In this episode, social practice artist Suzanne Firstenberg turns national tragedy into human encounter, asking a simple but destabilizing question: Can art make us see each other again? From a field of more than 600,000 white flags on the National Mall to immersive installations on addiction and psychological trauma,
Firstenberg's work doesn't explain. It reveals. Each project begins with a question beneath the surface: not how people fall apart, but why. Not how many died, but who they were.
Her process moves through research, deep listening, and public participation to transform private pain into shared space. Whether through handwritten memorials, recorded voices, or silent visual scale, she creates conditions where strangers become witnesses. What emerges is not consensus, but connection. In a culture fractured by disinformation, fear, and isolation, Firstenberg reframes the problem:
Extremism behaves like addiction because it is reinforced by dopamine and sustained by repetition.
Anger is often grief in disguise.
Community is not optional. It's the mechanism of healing. Her current work asks a quiet but radical question: "Can we be we again?". It’s an invitation, not a slogan.
This episode offers more than insight. It offers a practice that includes paying attention to what's unseen, asking better questions, and staying in the conversation, especially when it's hard. The work of art, at its most useful, is not to decorate the world, but to make us more capable of living in it.
Notable Mentions
People
Suzanne Firstenberg: Social practice artist known for large-scale, public installations addressing grief and public memory
Eleanor Roosevelt: Former First Lady and human rights advocate whose mentorship shaped early social policy work
Dan Patrick: Texas Lieutenant Governor whose early pandemic comments influenced the conceptual framing of Firstenberg’s memorial work Pablo Picasso: An artist whose painting informs Firstenberg’s large-scale historical documentation work
Organizations
Charles F. Kettering Foundation:The Charles F. Kettering Foundation, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, operating foundation with a mission to advance inclusive democracies worldwide by fostering citizen engagement,
promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism.
Democracy and the Arts: The Kettering Foundation's focus area for integrating the power of the arts into democratic life locally, nationally, and globally
National Park Service: Federal agency that partnered in hosting In America: Remember, Firstenberg’s National Mall Installation
The Washington Post: Coverage of COVID death framing that helped catalyze In America: Remember
coins.m4a by djfroyd -- https://freesound.org/s/529187/ -- License: Attribution 3.0
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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.
Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.
Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.
Transcripts
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Bill Cleveland
::
Hey there. How can art help make the unseen visible when people look away?
From the Center for the Study of Art and Community this is Art Is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activists, artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland.
This episode is part of a special Art in Action series we're producing in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation’s Democracy and the Arts program. In these episodes we'll be speaking with artists, cultural organizers, and arts leaders who are navigating and challenging current efforts to limit free creative expression and free speech. Together, we'll explore what freedom of expression means in practice, not as an abstract right, but as a lived responsibility at the heart of democratic life.
In this episode, you'll hear how social justice artist Suzanne Firstenberg translated America's devastating Covid story into a field of white flags to honor the dead and make visible the invisible. And what happened when people stepped into that space and started telling the stories behind the numbers.
You'll also hear how a cross-country search into addiction revealed a different question. Not how people fall, but why? And how that insight reshaped the way suffering can be seen and met. What follows doesn't offer easy answers. It offers something I think a little more useful. A way of seeing, a way of working, a way of staying human in the middle of rupture it.
If you're trying to understand how art can cut through the noise, hold complexity, and create real encounters across difference, there's some hard-earned wisdom here and a few stories you won't shake.
Part One: A Social Warrior on the Loose
Suzanne Firstenberg, welcome to the show. Tell us who you are and where you're hailing from.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Okay. I am Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg. I am a social practice artist in the D.C. area, and to be specific, my studio is in Bethesda.
And this is the space of the Piscataway, you know, Choptank Indians in the land between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake. I grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, which is the gateway to the Black Hills. But those lands were granted as spiritual lands to the Sioux.
was in the Laramie Treaty of:
Bill Cleveland
::
Yes. It's a desecration.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
It's a desecration. So, growing up, it was really difficult to know that and to both celebrate the history of the U.S. but also the sacred rights of Native Americans. So that dialectic is something that's important to hold.
