California’s Creative Uplift
In this moment, we’re all adapting to significant change — some unexpected, and some long-awaited. It is a storm of challenges that make this moment in time truly unique.
We hear over and over how this moment is an opportunity for reinvention, and it is. I believe this is a time that will test our ability and willingness to look at redesign honestly and unflinchingly, to ask hard questions, to listen carefully to all voices, and to be willing to challenge ourselves with difficult discussions. This is our opportunity to responsively build toward needed change, to go beyond making gestures. It is our chance to innovate, create, grow, and heal.
This global pandemic is impacting the physical, mental, and economic well-being of us all, with disproportionate and devastating effects for our state’s most vulnerable communities. At the same time, there is a call for widespread institutional and social change to end racial inequity in our country that is amplified, increasingly sharply defined and starkly visible.
In times of crisis, artists are a vibrant source of hope and resilience. We turn to creative expression as a means of understanding and healing. The California Arts Council believes that the arts are a tool for transformation that lives within each of us — a tool that we can use to collaborate and build a better future together.
The arts and culture sector is among the hardest hit industries during the COVID-19 pandemic — and yet even while facing significant financial hardships, California’s creative community continues to be our dependable and fearless guides leading us into a new and reimagined future together.
In these past six months, artists and arts organizations throughout the state have persisted tirelessly as they continue to work within and for their communities, searching out new ways to present their creativity, delivering meaningful experiences and opportunities for engagement, sharing art that inspires, uplifts, teaches, and unites.
Artists continue to be at the forefront of social justice work today, as they always have, using their skills and talents to communicate universal truths, share lived experiences, to educate the public on important issues and current events, organize community gatherings, support crucial causes, and call us to action.
Arts and culture serve as the source of innovation for other sectors as well, bringing forward new ideas that are necessary in these times of social distancing, making it possible to be together even while we are apart — to envision a future for our schools and shift business practices within our workforces.
It is imperative that we think carefully about how redesign, reinvention, has the potential to leave people behind — those with disabilities or have varying degrees of access to, or familiarity with, technology; those who are geographically dispossessed from the rest of the state, both physically and in terms of digital resources. We must always make a conscious effort across the field to make sure new ways of experiencing arts and culture are as inclusive as possible. The National Endowment for the Arts has put together a useful resource for ensuring accessibility for webinars, livestreamed performances, virtual tours, and other digital events.
Our grantees are using state arts funding to connect people in beautiful and necessary ways right now. They are doing the careful thinking, redesigning and innovating to meet these unprecedented challenges. Over the coming weeks, the California Arts Council will use this space as a way to center and celebrate the voices of artists and cultural workers who are at the heart of our communities.
We want to share their stories of strength and hope, empathy and love, as continued inspiration — building resolve in this unique and difficult time. We look to their stories to help us feel connected to the heartbeat of our communities. We want to honor their dedication and perseverance as creative thinkers who strive each and every day to promote change, to push us forward, challenge us to do more, and to realize a different and better world for us all.
We invite you to follow along on social media as we present this new series to share the inspirational work of our arts communities far and wide, using the hashtag #CreativeUplift. And we welcome each of you to share your own experiences of art as a source of change, compassion, comfort, healing, and unity in your own communities using the same hashtag.
Follow the California Arts Council on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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