Can the right song, painting, or museum exhibit spark real political change? What if culture is the missing strategy in today’s social movements?

If you’ve ever felt like your efforts for justice aren’t hitting deep enough, it might be because the culture hasn’t caught up with your message. In this episode, labor organizer and social change strategist Ken Grossinger shares how his journey from labor organizing to cultural advocacy revealed a truth many overlook: policy changes fade, but stories—and the art that tells them—have staying power. In this episode:

• Discover how blending power analysis with artistic expression can amplify grassroots campaigns and drive long-term social change.
• Hear powerful case studies—from a revolutionary museum exhibit in Louisville to a musical uprising in Alaska—that reveal how art can expose injustice and build movements.
• Learn from real-world collaborations between artists and organizers that shift narratives, challenge power, and activate communities in ways no policy paper ever could.

Tune in now to hear how Ken Grossinger’s book ART WORKS and his work in communities across the U.S. show us why art isn’t just a reflection of justice—it’s how we get there.

Notable Mentions

People

Ken Grossinger — Longtime movement strategist and author of Art Works: How Organizers and Artists Are Creating a Better World Together, which explores the strategic partnership between artists and organizers across decades of social-justice campaigns.

Richard Cloward — Columbia University sociologist and organizer whose power-analysis framework shaped generations of strategists; co-founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization and a chief architect of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act ("Motor Voter" law).

Bernice Johnson Reagon — Civil rights song leader who co-founded the Freedom Singers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later founded the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Si Kahn — Veteran folk musician, author, and organizer who has spent decades writing songs in direct collaboration with the communities he serves, including the fishermen and Alaska Native communities fighting the Pebble Mine.

Harry Belafonte — Singer and actor who became one of the civil rights movement's most trusted strategists and financiers, sitting at the strategy tables of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

Bryan Stevenson — Founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy; created the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Amy Sherald — Painter whose 2020 Vanity Fair portrait of Breonna Taylor became the centerpiece of the Speed Art Museum's "Promise, Witness, Remembrance" exhibition.

Stephen Reily — Director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville at the time of Breonna Taylor's killing, who reorganized the museum's programming around community-led advisory boards.

Norman Lear — Legendary TV producer and creator of All in the Family, who used Archie Bunker's bigotry to bring racism and homophobia into American living rooms as everyday conversation.

Frances Stonor Saunders — British historian and author of The Cultural Cold War, which documents the CIA's covert promotion of Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock as ideological counters to Soviet Social Realism.

Jane Fonda, Karen Nussbaum & Ellen Cassedy — Actress-activist Jane Fonda partnered with 9to5 co-founders Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy to turn the working women's organizing movement into the hit 1980 comedy 9 to 5.

Organizations & Institutions

Center for the Study of Art and Community — Producer of Art is Change and host organization for the Art in Action series exploring arts-based civic engagement.

Charles F. Kettering Foundation — Nonprofit research foundation focused on deliberative democracy; partner for the Art in Action series through its Democracy and the Arts program.

Equal Justice Initiative — Montgomery, Alabama human-rights organization founded by Bryan Stevenson; operates the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Speed Art Museum — Louisville, Kentucky museum whose 2021 exhibition "Promise, Witness, Remembrance," built around Amy Sherald's portrait, became a national model for community-driven museum programming.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — New York institution whose mid-century ties to CIA-backed cultural promotion of Abstract Expressionism are documented in Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War.

American Museum of Natural History & Smithsonian — Both institutions faced public pressure after climate scientists and advocacy groups called on them to sever ties with board member and fossil-fuel financier David Koch.

Highlander Research and Education Center — Tennessee-based center for labor and civil-rights organizing, where staff such as Zilphia Horton adapted "We Shall Overcome" and other freedom songs used across the movement.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) — Student-led civil rights organization that carried freedom songs into direct-action campaigns across the South and gave rise to groups like the Freedom Singers.

International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) — Union whose cultural department trained its own members to write, sing, and perform, producing the Broadway hit Pins and Needles.

9to5, National Association of Working Women — Organization founded by Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy to fight for office workers' rights, later dramatized in the film 9 to 5.

Musicians United to Protect Bristol Bay — Network of musicians, co-organized by Si Kahn, that used songwriting and touring to build public opposition to Alaska's proposed Pebble Mine.