Bill Cleveland
::
I think you're right. So, I'm on Alameda Island on the unceded lands of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone peoples. And in this particular area, the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan.
Now, a very, very critical question. Have you ever had a handle or a street name? And if you have not, what it would be if you had one?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Oh, man. I really. I've always wanted to have a nickname. I begged my friends in grade school and junior high to help me have one, and I never got one. But if I had to have some kind of moniker or descriptor, I guess it would be — I'd have to have the word dialectic, because that's from the start who I am, but social warrior, because I like to have two kinds of weapons, if you will, sheathed. And one is honor, creating honor for people. But another is opprobrium, to splash opprobrium on people who are evil or evilly intent. I have such a sense of justice, and yet I don't feel comfortable using the word justice in this moment. As odd as it may sound, we are losing the power of words like justice and democracy in this moment.
Bill Cleveland
::
at scrambling the dictionary.:
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
I love that. I love that thought.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah. So, when you're sitting at your Thanksgiving table in New York and across from you is a person who has no idea what your daily work is, how do you describe what it is you do? What is your work in the world?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
I think my work in the world falls into a couple of different categories, the first of which has to be described as making the unseen visible. Because that's what my major art efforts have been to date. And I think that's one of the most important things that art in this moment can do. If you think about it, people are so segmented into their echo chambers and information silos that it's really hard to reach people, and especially when time is limited. So, we have to really double down on the places where this “us and them” philosophy breathes.
Bill Cleveland
::
Part Two: Visible on the National Mall
Okay. Making the invisible visible. How did you come to this work? What's the path that led you to the description one might make of a magician?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Only I don't have anything up my sleeve.
Bill Cleveland
::
Right. Okay.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
I think that one of the examples of making something that's invisible visible is probably the artwork that I know it most for, and that is the white flags on the National Mall that helped people visualize the lives lost to date from the pandemic. And it came from a source of great frustration. Let me explain. I had done years of hospice volunteering and met some amazing people. I once was a hospice volunteer for a woman from New Jersey who had been mentored by Eleanor Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt gave her start, and this woman helped first food stamp program. Okay. She was a patient of mine as a hospice volunteer. So, throughout the years of meeting all these fascinating people whose lives were big and small, but each was fascinating in his or her own right.
At the start of the pandemic, I was very upset to hear the Texas Lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, just two weeks into the shutdown, that we should have the elderly pay the price of the pandemic for the sake of the economy. And I was appalled. I thought, once you start deciding that certain segments of society no longer hold value or are dispensable, yeah, when society crumbles. And so, I held that with me, knowing I have to help people understand better what's really going on here. That was inside me.
But it was in August of that year, months later, when I read The Washington Post article. Maybe it was an opinion piece, the title of which suggested that president's reelection campaign was going to position 170,000 deaths as just a statistic. And at that moment, I knew that I had a responsibility as a visual artist to help people understand the magnitude of our loss. 170,000 deaths. Nobody can visualize that number gets so large as to be inconceivable. It gives people permission to ignore it.
ide the DC Armory the fall of:
In the olden days, men would create the funeral fire, and they would. Or they would create the coffin. They would do something physical. And of course, even now, people cook and prepare foods for the family that's grieving. But I realized that being able to come to that art and to write a name or description of a life on one of those flags was really important. So, we did that. And in that iteration of the art, 2,000 people wrote flags for their loved ones lost.
One woman came from California to write a flag for her son Joey, who was just a teenager when he died. From COVID Another woman flew from. I think it was Wisconsin. She couldn't get a flight all the way, so she flew into something like Pittsburgh and drove the rest of the way in rain to write five flags for her family's loved ones who had died. So, I really understood in that moment that helping people see the invisible loss was invisible but making it tangible was very important. The next fall, I took that same art installation to the National Mall at three times the size.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah. First of all, a sacred ritual.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Yes.
