"We are chronicling the link between how we memorialize collective history and how we experience personal history, how silence and suffering in one realm may reproduce silence in the other. Authoritarian structures in the family and individual mirror those in the political world. Amnesia in the political realm can reinforce silencing in personal life. The retrieval of memory and self-expression through the arts can disrupt such a system." -Watkins & Shulman
Art can be used to share feelings and emotions, explanations when words fail us, but it can also be used to create change within lives and within society. Art is often moving in a way that explanation is not. It creates emotion within us and leads us to a sense of empathy that otherwise might have escaped us. - Which in turn can often bring humans together in the name of a cause, in the name of change.
When I consider art that was intended to bring change, I consider a lot of the ads from my childhood. I consider billboards. I consider statues and even graffiti.
Some of my favorites are...
I love this for the fearlessness of it. The fact that she's a child and a girl really moves me because there is such power in moving past fear.
This... gives me chills still. Cocaine is as much a death sentence as a gun to your head. I feel like it's these kinds of ads that really shifted my generation away from the drug scene, much more than programs like D.A.R.E.
This is one that my oldest son sent me. It feels like "turn on phone, remove brain" which is often how it feels both when I see what/how some people post also how they behave when their phones are out. I was working for the public library as the cellphone scene really took hold and we used to joke about the zombie apocalypse, watching people walk slowly with their phones in front of their faces, paying no attention to the world around them.
I also feel that sometimes people feel like messages are being "crammed down their throats" when it's something people are using words to communicate to them but when it's "just" art, just something you look at that makes you feel something with some kind of context... That it makes it a little more digestible, I suppose.
There is so much happening in the world these days that I feel like we don't want to look at or think about. That we don't know how to view or begin to approach thoughtfully. But maybe producing art is one way to make the issues at hand a little more approachable because good knows we can't change it by ignoring it.
This will be the first entry in a journal for my MA class Explorations in Creativity with Dr. Nisha Gupta. It is designed to document our journey each week: the activity, how it ties in with what we're learning about, our experience of it, etc. Because it is our first week, there were no readings associated yet. We were asked to write a short, cinematic description of a time when we had experienced a sense of creative genius. - I was immediately concerned: had I ever experienced this? What were moments in which I had been creative and felt really proud of what I had done/made? Of the moments that came to mind, they all had one concept in common: I had created a story for my kids. - Not as in we sat down and I told them a story before bed, but as in I created some piece of their imaginary world. I chose to share the story of the tooth faerie, of my 2nd born son's sincere attachment to this charact...
Creativity takes courage. - Henri Matisse This semester has been a whirlwind. We have read an incredible amount and thought even more. The moments in which we were asked to consider different aspects of creativity were innumerable ... and the moments in which we were asked to engage in creativity were invaluable . In trying to come up with what to say about my experiences these last sixteen weeks, I almost find myself at a loss. We have explored what it means to be creative from the smallest increments to ones so vast that they change the face of humanity forever and we have talked about ways in which we can move across those realms, taking our creative endeavors from private to existence-changing. Do I think that I will ever create anything that changes the world? I want to say no, not in the ways that ...
"The techniques involved are not some esoteric branch of witchcraft that must be reserved for those with PhD degrees in psychology. When the ideas are made sufficiently concrete and explicit, the scientific foundations of psychology can be grasped by sixth-grade children." (Miller, 1969, on accessibility of phenomenology) While this week has not been entirely about accessibility, this is an issue that has been brought up time and again. What should people have access to? What can they understand? Is there potential danger involved in making "Everything" accessible to the masses in terms of psychology or, in Miller's case, phenomenology? The truth is, everything has room to be dangerous. Fizzy drinks, warm blankets, walks outside... These are not weapons but people manage to hurt or even kill themselves with them every day. We can't pack people up in cotton wool and expect things to go well. I feel like the same t...
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