Books, Films & Recordings

Art Works: How Organizers and Artists Are Creating a Better World Together — Ken Grossinger's book on the strategic collaborations between artists and organizers, discussed throughout this episode.

Just Mercy — Bryan Stevenson's memoir recounting his legal work defending condemned and wrongly convicted prisoners in Alabama, later adapted into a feature film.

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters — Frances Stonor Saunders's history of covert CIA funding of Cold War-era artists and cultural institutions.

Birth of a Nation (1915) — D.W. Griffith's landmark but virulently racist silent film, screened at the White House, that is widely credited with fueling a major resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

All in the Family — Norman Lear's groundbreaking 1970s sitcom that used the bigoted character Archie Bunker to bring racism, antisemitism, and homophobia into mainstream television conversation.

Pins and Needles — 1937 Broadway musical revue, written by Harold Rome and performed entirely by International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union members, that became the longest-running show of the decade.

9 to 5 (1980 film) — Comedy starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton, inspired directly by the real organizing work of the 9to5 working women's movement.

"We Shall Overcome" — Civil rights anthem adapted by song leader Zilphia Horton at the Highlander Folk School, credited with sustaining courage and solidarity across the movement's most dangerous moments.

Bristol Bay (album) — Si Kahn's 2013 concept album written in direct partnership with Alaska Native and fishing communities to help stop the proposed Pebble Mine.

Historical Events & Movements

National Voter Registration Act of 1993 ("Motor Voter") — Federal law expanding voter registration access, signed by President Clinton and shaped by the organizing and research of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

Promise, Witness, Remembrance — The Speed Art Museum's 2021 exhibition honoring Breonna Taylor, built through consultation with a national artists' advisory board and a local community advisory board.

Museums and fossil-fuel funding controversy — A 2015 open letter from climate scientists and museum experts calling on institutions like the Smithsonian to cut ties with fossil-fuel-linked board members such as David Koch.

BIO

Ken Grossinger, has been a leading strategist in movements for social and economic justice for thirty-five years, in unions, philanthropic and community organizations.

For two decades, Ken was one of the labor movement's leading strategists. He represented workers in the Service Employees International Union and then directed legislative field operations for the AFL-CIO, running large-scale issue campaigns including against the privatization of Social Security and for health care reform, economic and civil rights. Grossinger is widely regarded as an expert in pioneering national field strategies for labor and community organizations and is well known for building long-enduring alliances between the two.

Formerly a community organizer, Grossinger co-launched the Human SERVE Fund, a national advocate organization that initiated and led the successful decade-long fight for passage of the National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as Motor Voter.

Grossinger is active on several boards including the University of the District of Columbia (Trustee), Hirshhorn Museum (Trustee), People’s Action Institute (Director), Skylight Pictures (Director), and the CrossCurrents Foundation, (Chair).

Among other cultural projects, he co-executive produced the award-winning Netflix documentaries Social Dilemma and Bleeding Edge and served as Executive Producer of Boycott and the forthcoming film Borderland.

Ken is the author of ART WORKS: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World Together, published by the New Press in July 2023. He lives part-time in Washington, DC., and Telluride, Colorado.

Change the Story / Change the World 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.

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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.

Bill Cleveland

Hey there,

What if one of the country's most accomplished labor leaders told you that the arts are absolutely essential for organizing success?

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 that they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland.

This episode is part of a special Art in Action series produced 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.

A dozen or so years ago, Ken Grossinger was well known in labor circles as one of the movement's most influential and effective strategists through his work with the likes of the Service Employees International Union, the AFL CIO, and Democracy Partners. Today, while he continues his role as a movement leader, he's become a born-again advocate for the essential role of the arts and artists in the continuing struggle for worker rights and social and economic justice. If you're a curious soul like me, you may be asking yourself, “Gee, how'd that happen?”.

In this episode, we'll hear why Ken not only believes that organizers can't work effectively without culture, but also that that art is an indispensable part of creating the narrative shifts or story changes that are the foundation of effective organizing. He's written about why he thinks this is not only true, but profoundly important for our times in his new book, Art Works: How Organizers and Artists Are Creating a Better World Together, which we discuss in depth.

