latest from The Kudzu Project, check out this story on a “flash installation” of kudzu at Robert E. Lee High School in Staunton, VA, a small town 40 miles west of Charlottesville.

2018 People’s State of the Union: Prepare to Share Your Stories!

“I was visiting my mother for tea when the cable repair man came. Our small talk somehow led to immigrants, and we learned quickly he was not fond of them. He dove with both feet into racist statements, partly out of ignorance and being misinformed, but mostly out of fear. He thought he was safe saying these things in front of us, because we were white. We couldn’t possibly be immigrants. 

He was wrong. I decided to tread lightly, planting seeds of doubt in his mind. I spoke calmly with him, getting him to agree with me on basic things, then applying them to immigrants. This destroyed his argument, and I could often see looks of confusion on his face as he found himself struggling to determine which of the two contradictory beliefs he held were true. Speaking to my mother in our native tongue, then pointing out that she was not a citizen seemed to shock him. How could that beautiful blonde be something as terrible as an immigrant? Are immigrants really that terrible? In the end, I informed him that the only non-immigrants are Native Americans. He clearly forgot about them.”

            “Cable Man,” a story from the #PSOTU2017 Story Portal (Check it out: you will find hundreds of stories from people of many ages, races, cultures, locations, genders, and orientations throughout the U.S.)

It’s People’s State of the Union (PSOTU) time again! The USDAC is inviting folks across the U.S. to host Story Circles between 25 January and 4 February 2018. In this fourth year of the people-powered department’s annual civic ritual and story-sharing project, we hope that you will join the 350 communities that took part in previous years. Host your own Story Circle or upload your individual story directly to the Story Portal, which will launch on January 25th, 2018, so stay tuned!

A Story Circle event can be a few friends sharing stories across a kitchen table or a hundred people gathered in a public setting, perhaps meeting for the first time. Absolutely everything you need to know to host an event can be found in the free, downloadable #PSOTU2018 Toolkit. Just scroll down on this page and enter your email to download. You’ll also get access to the PSOTU2018 Public Folder, full of great stuff such as social media buttons, model press information, customizable flyers like those illustrating this blog, and even a lesson plan!

For #PSOTU2018, tellers are invited to share first-person stories in response to three main prompts:

• Share a story about an experience that gave you insight into the state of our union. 
• Share a story about a time you felt a sense of belonging—or the opposite—to this nation or your community. 
• Share a story of an experience that gave you hope in the past year. 

Prompts can also be tailored to a specific community or issue. For example, net neutrality is in jeopardy right now, with proposals being floated that would change an open internet to one with different levels of access conditioned on being able to pay. If you’re part of a community that cares about access, one of your prompts might be “Share a story about an experience that gave you insight into the state of free speech in the U.S.”

Other topics are full of energy right now too, for example:

• Women’s safety from sexual assault and harassment. What if your Story Circle used the following prompt? “Share a story about an experience that gave you insight into the safety and rights of women in the U.S.”
• The rights of Muslims and other religious minorities to full cultural citizenship and belonging. Share a story about a time you felt that true belonging—or the opposite—was extended to religious minorities in this nation or your community. 

Every year, we hear from many participants that Story Circles offer a powerful and simple way to connect people, even those who seem to have little in common. In a Story Circle everyone gets equal uninterrupted time to share a first-person story, usually two or three minutes apiece. Listeners give each teller undivided attention, allowing a breath after each story for it to settle. Those factors often have a large impact in equalizing participation; contrast this to a free-for-all where the loudest or most powerful person hogs the space. After everyone has shared a story, the members of each Circle reflect on what has been revealed by the body of stories.

Why is the simple invitation to sit in circles, share stories, and listen fully so powerful? Based on the hundreds of Story Circles we’ve seen, two main answers come to mind.

It can be a rare and delicious experience to receive full attention, to inhabit the space to tell a story without fearing interruption or contradiction. Too often, people are texting while you talk, or waiting for you to stop so their turn can start, or looking over your shoulder for someone they’d rather engage. The full attention and permission of a Story Circle offer an easy antidote.

The PSOTU motto says it all: “Democracy is a conversation, not a monologue.” We tend to defer so much to those deemed experts, privileging official findings, numbers, professional jargon. Most public conversations generate tons of opinion, and opinion can always be contested. Who wants to be in a shouting-match? But stories are different. When you start with, “I want to tell you a story about something that happened to me” and tell an actual story, with a beginning, middle, and end, each storyteller’s truth emerges to stand alongside the rest. When the group reflects on what has been learned, the richness and power can be surprising.

What if you just can’t host a Story Circle this year? No worries! When #PSOTU2018 launches on January 25th, we’ll provide a link to the Story Portal where you can share your individual story including text, video, and/or images. Your story will take its place amidst hundreds of first-person accounts that help us all know the state of union, connect to the way we want it to be, and recognize that we are not alone. We can’t wait to read your story!