The Art of Resistance
As a young artist supporting and engaging in intersectional arts and movements, I’ve been able to work alongside many beautiful artists and activists doing a wide array of creative resistance work in the Twin Cities. Art has added energy to advocacy, resonating with people at deeper emotional levels, while conveying what cannot be said with mere facts. I have seen the beauty art can bring when it is truly dedicated to social, political, and environmental change, I’ve also seen how it can invoke historical trauma.
Examples of both effective and ineffective works of organizing and art are having profound impacts on communities across the Twin Cities. A recent controversy at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center demonstrated how art can ultimately hurt communities when artists and curators attempt to speak for the people and their cultural history without consent. Effective creative resistance will bring attention to issues we are conditioned to ignore, instilling a powerful message and experience that honors the collective voice and perspectives of those represented. This is true activist art, communicating to the public in a way that is resonates.
White privilege allows me to be moved to act one minute and forget to act the next. Knowing this, I have been actively creating art and doing collaborative work around environmental racism, native rights, and sustainability. I am grateful to have the mentorship and friendship of several inspiring community leaders. These elders, organizers, and youth-empowerers have taught me the importance of indigenous wisdom and being mindful of the world we create for future generations. Because of this, art and indigenous sovereignty are a huge part of my life and activism. My body of work is primarily sculptural and photographic, incorporating found objects and materials, both natural and artificial, with the human body. When I paint, I paint on people because a person communicates so much through their body language. Body paintings bring life and personality to my work in a way that no other medium can. I try to center my work around women because there is a strong connection between the violence inflicted on those who identify as female and our Mother Earth. Pictured below is some of my art, each piece encompasses the intersection between humanity and the environment.
The vast majority of my work has to do with the ways humans interact, disrupt, and collaborate with their surrounding environments and the natural world. There’s no single meaning or interpretation for these pieces. I like to allow those viewing the freedom to reflect and draw their own conclusions without being told what they’re supposed to see.
Growing up in Minneapolis, I have been fortunate to find a strong sense of community in artist and Native circles alike. With roots all over the nation, Native artists in the Twin Cities are incorporating their own historical context with today’s common need for sustainable development and relations. This can be seen in the growing resistance against Enbridge’s proposed Line 3 pipeline “replacement”. In actuality, the existing Line 3 would be abandoned and an entirely new route constructed through Anishinaabe treaty territories in northern Minnesota. This movement, like the fight to stop the Dakota Access and Sandpiper, goes beyond pipelines and Big Oil. This movement has been an ongoing fight to ensure the survival of native culture and way of life for over 500 years.
Local artists are bringing attention to the movement through the creation of prints, buttons, and garments that urge viewers to Defend the Sacred | Love Water Not Oil. The installment of public galleries and beautiful murals decorating walls all over the metro area honor native cultures and voices. GoodSpace Murals ‘I Am A Water Protector’ series pays tribute to the water protectors and youth climate intervenors currently fighting to stop Line 3 in court and on the front lines. Like GoodSpace, many more organizations and cooperatives, including Northern Spark and Honor the Earth, are using arts activism to foster community and bring attention to environmental issues impacting indigenous communities.
Northern Spark is a free all-night art festival exploring the effects of climate change through participatory projects happening in neighborhoods along Metro Transit’s Green Line, connecting Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Northern Spark 2017, Climate Chaos | People Rising, showcased various community artworks inspired by the indigenous water protection movement. I was a contributing artist for iNMiGRATiON, an immersive sound and video installation centered around everyone’s migration stories. This installation also honored our interconnection with water and those native to the land we now occupy.
Honor the Earth is a Native-led organization using music, the arts, media, and Indigenous wisdom to develop the needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable native communities. Through my current HECUA internship with Honor the Earth, I have been working with a passionate group of women on a series of four body paintings that will be exhibited at the Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center. Art of Resistance: Embodying & Reclaiming the Sacred will showcase works centered around Line 3 resistance, nibi (water) and manoomin (wild rice) protection, as well as missing and murdered indigenous women. The exhibit and community event will feature additional female artists, indigenous to many Nations. With this work we are encouraging creative expression through spoken word, song, dance, and visual art. We are encouraging creative resistance.
Art manages to bring people together in a lot of ways, but when accountability and historical context are disregarded by artists and endorsers alike, deep seated divisions widen. Earlier this summer, the Walker Art Center allowed the installment of Sam Durant’s sculpture “Scaffold” in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Durant, a white, out of state artist, brought the traumatic executions following the Dakota War in 1862 back from the past without consulting native communities prior to the installment. Many were offended that such a horrific memoir of the Dakota 38 hangings, the largest mass execution in U.S. history, would be exhibited on Dakota land. After much demonstration, the gallows replica, which served as a chilling reminder of the Dakota lives taken by a system of white supremacy and genocide, is now buried in accordance to the instruction of Dakota elders. While the Scaffold still stood, a collection of banners and signs with the names of the those executed demonstrated the healing path resistance artwork can provide. Through everyday artistic expression, Native communities are reclaiming their stories and identities, reminding the world that they are here to stay.
Social change is like making art. Testing you on a physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual level, requiring you to become as in touch with reality as you are with yourself. The learning and dreaming process never ends because creating a future that supports all our relations requires solidarity across generations, across divides. For this is the art of resistance.
(All photos by Jenny Zander)
This piece is part of a series written by college undergraduates enrolled in off-campus study programs through the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). HECUA programs offer students a chance to think deeply about the issues that matter most, and we’d like to share a piece of that experience with you. Every student post on the HECUA Medium page considers a theory or reading that intersects with that student’s lived experience. For more information about HECUA programs, click here.