Act One: And Then I Married an Artist

Ken Grossinger, welcome to the show. So let me begin by just asking, what is your life path? And rather than all the really interesting job titles that you've held, what do you see as your work in the world?

Ken Grossinger

Most of my adult world has been as a social change strategist and what I now think about as a late-blooming narrative shift enthusiast, which is to say I've spent my life working in community and labor organizations, basically inside the community organizing world and thinking about how to move the ball down the road, that is the justice ball, into that lens. And the narrative shift enthusiast component comes about because when I learned how to think strategically about my work, art and culture were never a part of what I learned. And when I priced it Therefore, it wasn't a part of what I did. And when I started teaching younger organizers how to think about their work, it's not something I taught. And then I married an artist and I realized just how big a boat I missed.

And I realized one other thing, which was it wasn't just organizers that didn't think strategically about art and culture in their work, but it was artists themselves who often didn't think strategically about their work in the service of social movement. And so that's what I mean about being a late bloomer here, because I've only just come to this in the last 10, 15 years.

And it's why I wanted to write the book, because I thought if I was in this boat, many other people would have been.

Bill Cleveland

Well, but you married an artist. But you did bring an art form into that partnership. You are a musician, and you pay great respect in your book to the many, many musicians in particular, but artists in general that have been in service to this work. So here's a question. People describe you as an effective strategist, right So the question is, what does that mean?

What is an effective strategist, particularly in the work that we're referencing here, which is social change work, justice work?

Ken Grossinger

There probably, as you know as well as I, a lot of different definitions of this. In my background It meant and it means that I use a power analysis to decide and to develop plans for change. And what I mean by a power analysis is that I analyze who's in support of what I want to do, who's neutral, and who opposes it. And I use that as the basis to think strategically about what to do. And that really separates a lot of political and community and labor organizer strategists from other forms of strategists which rely upon less of power analysis and more a host of other things.

Bill Cleveland

So in the power analysis process that you undertake, and I'm going to just say it's not just doing it, it's doing it in a way that connects the insights derived from the analysis to the eventual action that is taken in order to move the ball. So what is that journey from “Oh, now I can see what the playing field looks like” to “ Now, what's the strategy? What is brought to bear in that circumstance?”

Ken Grossinger

So I think it's about developing relationships where they don't exist and building upon relationships where they do exist to build up a level of support and a way to frame moving the work forward. And it means reaching out to people who are on the fence and are not yet committed one way or the other, entering into new relationships, or at least new relationships around a particular issue, and then thinking about the extent to which it's possible to convert or neutralize your opposition. And so that's all quite labor intensive. And it's why organizing campaigns require a lot of depth and time to work. But it's all necessary.

Now, the one exception I would say to this are social movements. I do think that power analysis has a role to play, a significant role to play in social movements. But I also think social movements arise from demographic shifts in the economy, shifts like the migration from Blacks from the South to the North and so forth. They basically change the electoral map. And so the fine distinction to be made about the organizing side versus the movement side, but both of them really do embrace some understanding of who's with you and who's not.

Bill Cleveland

Absolutely. So how'd you learn that?

Ken Grossinger

Bill Cleveland

Here is Bill Clinton at the bill signing.

President Bill Clinton

The victory we celebrate today is but the most recent chapter in the overlapping struggles of our nation's history to enfranchise women and minorities, the disabled and the young, with the power to affect their own destiny and our common destiny by participating fully in our democracy.

Bill Cleveland

So what does art making have to do with the in-the-trenches work of analyzing the playing field and figuring out where to push and where to pull?

Ken Grossinger

We can't do—organizers can't do —the work that we do without art and culture. And I want to make two points about this. One is that art is not just a reflection of or a reaction to social conditions, but it's a contributor to social change. And two, narrative shift is central to organizing. Now. Why is that?

