18. The power of creativity
The power of creativity is the power to reshape worlds according to our own vision. Out of the materials available — be they words or notes or scraps — we invent something that never before existed, or we put our personal stamp on something familiar so that it is perceived anew. We can give voice to what couldn’t be spoken, reframe experience through a different lens, form a connection with someone we do not know.
Whether you imagine a public life for your creations or use them to make everyday life more special, the power of creativity is a light that glows inside each one of us.
How do you experience your creativity? Is it the spark of an idea that catches fire? Is it a vision that appears to you in a dream or while you’re out for a walk? Is it a phrase that is whispered to you in your mind? Do you look at something and intuitively know how it might look better or work better? Is it a deep joy that comes from moving your body, assembling a bouquet of flowers, or combining ingredients to make a meal?
How do you exercise your creativity? Do you consciously work in an art form, or are you the person who is always decorating or inventing recipes or making up little songs as you run errands? Do you have a dream of your work going out into the world or do you prefer to keep it for your own enjoyment, writing in a journal or singing in the shower?
When I was a child, you would find me dancing in front of the hallway mirror or singing to the music on a record album. I liked to paint and craft things out of clay or fabric. In kindergarten, I got the title role in “Peter and the Wolf” because even though I was a girl, I was the only one in my class whose voice could be heard at the back of the auditorium. I sang in the school choir. In the seventh grade our teacher asked us to make a report about a career that we imagined ourselves doing one day; my report was about being a writer. In junior high, I taught myself to play guitar. In high school, I studied a performing arts curriculum and planned to pursue that in college.
Like many well-meaning parents, mine were fearful of my concentrating exclusively on a creative profession. They were working-class people; they were accustomed to making compromises for survival. “Why don’t you do that and something else too?” my mother pleaded. “That way you’ll be able to support yourself.” She wasn’t wrong. Most creative professionals in the United States need other jobs to make ends meet, whether it’s teaching or a position in arts management or something entirely unrelated to the arts. I am no exception to that.
Our conception of creativity, though, should not be limited to professions or products that can be monetized. You are expressing creativity when you bring fresh flowers to brighten a dreary room, when you add an unusual spice to a pie you’re baking, when you harmonize with the song on the radio on your morning commute.
Creativity is an approach to life; it allows us to perceive possibilities to remake the world around us. Creativity offers us the power to transform our reality.
As a writer, I’ve seen that being able to tell my story, to speak my truth, gave me a power over my experience that I did not have when I was silent. Writing about my incest experience, for example, gave me the power to transform it. I was no longer the voiceless victim, marked by this thing that had been done to me; writing about it, I became a survivor, the one who controlled the story, including the outcome.
Can you think of a time when you transformed a situation with your creativity, whether it was the song you made up to calm your kids when they were fretful, or putting together an outfit with unexpected pairings that made the occasion seem festive, or making a work meeting more fun by having everyone wear silly hats?
So, who gets to tell their story? Who gets to be creative?
In ancient cultures, including those of ancient Greece, China, and India, creativity was seen as the province of the Divine. It wasn’t until the rise of humanism, during the Renaissance in Europe, that “great men” were believed to be capable of creating. By the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment in Europe, creativity began to be linked to the imagination, but this was still considered the province of exceptional men. In fact, a distinction was drawn between “talent” and “genius.” One might have skill or talent, but significant creativity was defined in such a way that it could be attributed to only a few who were white, upper class, and male.
Women rarely had opportunities to pursue creativity as a vocation; they were denied education and access to the professional sphere and expected to devote their time to childrearing and running a household. Women’s creative products (needlework, pottery, and basketry, for example) were dismissed as “utilitarian” or “handicrafts” because they had practical uses, no matter how beautiful or well-made. Additionally, when women did make art, those products were too often attributed to their husbands and brothers or to “anonymous.” In her 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
If you had gone to art school in the early 1970s or earlier, you would likely have studied art history using the text, Janson’s History of Art. At that time, this tome included no women artists. No Artemesia Gentileschi, no Mary Cassatt, no Rosa Bonheur, no Käthe Kollwitz, no Frida Kahlo — all now considered master artists after being reclaimed by feminist scholars. You would have been led to believe that no woman had ever produced anything of value to art history.
