"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.
"If someone witnessed my behavior at the time and labeled it a manic episode, I would not blame them. Certainly, for some time afterward, having been trained as a clinical psychologist within the Western medical model, I wondered if I was bipolar. Early into my spiritual emergency, I called a psychologist friend and described to him my symptoms. He said that I sounded like his manic-depressive patients in the in-patient unit and that if I went to a hospital, they would probably medicate me. Instead of checking myself into a psychiatric unit, I brought myself to a Jungian psychoanalyst." - Dr. Nisha Gupta Last week, we spoke at length about the creative mind and madness. What constitutes creativity has been a question that has led us along journeys. What constitutes madness feels as though it could take a similar route. Some of the greatest creative minds of our time have experienced periods of intense upheaval and emotion that resulted in amazing pieces of art, music, poetry...
"There are numerous references within medicine, anthropology, and the arts to the earliest healing applications of expressive modalities. For example, the Egyptians are reported to have encouraged people with mental illness to engage in artistic activity (Fleshman & Fryrear, 1981); the Greeks used drama and music for its reparative properties (Gladding, 1992); and the story of King Saul in the Bible describes music’s calming attributes. Later, in Europe during the Renaissance, English physician and writer Robert Burton theorized that imagination played a role in health and well-being, while Italian philosopher de Feltre proposed that dance and play were central to children’s healthy growth and development (Coughlin, 1990)" - Cathy A. Malchoidi It seems as though, without even meaning to, our species has found art, music, drama, and dance as ways to communicate feelings for which we had no real words or no words of our own to present. Before we knew it was ...
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...
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