So we know that policy advocates and organizers and lobbyists sometimes can win policy and legislative reform for the good. But what happens is when power changes hands, those concessions get rolled back. And I think they get rolled back in large part because we never deal with the narratives underlying the progress. And so we have a system in place where we've got organizers taking on institutions and artists trying to shift the way we think. And artists really have a way of penetrating popular culture in a way that organizers never will, because that's not how organizers think. And in fact, artists don't think like organizers, which makes it such a wonderful collaboration.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah. But I will also provide the caveat that —particularly in the current landscape that I work in — the hybrid, which is people who literally organically come up from both of those streams and are working in the new creative practice and can actually speak both languages. My sense is this is a new practice, or maybe an old creative practice in different clothes. And so I just wonder what you think of that.

Ken Grossinger

Well, I think you're exactly right.

And if you look at the work of Bernice Johnson Reagan, she will tell you that those of us who are cultural workers thought of ourselves as organizers, and culture was just a part of what we did for your audience. Bernice was one of the founders of the Freedom Singers and went on to found Sweet Honey in the Rock. And think about another musician, Si Khan, who's been a civil rights organizer and has, I don't know, produced 20 CDs of music. And so there are, in fact, any number of artists who are organizers and organizers who are artists.

And Harry Belafonte is probably the greatest example that I could think of. I mean, Harry, he had to balance his time between art and activism toward the latter. I mean, Harry was at the strategy tables of the Southern civil rights movement, and he brought his artistic skills to that table. It wasn't that he was an artist that realized he had celebrity and could raise money for others to do the work. So I think you're exactly right, Bill, that's a really important caveat. I guess I don't think about that as much because I'm more concerned about the scale at which these collaborations happen. And they're happening, to be sure, but they're not happening on scale. So I wanted to get at that.

Bill Cleveland

Act Two: Artworks, Artists and Organizers Making a Better World Together

So one of the impetuses for this conversation is an incredible book that you have written.

And as I said before, it seems to me that it does a good job of collecting and sharing and animating your history and your experiences for others to learn from. Could you talk generally about the book and then we can get into some specifics?

Ken Grossinger

Not to sound too repetitive, but just to start out, the book really focuses on the impact of collaboration between artists and organizers. So not just the power of art and not just the influence of organizers and movement leaders. It looks at the impact of the two through the context of the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements through environmental and immigrant justice movements. And it looks at two institutions, philanthropy and museums, and the extent to which they support or disrupt social change strategies. And it winds down in the last chapter with a discussion between artists and organizers about what makes collaborations work and what makes them difficult.

Bill Cleveland

So who are you speaking to in this book?

Ken Grossinger

Mostly, I wanted to talk to artists and I wanted to talk to organizers, but I also wanted to talk to museum workers. There's 450,000 of them. I wanted to talk to people that work in philanthropy who support these things. So I have really, in the scheme of a book, a very narrow audience that I'm trying to reach. And I've been doing that through not only the traditional public library and book presentations at bookstores, but through meeting with organizations that are grappling with these questions. And that's where it's begun to take hold.

Bill Cleveland

So obviously, one of the reasons for this podcast is change the story, change the world, which is at the center of much of what you talk about in the book, which is narrative change and the power of that and the necessity for that. Not just nice thing, but as you said, change comes and goes very quickly and is very fragile unless it has a cultural narrative underpinning that anchors it in people's worldview and belief system above and beyond the codified and the policy world.

So I would ask, does a story come to mind that really personifies the cause effect that you have seen once you became a born-again cultural organizer that really says, “Oh yeah, this is how this stuff really cooks?”.

Ken Grossinger

There are many stories, and as the book is full of stories. Yes, I'm very intentional about not being critical about what is going on, but rather to focus on what's working. And so let me tap the museum world, if you will. And one great, very important story about museums is the question of whether or not museums are going to become community action targets or community building institutions. And I could talk about both, but I want to talk about the community building component first.

And this story takes place in Louisville, Kentucky, at a museum called the Speed Museum. In the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Breonna Taylor is killed and Ta-Nehisi Coates calls up Amy Sherald, who did the portrait of Michelle Obama, and asks Amy if she would do a portrait of Breonna for the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. And Amy said, “Yes, but I want it shown in Louisville.

And so Stephen Riley, who was the director at the time of the Speed Museum, asked himself what it meant to be a museum director in a time of Black Lives Matter, when the fight is right at your doorstep. And so here's what Riley did. He emptied several galleries within months. And as museum exhibitions, the runways are like three to five years.

He emptied out several galleries within months. And then he put together two advisory boards.

