Making Black Lives Matter: Toward an Anti-Racist Artmaking and Teaching Agenda -Part 1

Yesterday, I finished writing an open letter to my field of fellow creatives — a field broad enough to include artists and designers who practice in all mediums, those who teach the visual art or design or media arts from kindergartens to colleges, those who collect art, those who critique art, and those who curate art in museums. The letter was one single train of thought — started on a Friday and completed the next Monday. I began with a reflection on the rising clamor for social justice over the last two weeks in the history of the United States, with protests that have spilled over across the globe, all from the perspective of my roles as a leader in my professional organization.

I began the letter from a place of exhaustion — forced yet again to contemplate the systemic nature of social inaction whenever local law officers gone rogue or domestic terrorists murder Black lives as if those lives didn’t matter. Most often these bad actors wind up either never being arrested, never being charged with a crime, or in the end never being convicted. In my letter I arrived at a call to action for fellow creatives. I concluded with a series of suggested interventions for comprehensively and creatively dismantling the bulwarks and bunkers of white supremacy that somehow still permeate throughout society here in the 21st century.

As we’ve all watched social inaction go to impassioned social upheaval like a car screeching from 0 to 60 in a quarter…