Bill Cleveland
::
We don't have a lot of national sacred rituals, particularly for something like mourning living in America. Mortality is really not a part of our national conversation, which certainly ought to be, because we're all subject to it. Yes.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
One thing in this moment, if I had a magic wand and could create one type of visual that would help people, it would be a national sign of mourning. We had that we used to wear black, and there was a prescribed time period over which you would wear black and then introduce tonal colors, and that would mark that one was still in grieving or in mourning. But we have no. No way of knowing that the person in front of us in the grocery line, the guy behind us in the movie theater, we have no idea. And if we don't have the knowledge, then how can we have the empathy?
Bill Cleveland
::
Well, there isn't a person who hasn't been touched by our mortality. I think it's beyond empathy. I think it is belonging to the cycle of life. And when people are reminded, everybody around me has this thing in common.
Covid was probably the most significant moment like that that we've ever had in such a short period of time. So, I will just say good on you for having done that. That picture of the Washington Monument with those flags is extraordinary. And I can't imagine anybody that was anywhere near that that didn't have a new healing story in their heart that would never go away and something that we could all own.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Let me share a few stories. First of all, when I began planning it with the National Park Service, it was late February, early March 2021. Vaccines were going into arms. It looked as though by September, so many people would be protected because of the vaccines. Doors to schools would be flung wide open. Employees would be back to work.
me backtrack for a minute. In:
emic to date in the winter of:
Bill Cleveland
::
Here's an excerpt from a CBS affiliate WUSA9 documentary describing In America: Remember.
WUSA Announcer
::
How do you measure the enormity of a loss in minutes? Sunrises, sunsets? How here in this flag draped field are the dreams spread across 22 acres that slipped away. Phone calls that ended abruptly, visits that would never be, lives that didn't have to end. Here the flags speak.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
This art is a mirror back to America to say, this is who we are? Is this really who we want to be?
WUSA Announcer
::
Artist Suzanne Firstenberg knows her. In America: Remember tribute is a living installation, a memorial that seeks to capture the soul of the lost to Covid in this country and its devastating toll more than 680,000 times over and growing. Every person's presence honors every other person's grief. If you listen closely, there is commentary on how we got here, on inequity and health disparities, and a declarative statement formed at the base of the Washington Monument and in the shadow of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
The fact that the lives of the elderly and lives of color were disproportionately affected by this really drove me to create the art in the first place. We have to know that every life matters. I hope it changes people, if not a nation as a whole, individually, one at a time.
WUSA Announcer
::
Or else we'll be left to ponder how we raised a white flag and surrendered.
Suzanne Firstenberg
I have to say, after that art installation was over, I was sitting here in my studio reeling, because I thought, I can show people what 700,000 deaths look like, but does it change their behavior? And it just — it broke me. So, I started reading and I read a book called Denying to the Grave. It is by the Gorman’s, a father and daughter. And in that book, it mentioned that when people encounter information that supports their ideologic beliefs, it triggers a dopamine surge in their brains.
Sitting here in my studio, I had completed a seven installation art series about drug addiction to understand why people became addicted to drugs and how to help them. And I realized, oh, my God, there might be a link here. Maybe all these people who are going down this science denial pathway, maybe as they get these conspiracy theories in their minds, it's like a drug. And they need more and more of the drug to reach the same physiologic or behavioral effect.
And that's why people whom we know and love, who we just sat across the Thanksgiving Day table from, they can believe the most outrageous things because they need to, and they need that to maintain. But if you use that framework, then people who share misinformation knowingly, guess what, they're drug dealers. And the platforms from which these people provide and share in a multiplicity of ways, this disinformation, those platforms, they're cartels, and we use this can help us understand how to get people back from the edges. And I say both edges because people are dropping off both cliffs left and right.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yep. Well, here's the thing. That's one of those circles. Circle of life and death, the empty fix. And your question about political extremism. Right. And both the addiction to denial, which we went through a big-time during COVID time, and our separation from each other as more than just a geographic or spatial event, but also a coping mechanism for the fragility of belief.