One was a national advisory board made up of artists who have had family members killed or maimed by the police.

And the other was a local community advisory board made up of mental health workers, legal advocates, community economic development folk, and so forth. And he charged these advisory boards with coming up with the content for the show. And they didn't always agree with each other.

So the national advisory board said, well, we should have thirty pieces of work. And the local advisory board said, yeah, but they all have to be by Black artists. And so there were those kinds of issues, any number of them that came up. And Riley would always defer to the local community advisory board when those conflicts emerged. And it was only after they, along with Tamika Palmer and her family, Breonna Taylor's mother, came together on the content and they brought in a curator

Bill Cleveland

My understanding is that, that guest curator, Alison Glenn, saw the exhibit as an opportunity to

is to show “museums can get it right” through consultation with the community.

And Sadiqa Reynolds, the CEO at that time of the Louisville Urban League, said, it was the first time my people ever felt comfortable coming into that museum. And so it became a community building institution in such an important way.

Felicia Ashley, News Reporter

This is the room honoring Breonna Taylor. It starts with a timeline of her life beginning back in Michigan and leads to her story here in Louisville, which ended in tragedy. This exhibit opens April 7, and it ends on June 6. Reporting in Louisville, Felicia Ash.

Bill Cleveland

So, as you point out in the book, this is not business as usual in the museum world. As you said, a museum that turns on a dime like that to be responsive to something outside of its purview. That's not something that happens often.

Ken Grossinger

There's another museum story I share in the book, and this is a story from Montgomery, Alabama. Many people know Bryan Stevenson. He wrote the book Just Mercy. There was a film made from the book. Brian founded an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative. And Brian understands in his bones that art and culture are central organizing and dealing with racism.

And what he did is he created two major art centers, for lack of a better term. One was a museum called the Legacy Museum, which tracked the Atlantic slave trade right up through mass incarceration and connected the dots. And the other was he created a memorial called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. And the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is eight Horton steel beams hanging from the ceiling. And inside this rectangle, underneath the beams is inscribed the names of some of the people who have been lynched and the county and cities in which those lynchings took place.

Brian understood what Lonnie Bunch from the Smithsonian said, that museums need to be “as much about today and tomorrow as they are about yesterday.” And so what Brian did was created life size replicas of these Corten steel beams that if you're from Richmond and happen to see one hanging from the memorial that spells out Richmond, you can bring that back to Richmond, Virginia, and you can demand a marker, some type of recognition of what happened, and you could use it to fuel racial justice fights if you want. So Brian integrated an action component into the work of the museums, which also is fairly rare and very important.

And that's a great example of narrative shift work.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's a really important thing, which is the entire idea that most people do not actually know that they have a worldview that is informed by a series of conscious and subconscious stories that live in their memory, live in their body, and a PowerPoint presentation and a policy shift is not going to change that story. And actually, this is my bias.

You're a musician, I'm a musician. I've always felt, I've always known from my own experience in the world is that music is one of the most powerful forces for connecting the head and the heart and in some cases, hacking the head and the heart. I just want people to know that this book is not only text. There's a discography, there's music connected to it. So it's a multi-sensory experience.

Ken Grossinger

Thank you. So this is a quote from a guy named Wyatt T. Walker who was the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the early 60s [writing] about the song “We Shall Overcome.” And he writes, one cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes.

Across the Southland, I have heard it sung in great mass meetings with a thousand voices singing as one. I've heard a half a dozen sing it softly behind the bars of the Hinds county prison [Hinds County Raymond Detention Center] in Mississippi. I've heard old women singing it on their way to work in Albany, Georgia. I've heard the students singing it as they were being dragged away to jail. It generates power that is indescribable.

Bill Cleveland

And to add another layer to that, from what I understand, and I certainly wasn't there, but the Highlander Center, which is the center of a lot of the wisdom and strategies that were learned and passed on and shared, literally taught the power of that song and many others as a way to maintain solidarity in the face of some of the terrible violence that was part and parcel of the history of the civil rights movement and the labor movement. When I tell people that, because most people think of songs as just really nice things to have around. And of course, religion knows better, and certainly the Black church knows better.