If you were a woman who had gone to art school in the 1970s, you might have been told by the instructor that you were wasting your time, because in the end you were just going to get married. You might have been told that the issues you wanted to address in your work were trivial, of no interest to society. You might have been ignored or subjected to scathing critiques designed to discourage you into quitting. You might have been sexually harassed by fellow students or professors.
Have you ever been discouraged from pursuing your creativity because you felt your content or your identity wasn’t valued?
My own experience was not in art school but in university theater programs. In my first, I was denied roles because I wasn’t blonde and slender, because I was assertive and expected to be treated like an equal. In my second program, there was an expectation that I would sleep with the artistic director. I began to despair that I would never have the opportunity to express my creativity in a public way.
In response, I did what many feminists and people of color did in the 1970s; I started making theater on my own. Rather than try to make headway in existing institutions where the sexism and racism was entrenched, women artists, artists of color, and LGBTQ artists began to create their own opportunities to present their work, establishing theaters, galleries, publishing companies, bookstores, and record labels.
Through these efforts to establish alternative artistic outlets, community was being built among the artists as well as among the audience. In seeing our lives and experience reflected in cultural products, sometimes for the first time, we begin to gain an expanded sense of identity and pride, and to bond with others who share that identity.
Have you come across creative products — books or music, movies or images — that really resonated with your experience or validated who you are? What do you remember about the effect this had on you?
The Woman’s Building was founded in this same spirit. Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, and Sheila de Bretteville had been teaching in a feminist art program at CalArts. They tried to encourage women students to explore the content that was important to them, to take risks and make bold statements. But students would leave those classrooms and receive discouraging feedback or outright ridicule from their other instructors and fellow students.
The founders determined that they needed to create an independent institution for women’s art education, the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW). They further decided they wanted a strong alliance with the many feminist activities taking place throughout Los Angeles and decided to rent an entire building — the Woman’s Building, the ultimate “room of one’s own” — to house the FSW. Not only were there classes and workshops offered, but gallery exhibitions, performances, readings and lectures, film and video screenings, dances, conferences, and rallies. Opening in 1973, the Woman’s Building soon became a hub of feminism and a symbol of women’s creativity around the world.
It was at the Woman’s Building that I came to understand creativity not just as an impulse or a talent, but a power that could help one to reshape perception and influence culture and thereby change the world. Women’s voices and experiences had been excluded from mainstream culture. By projecting our viewpoints and visions into the world, we believed society itself would shift as it incorporated those perspectives.
Have you found an environment or a context in which it feels safe to explore your own creativity? It might not be an entire building; it might be a class, a community center, a project, a teacher, or a group of friends. If you have, what effect has this had on your perception of yourself as a creative person?
I encountered many important ideas about creativity during my time at the Woman’s Building that I have carried with me in my own creative practice and shared with the students I teach:
• Creativity is a power that is available to everyone; it only needs to be cultivated. Creativity is the ability to produce original and unusual ideas, to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns within or make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena and to generate solutions. If we are forced to always accept the status quo and never question it, if we are never asked for our ideas, creativity stagnates.
• Creativity thrives best in a climate of collaboration and mutual support, in community. Too often we hear the myth of the “lone genius,” as if a creative idea springs fully formed into the head of a (usually) male artist, who executes it without significant input or assistance from anyone. This not only makes us feel there’s something wrong with us if we ask for help; it also leads to a proprietary approach to creativity and creative products; one feels “ownership” of an idea and may feel competitive about defending that property and any monetizing of it. If, instead, creativity is exercised collaboratively, the project benefits from the input of many; in addition, all the participants grow from the exchange.
• Creativity occurs in the conceptualization and development of an idea, which may coincide with the production of a tangible artifact. However, creativity does not require a product. Many acts of creativity are ephemeral — ideas, moments, or something tangible that exists fleetingly, like a flower arrangement or a snow sculpture. I had the chance to visit Spello, Italy, during the Infiorata Festival. Most of the town participates in creating works of art composed entirely of flowers on the streets throughout town. Families stay up all night to assemble their creations, and visitors roam the streets admiring each work as it takes shape. When church lets out in the morning, there is a procession which passes through the streets and sweeps away the artworks. People understand it is in the making of these creations, doing it together with family and friends, that the creativity resides.
• The audience or readers of a creative product are not merely passive spectators; they are co-creators, shaping the work’s meanings with their own experience and perspectives. They too contribute to the energy and ideas of the work. No two people will read a poem or interpret a movie in the same way; each brings their history, their life experience, their aesthetics to the work, and these things interact with the content of the work itself to create meaning for the individual.
