What use is art making

when freedom is under pressure?

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community? This is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activist 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 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 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.

This show features my conversation with painter, organizer, educator and “root waterer” Jordan Seaberry,about what happens when art moves beyond decoration and entertainment and becomes a powerful civic practice for listening, organizing and building people power. Jordan's work, which spans painting, policy, comics, teaching and movement building, is all grounded in the conviction that human creativity is not extra.

Along the way, we follow Jordan's journey from the south side of Chicago to the Rhode Island School of Design, otherwise known as RISD, to Oregon organizing around prisoners rights, studying at Roger Williams University School of Law, and helping lead the US Department of Art and Culture.

In it we will learn about:

* How Jordan's life as a painter and organizer came together from RISD disillusionment to grassroots organizing, law school teaching and cultural strategy.

* Why listening is central to both art art and organizing. Whether the canvas becomes an ear or an organizer helps someone rehear their own life with dignity

* How artists can generate real civic power by joining movements, helping build alternative systems, and challenging dominant institutions from both inside and the street.

Notable Mentions

People

Jordan Seaberry — Painter, organizer, educator, and co-director at the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, whose practice bridges painting, policy, comics, and movement work.

Adam Horowitz — Founding leader in the creation of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture’s people-powered national framework.

Arlene Goldbard — Writer, speaker, and longtime cultural activist who helped shape USDAC’s founding vision.

Gabriel Baez — Cultural organizer and early USDAC leader involved in its national development.

Jonathan Highfield — RISD faculty member and an important mentor in Jordan’s political and intellectual formation.

Carlton Turner — Artist, organizer, and co-founder of Sipp Culture, building rural cultural infrastructure in Mississippi.

Brandi Turner — Co-director of Sipp Culture and key partner in its community-rooted cultural work.

Dan Denvir — Host of The Dig, the podcast Jordan names as a useful guide in making sense of the current political moment.

Nadine Bloch — Activist, trainer, and creative strategist with Beautiful Trouble, mentioned in connection with artists against authoritarianism work.

Michelle Alexander — Civil rights advocate and author of The New Jim Crow, one of the books Jordan cites as deeply influential.

Richard Powers — Novelist and author of Bewilderment and The Overstory, both named in Jordan’s recommendations.

Jon Fogel — Author of Punishment-Free Parenting, which Jordan connects to broader questions of punishment and power.

Kathryn Bigelow — Director of A House of Dynamite, the film Jordan references in thinking about the state and the individual.

Organizations

U.S. Department of Arts and Culture — A people-powered, non-governmental “performance piece” that prefigures what a real federal department of arts and culture could do in support of cultural democracy.

Charles F. Kettering Foundation — Partner on the Art in Action series through its work connecting democracy, public life, and the arts.

Democracy and the Arts at the Kettering Foundation — Kettering’s focus area for integrating the power of the arts into democratic life locally, nationally, and internationally.

Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) — Jordan’s alma mater and now one of the places where he teaches.

Jordan Seaberry at RISD — RISD faculty profile outlining his work as a painter, organizer, and educator.

Roger Williams University School of Law — The law school where Jordan studied while deepening the connection between art, policy, and public life.

“Radical Imagination, Radical Listening” at RWU Law — Profile of Jordan’s path through Roger Williams and the role legal study played in his work.

Sipp Culture — Mississippi-based cultural organization founded by Carlton and Brandi Turner, named here as a powerful example of alternative system building through art, food, land, and community.

Beautiful Trouble — Creative strategy hub for activists and organizers, referenced in connection with USDAC collaborations.

The Nonviolence Institute — Providence-based organization where Jordan served as director of public policy.

Publications, media, and resources

The Dig — Socialist podcast Jordan cites as part of his effort to understand the current political landscape.

Bewilderment — Richard Powers novel exploring empathy, climate grief, and the human relationship to the living world.

The Overstory — Powers’s earlier novel, invoked here as part of the same moral and ecological terrain.

A House of Dynamite — Kathryn Bigelow’s Netflix political thriller, which Jordan reads as a study in how governments can reduce ordinary people to pieces on a strategic board.

The New Jim Crow — Michelle Alexander’s landmark book on mass incarceration and racialized punishment in the United States.