And just about any movement around the world at some point or another comes to grips with the fact that we need more than just pep talk to hold the line, particularly when you're in a nonviolent movement. So it's a long history.

Ken Grossinger

Courtney Cox, who is one of the SNCC organizers, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said the songs helped thaw the fear of the locals because they were afraid to stand up and fight back because they knew people were being lynched and killed and beaten. So, yeah, the songs have huge power, But I also think it's important to look at not just the song and the music, but the artist who's generating it.

There are a lot of celebrity artists that use music in a lot of important ways. But there are kind of another tier of artists that think about music as a form of organizing. And so one of the examples the book talks about is Bristol Bay. There was a mine up in Alaska called the Pebble Mine. And it was going to be, it's been a 20-year battle.

It was going to be the largest open pit mine in the world, or the second largest open pit mine in the world. And there are two major industries in Alaska. One is the extractive mining industries, and the other is the fishing industry. People that fish commercially, people that fish for sustenance, and people that fish sport. The fishermen had gotten together to oppose the mine. Now the mine was being situated in a 60% indigenous community. And so if anything were to happen, there would be flows and flows of toxic material that went into the community. And not 150 miles from there was one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded in history, which created dozens of tsunamis, killed a lot of people. And so the thought, if you think about California and the San Andreas fault, there are going to be more shakeups, especially those of us who have lived through them.

And in order to make this mine, they were going to need to build a 70 foot, seven-story earthen dam to contain the toxic waste that would basically decimate things. And so among the fishermen, which is the point of the story, were artists, particularly musicians. And they realized that what they were missing was a campaign theme. They needed an anthem, campaign song.

And so they call up Si Khan in North Carolina, who I mentioned earlier, and asked him if he would come to Bristol Bay to learn about the fight. And they did a lot of different things. So they brought him to a class of young people that was called Rebel to the Pebble. And Si said, in whatever way you say to seventh-graders, I'll be your musical messenger if you give me the message. And he wrote this beautiful song called “Abundance,” which became the basis for an album which was used to raise a lot of money.

Si Kahn (Singing)

No power known can never force me. From this ancient place that gave me. Birth Earth from the richness of this river and the abundance of this earth We've been here 10,000 years.

Along this. River shore if there's any justice left, we'll be here 10,000 more.

Ken Grossinger

But he did a lot more than that. He began to generate songs that he would then take into people's homes in the community. So there'd be gatherings of 15, 20, 25 people, and he would play the songs for the people that were there. And he'd say, “Well, what do you like about it? What don't you like about it? You want me to throw out this line? Do you want me to throw out the song? Should I keep it the way it is?” And through that process created trust. And so now musicians and fishermen and others in the community were in a new kind of relationship.

And eventually they said to Si, we've now got Alaska covered. We want you to go south into the lower 48 to raise money and carry our message throughout the nation. And so Si created something called Musicians United at Bristol Bay, which did exactly that. And so musicians have contact lists, they've got social media following, they've got organizing savvy, many of them contrary to popular opinion about how to get a message out there and engage people with it. And so it's important when we think about the power of music that we also think about the artists themselves that bring us that.

Bill Cleveland

Act Three: The Most Powerful Thing for Good and for Ill.

When our ancestors sat around the ritual fire in prehistory, pretty much what kept them together was all the things you're talking about. Rhythm, music, images, the rituals, the pre-art art. I think most people who are organic organizers know that you have to move people above and beyond just the brain. And one of the things that just rises up for me from that Bristol Bay story is the fact that intrinsic to the art making process is the embodied strategy you're talking about, which is, artists will tell you, “I know that didn't just come from me.”.

Yeah, I am, you know, as a songwriter and storyteller, I'm tapping into a multi millennial cycle of stories and ideas and feelings and I'm just picking up on the stream. And so when you're in a community and you're doing that same thing that Si did, which is he's very intentionally saying, here's what washed up on the shore. Let's see what sticks, what doesn't. Here's our song. And the thing about that kind of work is that the judgment world basically says, “Is it technically good, Is it technically bad?” But people whose song rises up from their story, they don't have those questions. I feel it here in my heart. And that's age old. That's very old school. That's not a New Deal at all.