As you say, when there is a void that exposes you to the often very scary mysteries of the world. Life, death, meaning, then that same brain that manifests this dopamine is crushing ambiguity and looking for a way to get answers so that you can get to the end of the day without losing it. Because there's a lot of stress in not knowing. Science is discovering new things daily.
But people are looking around thinking, I know less today than I did 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Things that I was sure of, things that I believed in, I can no longer depend on them. And the people that I believed in, I no longer trust. And I need something to fill that gap desperately. And I don't think there's any of us that haven't felt that. And instead of lecturing, you're doing what you said. You're making the invisible visible, so at least we can look at it and make up our own mind about what we think.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Yes. I feel so lucky to have been on this earth before Photoshop, right before questioning of the truth and people saying, well, which truth is yours?
Bill Cleveland
::
Part Three: The Empty Fix
I totally agree. You want to talk about the empty fix?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Let me set up that story. Because as an artist, I work in different blocks. I will take a topic, I will do research on it, I'll read all sorts of books to ground my experience, and then I will figure out what needs to be understood or what needs to be seen.
I was the resident artist at the Bloedel Reserve. It's on Bainbridge Island. It's a beautiful nature Reserve, about 150 acres. I was very lucky to be Ms. March of that year. So, I would spend my time walking through the beautiful pathways and whether it was the rhododendron glade or the moss garden. And I would work with the groundskeepers there and get to know them to really fully experience the place.
As I was thinking about my next body of work, one of the groundskeepers told me how grateful he was to have his job because he had just gotten out of prison. And I said, what do you mean? You're too young to have gotten into prison, much less gotten out. But he shared with me the story that when he was in the eighth grade, his single mom wanted a way to relate to him, and so she shared her oxycontin. What a way to relate to her son. Right?
You can imagine the trials that he had probably gone through in that family and was very vulnerable to addiction because, as we know, psychological injury does make a person exquisitely vulnerable to all sorts of addictions. He became wildly Addicted and ended up being arrested selling drugs in the boy's bathroom in high school. And he was old enough to be convicted as an adult. And learning that, I thought, oh, my God, he's a drug dealer. But was he really a drug dealer by choice?
So, it made me wonder what all I didn't know about drug addiction. I went on the road, and I traveled to 24 different states and interviewed literally hundreds of people who were suffering or recovering from drug addiction. And I came to talk with people at addiction centers because I needed to know, too. Not just what made people vulnerable to addiction, but how best that they could recover from it. And with that knowledge, I came back and created seven installation art series that would help people understand it.
One of the first installations I did was I took pictures of their eyes, and I fixed those [photographs of the] eyes to glass blocks, and I present them in bodies of water, for instance, reflecting pools or fountains, so that when people walk by, they look in and they see eyes looking out at them. And the reason for that is because when we see someone suffering from addiction, we'll give them wide berth as we walk around them. But if we pass someone who is drowning, we are socialized to not walk past. Yes, right.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yes.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
And that's what addiction is.
Bill Cleveland
::
And as you well know, this issue is enormous. Many people have tried in so many ways to do what addiction, the easy fix, is doing, which is to get beyond the stereotypes and the memes and the fear and the stigma and the terrible stigma and the metaphor of a drowning person, at least in my experience, having spent over a decade in the California Department of Corrections working with hundreds and hundreds of people who had addiction at the center of their lives.
And because I was running an art program, I saw a lot of them making art about that search for a way to tell their story without being the victim and without being the devil and being a human who was drowning. And terribly enough, the place they ended up in it doesn't have many life preservers. And that's one of the things that we provided, is that you teach a person how to draw an orange in the corner of a room, they're beginning the process of being able to craft their own life preserver. That's my experience, yes.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
One of the things I think we really have to understand better is that we have means to protect people from addiction in the first place. But it means we have to understand it almost universally. I began doing some of this interviewing in Salt Lake City and at a homeless shelter.