Punishment-Free Parenting — Jon Fogel’s book, which Jordan links to deeper questions about discipline, punishment, and retribution.

Related episode

Art Is Change, Episode 78 featuring Carlton Turner — Bill notes this earlier conversation in connection with Sipp Culture and Mississippi-rooted cultural organizing

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Hey there. So, tell me, what use is art making when freedom is under pressure?

From the Center for the Study of Art & Community, this is ART IS CHANGE, a chronicle of art and social change, where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Now, this episode is part of a special Art in Action series we're producing in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation 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, I talk to painter, organizer, educator, and root-waterer Jordan Seaberry about what happens when art moves beyond decoration and entertainment and becomes a powerful civic practice for listening, organizing, and building people power.

Jordan's work, which spans painting, policy, comics, teaching, and movement building, is all grounded in the conviction that creativity is an essential part of our lives, not an embellishment. In our conversation, we follow Jordan's journey from the South Side of Chicago to the Rhode Island School of Design (otherwise known as RISD) to organizing around prisoners' rights, studying at Roger Williams University School of Law, and helping lead the U.S. Department of Art and Culture.

In this episode, we explore:

How Jordan's life as a painter and organizer came together, from RISD disillusionment to grassroots organizing, law school, teaching, and cultural strategy;

Why listening is central to both art and organizing —whether the canvas becomes an ear or an organizer — helps someone re-hear their own life with dignity; and

How artists can generate real civic power by joining movements, helping build alternative systems, and challenging dominant institutions from both inside and the street.

Part One: The Root Waterer

Jordan Seaberry, welcome to the show. I have to say, I'm really looking forward to this. I love talking to people who split the difference between the work, the art, the politics, the whole thing. So, let's begin.

Where are you hailing from?

I am calling in from what we call right now Providence, Rhode Island, but historically and hopefully in the future was land of Narragansett and the Wampanoag people. We are at a site of, I think, really interesting history. Roger Williams founded the colonial state, Providence and Rhode Island, and he was a religious heretic who was chased out of Massachusetts Bay Colony because he believed in this really wacky idea called the separation of church and state. So, we are at a really interesting crossroads, both as a colonial project and also a project that put this core principle into the American bloodstream.

Bill Cleveland:

Yeah. And into the community itself, because of the ripples of that history. Yeah. I usually ask, what's your handle? What's your street name? If you have one. And if you don't, what would you like?

Well, my nickname my whole life has been Monk. My whole family, my friends, everybody calls me Monk. It's derived from a name my older sister gave me just moments after I was born. Because she decided she did not like the name Jordan, she redubbed me Monket and it has stuck ever since. Three and a half decades, it's come with me.

But if I had to think of one that encapsulated what I'm hoping to give to the world, I do think there's some monk to me in terms of hopefully an ability to keep my cool in chaotic surroundings. But the one I would choose would be a root waterer. I spent a lot of time in the limelight and out front as an artist and an organizer, and I have found a real joy in stepping back and being the one who can nourish the folks who are coming up next, who are hungry and eager and need some guidance and some nourishment and some support and some love. So, root waterer feels right for this chapter of my life.

And you're in the right place to do that because . . . . How long have you been there at the U.S. Department of Art and Culture (USDAC)?

I started at the USDAC . . . I think it was probably the last week of February 2020. So I had no idea what was about to come slap us all in the face. So, yeah, my first week, months, years on that job was really trying to hold the team together and trying to support folks through just the unknown. It was really chaotic, but I'm lucky that team is made up of, to this day, some of the most incredible people I've ever worked with. So, it wasn't that hard to keep it together.

So, for those who are not familiar with USDAC, could you share sort of a capsule, maybe history and mission statement?

Absolutely. USDAC stands for U.S. Department of Arts and Culture. And before your listeners panic and throw their headphones across the room, we are not a federal agency. We are not a part of the glorious administration bringing us back to the golden age. I like to think of us more like a performance piece. We are performing what we would want that agency to do if it existed. The only reason that we're able to use the name U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is because the government never made one. So, I used to joke that we're just doing this until we get our cease and desist letter because they decided to get off their butts and make a "real" version. But until then, we are pre-figuring what we would want that federal agency to do. How would we want it to define artists? How would we want it to support those folks?