Ken Grossinger

It reminds me of my wife who — who I mentioned was an artist — has an exhibition up in Washington D.C. at a museum called the Katzen Arts Center that's connected to American University, a exhibition of ten second generation Holocaust survivors. And so at the opening panel before the exhibit opened, each one of these artists talked about where their art came from and how being a second generation Holocaust survivor impacted it. And there were all kinds of stories from “I don't know where this came from.” to “Well, my mother talked about it every day.” To “My mother would never talk about it, but I heard about it.” It's so rooted in community and experience.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah. And of course, archaeologists and brain scientists are all basically coming together to say that this is not something that is a choice for humans. We have to do this. In fact, I would say a community that is not actively involved in making its own narrative is a community that is hurting. And I think that may in fact be one of the circumstances we find ourselves in right now, which is so many people feel disconnected from the story that is somehow imposed upon them or being told about them, even to the point where some people buy the distorted story that has been crafted externally as a substitute. And I think giving people that agency back, getting their fingerprints back on their story is critical. Right?

Ken Grossinger

That's such a profound insight, Bill, and reinforces why I wanted to do this podcast.

Bill Cleveland

Okay, good. Well, that's one of my soapboxes. So this actually brings up a question. I guess you'd say my liturgy is this human creative practice. This is the most powerful aspect of what it is to be human that we have in many ways squandered. And where people use it, it cooks. Okay. It really actually does make a difference.

But one of the things when I teach that I have to pound home is that many people assume that artists and art making are naturally aligned with this progressive tilt, when in fact, historically, probably some of the most effective cultural organizing has happened from the other side of the coin, which is people like Milošević and Hitler and Pol Pot and the Stasi [the secret police of East Germany] all understood the power of culture and on one hand stifled it and on the other hand appropriated it in order to totally capture the story and produce tyranny. And once you actually recognize that, you realize you're not dealing with a benign force, you're dealing with something that's extraordinarily powerful, that could be used for good or for ill. Could you talk about that a bit in terms of your own experience?

Ken Grossinger

And when I interviewed Norman Lear for the book, I asked him if he thought that political change required social change first or did cultural change require political change. So what was the driving force? And of course, he said, well, culture change has to happen before you can have political change. And he draws upon All in the Family and he says racism and homophobia were never water cooler conversations until they entered the homes of people.

Carole O’Connor and Jean Stapleton: (Singing)

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played songs. That made the hit parade. Guys like us, we hadn't made. Those were the days. And you knew where you were then. Girls were girls and men were men.

Act Four: Power Analysis

Coming back to this museum world, which is, to me, it's one of the most interesting sort of case studies if you look at it. They're incredibly conservative institutions by their history, and they have this immense footprint of power in communities, both symbolic and also just their horsepower, the big ones. And the kind of challenge I think your book poses, which is asking the question, “What is our role in community? Who do we serve.”

Ken Grossinger

And maybe I should tell another story because it gets to this point. At the American Museum of Natural History, David Koch was on their board for, I don't know, 15 or 20 years. David Koch is one of the biggest investors in fossil fuels, biggest investor in climate denialism. And imagine you're a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, which is an educational institution and wants to do a show about climate change. Are you going to present that to the CEO who then has to grapple with whether or not they want to cross David Koch. Without ever opening his mouth, he immediately gives pause to the idea.

Amy Goodman (Democracy Now)

Democracy Now. Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

We end today's show with a look at how the nation's top museums are facing calls to cut ties with billionaire funders who profit from global warming. In an open letter, a coalition of climate scientists, museum experts, and environmental groups say science and natural history museums should stop accepting money from fossil fuel corporations and individual donors like the Koch brothers. Koch Industries has extensive energy industry holdings and has funded climate denial. David Koch is a board member of both the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian National Museum of the Natural History.

Ken Grossinger

And so we have to take a real hard look at integrating and realigning those boards so that they reflect — I'm not telling you anything you don't already know — that they reflect community interests and not just an uber wealthy class.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah. And getting back to your strategy, that's a power analysis that you just described. It's something that I call in my power analysis world as the chain of accountability, which is the silent tyranny, this shadow that is cast where people who are aware of the chain of accountability and are also thinking about their self-interest and their careers and even their institutional survival are basically doing the editing ahead of time. And one of your stories about Pins and Needles, about a piece of art that is telling an important story, I'm going to let you tell the story and how it had to confront what to say and what not to say.