A young man I was interviewing, I asked him, “How did you become addicted. And he looked at me with the most long-suffering expression and said, Suzanne, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether I was shooting up in a dark alley or smoking weed behind the school gym, it doesn't matter. What matters is what? Why I became addicted. And he said, ask people that. So, I began. And almost universally, the stories of psychological injury poured out of every person. So, I brought their stories back. I captured so many stories of psychological harm that had been administered to these poor people who were, and often at a very young age.
I bought a shipping container, cut it down to 28ft, and in that shipping container, I've installed one of the most important artworks that I've ever created. It's called protect them. As people walk through this shipping container, they're basically going through a tunnel of child protective or safety items. Car seats, safety gates. There’re 167 bike helmets in this tunnel of items. And as they are entering it, there's a sign that says, Americans spend over a billion dollars a year on child safety items. But are we really keeping them safe as they go through here? From hidden speakers, seven hidden speakers, they hear those stories of trauma. Yes, we are so focused on physical safety, we forget that our children's psychological safety is where we must begin.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah, it's a repeated American story. We're really good at pills and mechanisms and structures. But when it's a lifelong hard struggle that succeeds sometimes and fails sometimes and takes a lot of learning, helping parents be accountable to their kids, but also to the community they're bringing these kids into. It's a scary world out there when it comes to those fragile young minds.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
It is, but you said the right word, which is community. We need to have more social and economic supports for parents. But creating community and having a sense of it is so critical. And in fact, it's one of the three pillars of recovery that I learned of when I was out there traveling across America, learning what people need to get better. There’re three pillars. One of the things is understanding the psychological trauma that often traps a person in addiction and that triggers it.
Number two is helping people see their way forward, helping them create a better self-image. But number three is community. People have to get away from the community that is supporting them in their use and find a new community. That's why when we have people across from us at the Thanksgiving table who we never want to see again the rest of the year because their views are so diametrically opposed, the most important thing is to see them more often Absolutely. Engage in more conversation.
Bill Cleveland
::
One of the ironies of both the wound and the self-administered cure, which is the numbing of the wound, is that the number one symptom aside from the physical, is isolation. And so, it compounds the already existing sense of estrangement from the only force that is out there that is actually going to break the cycle, which is you can't do this alone. You don't have to do this alone. Nobody does anything like this alone. Not just healing your wound, but everything. You know, Suzanne does not make her art by herself.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Definitely does not. I had 1,000 volunteers helping me on the mall. I did not do my art alone.
Bill Cleveland
::
No. And one of the unfortunate stories that we tell ourselves in civics class sometimes is that America is the land and home of the brave. And the picture of the brave is this one person standing there with a gun in his hand. And that's not the American story. We are a story of collaborators and collectives and communities working together. 24 7. Elon Musk and all those billionaire icons, none of them got where they got by themselves.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
And so, the two myths that we have to break are, number one, the myth of the rugged individual, because that's not how the west was won. And other is stranger danger. We have now inculcated in two complete generations the utter fallacy of stranger danger. I want to tell you the place I get the most inspiration is by talking to people I've never met [before].
Bill Cleveland
::
Exactly.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
And that's where the true learning happens for me is in being allowed into strangers’ lives. So, one of the ways I'm manifesting that here at the studio is I've begun doing loss salons. And that is where strangers come in a small group, like eight to 10 people, and they spend an hour and a half just sharing their stories of loss. Because we see people's successes, people are very quick to show those and oftentimes it's monetary. But we don't show each other our losses. And that's what's really humanizing. And ultimately, I will share with you.