• Guru Grrrl knows that by engaging in creative activity, we are also transforming ourselves. My time at the Woman’s Building showed me that creativity is a way to make my existence meaningful by becoming active in my own life. Each book or performance I have created has challenged me to gain new skills, dig within to unearth deeper meanings, and engage with new people as collaborators and as communities.
I have seen the transformative power of creativity at work in the lives of many. In the 1990s, I spent nine years facilitating writing workshops for people with HIV/AIDS; their creative expression helped them come to terms with their illness and in some cases prolonged their lives. I’ve known poets and theater artists who worked with incarcerated people in prisons, helping them to reconnect with their humanity in a context that is designed to be dehumanizing. I know a photographer who worked with foster youth, who often feel unseen; she helped them to create their own self-portraits. I’ve known muralists who worked with teens to empower them to discover their history and revitalize a rundown neighborhood. I know a poet who worked with immigrant women, teaching in their native language, to provide an opportunity for expression to women who believed they were voiceless. In each case, the creativity was already inside the participants; they just needed to be encouraged to let it out. Guru Grrrl sees the potential for creative expression in everyone she encounters.
If you identify as an artist, actor, singer, dancer, writer, you may already be aware of pathways to explore your creativity — get involved in a local arts organization, take a class at a community college or university, join a choir, find other people who do what you do and collaborate. Make your work. Share it with others.
The capitalist and competitive nature of the professional arts world can confuse and discourage people who want to pursue their creativity, and especially women and people of color who are frequently underrepresented in the ranks of those who succeed professionally. The elevation of some creative expressions over others often has little to do with the skill or imagination of the work, and so much to do with the privileges the individual was born into. It takes faith and commitment to sustain your dream on an unequal playing field, but persistence is an investment in your own vision. We’ll be talking more about “The power of persistence” in a later chapter. Guru Grrrl finds it helpful to decouple the power of creative vision from financial reward. Whether the former leads to the latter, the power of creativity can transform the world.
If you don’t already have an identification as a creative person, ask yourself: Where does my creativity come out? Do I keep a journal, do I make sketches in my notebook? Do I love to cook and invent recipes? Do I have a flair for decorating my environment or a strong sense of color? Do I love to sew, or embroider, or knit, or bead? Do I take a lot of pictures on my phone? Do I sing in the car or in the shower or play an instrument? Do I put on music and dance around my apartment? Do I make jewelry? Do people love to hear me tell a story? Recognizing the places in your life in which you are creative will help you to cultivate this power.
Something that made all the difference to me was when my friend, the artist and photographer Mary-Linn Hughes, invited me to be her art buddy. This meant that we would check in with each other regularly (sometimes daily; after decades it’s more like weekly) and each take some time to talk about what was happening in our creative lives. It might be a project we’re working on, a problem we’re trying to figure out, or being stuck with feelings of doubt, fear, or worthlessness. Knowing that another person really cares whether I am creating or not is immensely powerful, and it allows me to keep going when I feel discouraged or blocked.
Can you think of someone who could be your art buddy, whether you come together in person to make art together or whether you just check in on the telephone or Zoom?
Practice: Stimulate your creativity
(If you want to listen to this practice, click here.)
• Gather a few simple household objects (a toothbrush, a can opener, a knitting needle, the TV remote are just a few possibilities) and put them in a box or a bag. Reach inside without looking, and pull one out.
• Give yourself 5–10 minutes to write a list of possible alternative uses for this object, the wilder or sillier the better. Get as many as possible. This can be a fun game to do in a group, or just on your own. The idea is to think beyond the usual and practical, to think creatively.
• For those more visually inclined, you can quickly sketch alternative designs for the object. Or make up a song and/or a dance about the object. Or improvise a dialogue between two or more of the objects — what does the toothbrush have to say to the TV remote?
• You can do this by yourself or you can invite friends or family to do this with you. This exercise is intentionally silly. If it were too serious, you might be tempted to try to make it “good.” Trying to “do it right” or “make it good” is often inhibiting to creativity. Creativity wants to play and be free.
Further reading
Bilbray, Sandra. “7 Amazing Books That Will Unlock Your Creativity.” Live Happy, 3 Nov. 2017,
https://www.livehappy.com/reading/7-amazing-books-that-will-unlock-your-creativity.