Ken Grossinger

What made it special was it was an attempt by the ILGWU, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, to shape public perception about garment workers. And what distinguished it was it wasn't professional actors, but it was the workers themselves that played the role.

The workers themselves had the longest Broadway run in the history of America. Not professional actors.

Cast of Pins and Needles (Singing)

Sing me a song with social significance

There's nothing else that will do

It must be tense with common sense

Or I won't love you

Bill Cleveland

Harold Rome, Pins and Needles Composer

We had been rehearsing for a year with members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Sing me a song of social significance or I won't love you.

The ILGWU, that's International Ladies Garment Workers Union to you, had a cultural department where they taught the union members tap dancing, mandolin playing, elocution, I think, even embroidery and singing. And from that group, we got the cast of Pins and Needles to rehearse. They came three days a week after work from 7 to 10.

Bill Cleveland

That was the theme song, and Harold Rome, the composer, reflecting back. One of the things I love about this play is that it was a constantly evolving script based on changing conditions on the ground.

So here's a hard question. We live in a world that is increasingly a hyper temporary. And by that I mean where the most profound issues and events and lessons and learning are regularly turned into digestible gummies on screen, on media, et cetera, et cetera. How do you succeed in creating the message and not have it turned into just another day's minor headline and then here today, gone tomorrow?

Ken Grossinger

Yeah, well, if we could figure that out, we would be doing a lot better ourselves. Personally, I think you're right. It’s a pretty important question.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah.

Ken Grossinger

You know, there's a story in the book about Jane Fonda. It's about the power of film and political mobilization. And it describes the evolution of Nine to Five as Nine to Five was not just the movie with Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. It was also an organization. Before there was a movie called Nine to Five it was 9 to 5, the organization by two women, Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassidy.

And when Jane's antiwar activities wound down because the war ended, she decided to dedicate her time to fighting for women's equity. And she calls up Karen and she says, “Karen, I want to learn about your organization and what it's doing.”. So Karen, of course, meets with Jane and schedules several meetings for Jane with other activists and organizers that she's associated with. And then she has this big convening in Ohio, which is where Karen was based at the time, of 300 women.

At the end of the night, Jane had this throwaway line which was something like, “Do any of you have any revenge fantasies about your boss?”. And one woman stands up and says, “I want to grind his bones into coffee beans and feed them to the other bosses in the town.” And at that time, Jane understood that Nine to Five need not be a drama that could be labeled a feminist film, but a comedy. And so I tell this story because of what happened after the film came out, which is they decided to do a twenty-city tour of the film, and they wound up doubling the number of affiliates that they have through the film, through their collaboration.

Bill Cleveland

That's incredible.

Ken Grossinger

Yeah.

Bill Cleveland

I mean, it really is. How do you keep the power of organic, authentic, important messages? How do you maintain that horsepower in the world we live in where everything gets drained of its sustenance, drained of its power?

Ken Grossinger

And that's one way to do it, to integrate the art with the organization or the organization with the art.

Bill Cleveland

So what's been sparking you lately that you're excited about that you want to share with folks out there?

Ken Grossinger

I guess two things in particular. One is the organizing victories that we've had. Amazon. A rise in the minimum wage In California, $20 an hour for low wage service sector workers. I mean, labor's obituary has been written more than once in our history, and labor has always rebounded. And whether this is a rebound or a blip is unclear. But it's inspiring me.

And the other thing that's among a million things that inspire me, that really inspires me, is Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell has come back, come back from serious illness and medical problems where she had to relearn how to talk, let alone sing. And that woman's on stage again, performing and embracing community and Jesus. I feel like anyone that follows her and follows that story, it's one of those stories that if she can do it well, certainly I can get there part of the way. Yeah.

Bill Cleveland

And I think pondering the strength and resilience of Joni's genius is a good place to end. Thanks, Ken, for your stories and your continued good work to our listeners. Thank you for the time that you've spent with us here.

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. Please know that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and 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 or go to the link in our show notes, which also includes links to the many people, places, events and publications mentioned in this episode. Thanks also to the Art Is Change Team. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the Maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of V235. So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.