My life's goal in this moment for art is to organize a group that will make a monument or a memorial space happen in Washington D.C. it's a memorial to loss. It's a place where complete strangers can come and share some part of themselves, whether it's carving it in stone or writing it and secreting it amongst rocks, as they do at the Wailing Wall right in Israel. This is sharing loss. And I think we need a place as a nation where we can do that one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this is because we've run from the pandemic. And I want to ask the question, why are we denying it happen? Why are we running so wholesale from it? When embracing it, embracing the mistakes that might have been made, but embracing the loss itself can only make us stronger and more respectful of other people.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah. Sharing loss, as always, the essential next step in completing the cycle. It's the creative process. The whole idea of truncating that, that's a trauma, you know. Okay, sorry, you get to this part of the story. I don't want to hear about it, you know.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Can I share a quick story from the flags?
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
There I was in the middle of this 17-day installation there on the National Mall. I was surrounded by 700,000 white flags. 20,000 of them had been written on. And each day on a massive sign there on Constitution Avenue I had kept the daily death toll so people would know, and they would see each day as it changed. A blonde, big woman came huffing into the flags right at me. And she said, “Is this your art?”. And I said, “Yes.” And she said, well, I want you to know my mother, she's one of these numbers. They say she died from Covid. She had Covid, but she died in the hospital of a heart attack. And I want you to take the flag out that's for my mother.
I was — whoa. And I was a deer in the headlights for a moment. This woman was asking to alleviate her sadness, to help her in her anger. And I didn't know what to do. And so, for a minute, I just froze. And then the dime dropped. And I said to her, “What was your mother's name?” And she looked at me at first like I was crazy. And then she said, “Well, Mary.” And I said, “She really meant a lot to you, didn't she?” And at first, she didn't answer and then she just nodded. And I gently guided her towards the shade trees at the edge of the yard. And I said, I really want you to tell me more about your mother. And she began sharing stories about her mom from growing up and even the later years. And when her grief was spent, she looked at me through tear-stained eyes and said, thank you. And she left. She taught me that anger isn't anger. Anger is just dress up clothing for other emotions, sadness, fear. And she taught me that when somebody is angry, get underneath it and find out what's really going on.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah. And they're asking for something.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
They're asking for something. They need something.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yep. And that's a question. I spend a lot of time working with large groups of people, some of whom really need to act out and often manifesting anger. And the question I've made, the biggest difference is just, so what do you need? What do you need? Maybe it's here. Because if you're with a group of people, maybe it's here. And often it is, I just want to tell my story.
Just want to tell my story and not have anybody argue with me or tell me I'm an asshole or interrupt me, but just, I got a story to tell.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
That's the magic of art, right? Because art is a way to share a narrative and people need to be understood as stories.
Bill Cleveland
::
Part 4: Fear, Freedom, and Desire
All of your projects are what I would call a healing practice. And we are in a moment of; I guess you would say we're in a big family that is having a hard time dealing with the abuse. And just like all the eyes in the pool, different people drowning in different ways, different people being afraid of drowning, different people wanting to drown other people. And I know that one of your more recent projects is this question about the addiction to political extremism.
And I'm just wondering what's sparking for you now that we're in this? It's a moment of tension and contradiction and fear. And how is it coming at you and how do you want to respond to it?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
First of all, I must say that the project I'm doing right now, one of the four major ones I've undertaken in this moment, is helping me understand my own limits as a person.
[:
going to go any further into:
And it's hard when the most one can do is acknowledge it for future generations, like this artwork and the corresponding master document from which it is created will be Viewed by people 20 years from now, 40 years from now, 60 years from now, as the portal into this time nation of this pivotal point in history. If it doesn't kill me trying to.
Bill Cleveland
::
Complete it, God, I can imagine.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
So, it's one thing we all have to do whatever it takes to know when we've reached the point where we have to just, like, bubble wrap ourselves. We have to be aware of what that is and take appropriate steps. So that's an example of what I am doing. But in this moment, I'm working on a campaign, one of my other projects, to make people visible who want to transcend the ugliness of partisan politics in this moment. And so, I've created a logo, and we're just working on getting it trademarked and out there. And it will be a way for people to show that they believe that we can be better than this and not us or them.