We know how, for example, the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Transportation or Department of Energy, we know how they define their mandate. We know how they support folks. We want to think about how we would want the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture to support our folks. And so we know we wouldn't want to define artists just as folks like me who are painters who exhibit in a sort of traditional avenue. We would want it to include folks like indigenous practitioners, street performers, grassroots artists, birth workers, food-justice folks, folks who are really building the cultural tapestry of our society, the real interlocking web that keeps us together. As much as I love the Boston Symphony Orchestra, we want to really build power with the folks, some of whom may not even think of themselves as artists, but who are really building culture.

So, supporting the creative capacity of American communities in a way that stretches way beyond the institutional definition or academic definition of what art and culture are all about.

That's the hope. And we're most known for our toolkits and our guides that we've used to resource artists. But we have experimented with a ton of different formations over the years. I wasn't the first director or co-director. We were founded in 2013 by Adam Horowitz, who had support from an incredible National Cabinet, as well as co-directors Arlene Goldbard and Gabrielle Uballez. There's a long history and a lot of experimentation trying out different geographical configurations, cultural envoys and regional anchors, trying out bringing folks together in physical space versus virtual space. And all of it in an effort to figure out how we can best support artists to understand their role in the movement for justice, in social justice organizations specifically, but the world at large.

Well, I think I mentioned at the top that I think you're the right person at the right place at the right time. Could you talk a little bit about how you have moved through this world as a creator and as an advocate and as an organizer? Just a capsule history of Jordan Seaberry.

So, I'm from Chicago. I was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, which I loved very dearly, but came out east to Rhode Island to attend Rhode Island School of Design, which was my dream school, my absolute number one choice. It was all I could think about. And from 0 until 18, all I wanted to be was an artist. Comic book artist, landscape painter, very traditional type of work is what I was really interested in. And I was lucky to get into RISD, get a scholarship to attend and about five minutes after arriving, I realized I was completely miserable. I could not seem to make friends. I couldn't feel like I even fit into the identity of artists. It was a huge culture shock. I mean, going to college for lots of kids is just a huge shift that they wrestle with. But for me, I just couldn't seem to make sense of it. I was really unhappy. And so, I struggled my way through, but I slowly had this political awakening about these issues that I had thought didn't have anything to do with me. Despite being born and raised as a Black kid in South Side of Chicago, somehow, I had to go to beautiful Providence, Rhode Island, to say, "Oh, racism is a real problem in this country. Oh, and sexism, too. And what is capitalism?" All of it just came flooding into my head, and it was so overwhelming that I was just looking for anything to make any sense of it.

And so, my first moment of activism that I chart all of this back to is just a very simple act that I encourage listeners here to do if you haven't tried getting out into the activist world or I talk to students about it. The first thing I did was I just looked at what resources I had on hand and how that might be able to fill a need nearby me. So, I had a meal plan for the cafeteria. And at the time, I've been told RISD changed this in part or in whole because of me, which I'm both proud and embarrassed by.

At the time, you could stack up all of your meals at the end of the week and get all of them, all 21 or however many, all at once. And I was a scrawny little kid. I wasn't eating anything but grilled cheeses. So I had plenty of meals at the end of the week. And I would cash all of them out, just get these piles and piles of food, and I would bring them down to the downtown area in Providence, Kennedy Plaza, which is our central transportation hub where a lot of folks congregate, a lot of folks who could use a nice hot meal from the RISD cafeteria.

So, I had no organization. I had no contacts. I just went out with a bin full of these cafeteria meals, and I just started handing them out. And I did this week after week, and I didn't have any plans for how it grew from there. Nothing beyond just knowing that I had this resource and I can give it to somebody. And because I was in the central transportation hub of the city, folks started seeing this strange little kid at the end of each week, just with a table of food and a bunch of people eating and a bunch of pigeons congregating around them.

I started catching the attention of other activists who were in that area, hopping on a bus, hopping off a bus. And so, I eventually started getting approached more and more by activists and that was actually my introduction to the activist world here. It was just this small act of service that I had no idea if it would be useful or sustainable, but it led to me building some really beautiful relationships with folks, some of whom I really love and know to this day.

