Artists & Activism
By Gabrielle Roldan
Picket signs, protestors, and police officers gathered at Newark Town Hall to participate in a climate justice rally on September 9, 2018. The kind of activism that makes it on television but eventually loses the attention of news media outlets and most of the general public. When I picture activism, very rarely do we imagine art, and even less than that do we conceptualize political art that addresses environmental issues. Growing up in an urban community made it difficult to see the impact of climate change on my environment. In brick-city Newark, the majority of the city is made up of low-income families of color who might not even have access to drinkable faucet water. For those members of the community, such as myself, trying to “go-green”, we’re not even able to compost our own food waste.
Local artist Jamie Bruno, and resident artist of coLAB Arts and the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership is somebody who describes her art as “less about holding a picket sign and more about how I’m internalizing politics.” She is an activist who uses her art for creative engagement with urban communities who are suffering the most from climate change. While Jamie incorporates a lot of science into her projects she says, “I never think about it as science, I think about it as practical knowledge a lot of us don’t have access to” and wants to connect people to the issues that are out there.
Jamie had always been involved in politics since her time at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. She protested for more diverse student representation on campus and advocated for more resources for her department. She claimed that being an artist in school is like living in a bubble and when it came time to exist in the real world she felt she really had to expand on the kind of work she was doing by traveling doing other holistic work. She stayed in Korea for three years and traveled the farmlands to explore the agriculture she’d become so passionate about. Jamie is an artist who has been able to incorporate her politics, learned experiences with agriculture, and highly skilled artistry to create tangible representations of her relationship with her environment.
One of Jamie’s most recognized and prized works of 2017, is a livable 6 foot 3-inch geodesic dome, meant to represent our relationship to and ownership of land. She described the process of building the dome as “the perfect renaissance work” because of the holistic practice that is demanded in working with agriculture, and the need to be able to do a lot of different things. Jamie makes an effort to create things people can purchase and use like the hanging shoe flower pots made of recycled sneakers, she created for her contribution to the “Windows of Understanding” project at Kim’s Bike Shop in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The pots were meant to represent her residency at coLAB, and inspire creativity within the New Brunswick community.
There is so much art in the world, but what separates the work Jamie does from most is the attention to detail and the emphasis on the shared experience with a community. An artist’s ability to interpret the world and create something remarkable out of that interpretation is a skill that can be cultivated by anyone. The activism comes second to the artistry for artists like Bruno, but it’s always recognizable. Creative engagement begins with an idea and the desire to share that idea with others to inform and inspire change. Community plays a huge role in creative engagement because without the response from the community there would be no actual change.