Bill Cleveland
::
So, if I have this, it says, “Can we be we together?”. On my T-shirt. Let's say I can imagine it being an invitation to a conversation. Can we be we together?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
We need to be able to see how powerful and how multitudinous this force of people is who simply want to rise above the craziness and protect what we have in this republic of ours.
Bill Cleveland
::
Well, you just sparked my brain. I could just imagine in D.C. when you're down on the mall or walking up and down those Smithsonian buildings, right? If there was something there that didn't just say Joe's Pizza on a T-shirt, but literally said, “I'm we. I'm in the universe of we.” And that could just get people pointing to you.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Oh, yeah, okay.
Bill Cleveland
::
Where are you from? You know, just even that first invitation to a safe space to share possible human connections with another person. We need a lot of practice doing that.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
We need to learn to talk with strangers.
Bill Cleveland
::
That is so fantastic. All right, so I need to ask another question.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Oh, okay.
Bill Cleveland
::
Let's say there's somebody who's starting out, and they hear your story, and they say, I want to do that. What would you tell them that might be helpful and useful to them?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
When I get to speak with student groups, what I say to them is, get uncomfortable. Push that envelope. Get out beyond your skis. When you get yourself into tough situations, you have a chance to prove to yourself, to explore and to find what's really underneath it all. And so that's my advice to anyone who wants to do anything, whether it's art such as mine or anything. Get uncomfortable.
Bill Cleveland
::
So, there's a room that I just created in my mind's eye that is filled with what I think are some essential components of a powerful, fulfilling, useful, and inspiring creative life. And in that room are failure, loss, fear. And the last one is a really hard one. Bewilderment.
And this learning how to dance with those things that challenge us, with those things that make us uncomfortable, is, to my mind, one of the most important aspects of the evolution of human consciousness in our time. We're creating a world where there's lots of discomfort and a world where you can buy and sell the temporary absence of discomfort almost anywhere. You know, you can drug yourself, you can beguile yourself with doom scrolling, you can buy 10,000 distractions.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
You can.
Bill Cleveland
::
You can spend your life in Disneyland.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
If you'd like, or in the metaverse.
Bill Cleveland
::
Absolutely. So, to survive and thrive and avoid ending up living in Disneyland, we need to practice dancing with discomfort in that room. So, let's build that room.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Let's build that room. But let's teach people how to get rid of fear.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
This fear is being used to control so many people. We need an antidote to fear.
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah. But I think we need a dance step that reveals fear as both potentially destructive, but also powerfully essential. Are you familiar with Rudolf Steiner?
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
No.
Bill Cleveland
::
I think he's probably somebody you'd like to meet. He's long gone, but one of his paradigms, he always dealt in threes. This particular situation. You have fear on one side, desire on the other side, and in the middle is freedom. And in his version of the story, dealing with fear and desire is essential to finding freedom because they all are intrinsically connected.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Love it.
Bill Cleveland
::
We live in a world that has got plenty of those two bookends.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Yes. The question I want to ask in my art is what freedom are you willing to take away from others?
Bill Cleveland
::
Yeah. An important question, I think, for all of us to ponder and probably a good place for us to end. Thank you so much, Suzanne.
Suzanne Firstenberg
::
Take care.
Bill Cleveland
::
And to our listeners, take care as well. And thank you so much for tuning in. Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.
ART IS CHANGE is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. We'd like to thank the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for partnering with us for this Art in Action series. And please know that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and the guests. They're not the views and opinions of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The foundation's partnership with us for this podcast is not an endorsement of its content. If you're interested in learning more about the foundation and its Democracy and the Arts program, please visit kettering.org. The link is also in our show notes, which also includes links to the many people, places, events, and publications mentioned.
Last, but certainly not least, thanks to the Art is Change Team, our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the Maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebe. Our effects come from Freesound.org, and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of Luke 2:35. So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.