But that led me into the organizing world. I started volunteering primarily in criminal justice work, prisoners' rights organizing. And I got more and more involved. And the more involved I got, the more sense it made in my life. And the more sense that made in my life, the less sense art made in my life. And so, I increasingly was seeing my identity go to this political side of myself, and art just made less and less sense for me.

And so, after my first semester of junior year, I dropped out. No intention of . . . no looking back. I slammed the door behind me. I was ready to be done. And I spent the next few years just engaging in that political organizing. I was lucky to get a position directing that prisoners' rights campaign that I had been working on. And for about three years, I didn't paint a thing. I didn't draw a thing. I thought art just had no role in my life any longer. And so, eventually, my best friend sat me down and explained to me how foolish I was being and that I needed to, both for myself and the community I cared about, needed to go back and figure out how these two sides of myself could pull together.

I must say, it's amazing that you're able to switch tracks so completely.

Exactly. I spent the first many years of my life only in art to the exclusion of the external world, to the exclusion of politics. Now I had gone exclusively to politics, to the exclusion of art, and she very convincingly and bluntly explained to me how stupid that was, and that I needed to figure out how to pull these things together.

So, fast-forward, I go back to RISD and I love it because I have this community behind me that I care about and this legislative work and grassroots organizing, protests, marches, all of this stuff that I've been lucky to build. And I have that, that I'm able to carry with me back into art school, and it feels so much more alive to me.

[00:15:35] Bill Cleveland:

So, deep inside all of that, the thing that actually got you into the street with your little cartons of food is an impulse to service. And I'm going to guess that didn't just descend upon you, that it came from some history, that it's a part of maybe people who came before you. Could you talk a little bit about where you think that impulse came from, how it rose up?

At the time, it felt so inexplicable. It just felt so just the force of nature that came through my life. I can point to some events and I can point to some spaces and some people.

An event would be I was a freshman when Obama was first elected, and I remember feeling there was just so much exuberance, so much joy, I mean, especially in Chicago. My mom was beside herself. And I just remember feeling like I was missing something. Why wasn't I excited about this guy who, in many ways, almost looked like me, had a similar sort of story? Why wasn't I excited for him to rise to this highest office of power? And I really reflected and started realizing that I think it's because I don't actually believe in that office of power. And so, that led me down a real path of learning.

But my biggest mentor in this time was a professor named Jonathan Highfield, who I'm lucky now to teach alongside at RISD. He was a huge mentor for me, thinking through these questions in both a macro-political way, but also a personal way. We took a course and traveled to South Africa together. We traveled to India together. And seeing the world alongside him, it didn't make more sense, it made less sense. I realized just how ignorant I was. And that was such a blessing to not feel like I had the answers, but that I needed to pursue these questions.

And then lastly, the place that I think I got some of this spunk from is a town called Shuqualak, Mississippi, which is where my grandfather was born and raised. And when he was a young man, there was a lynching in town, and my grandfather and his family fled with the understanding that if they stayed any longer, the same would happen to them. And so, they, like millions of Black families at the time, went straight up the Mississippi River to Chicago, which is where I was born.

And so, I grew up knowing that this was a part of our family, but I had no idea how it really fed into my own identity. My grandfather, for his part, only had two words to say about Mississippi, which was, "Don't go." And that fear was real, but it was shrouded in silence. And so, once I dropped out of RISD, I decided I didn't have a whole lot going on, why not see if I can find that spot of land where my grandfather was born, see if I can find something down there for myself.

Whoa. Whoa.

He had passed. I think I was probably about 16 when he passed away. And so nobody living had ever been there. Nobody could tell me where it was. So I went down and I spent a couple days in the county courthouse with the giant deed books, trying to figure out who bought what parcel of land in 1831 and who sold it to this person in 1890. Everything's measured in fence post instead of feet. It was very challenging. And I didn't find it the first trip, but the second time I went down, I did. And just like with that bin of food in the bus terminal, I had no plans. I had no expectations. I just arrived down there. It was a full-grown forest. I just parked my car, I pitched a tent, and I set up a propane stove with a can of spaghetti and some breadcrumbs.

Just to interject here with an observation that your no-plan questing is very familiar to me as what I sometimes think of as the creator's path, the impulse to know a thing, but not knowing exactly how or why or where it will lead, but ultimately intuiting the importance of the journey. Does that ring true for you?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I said, "All right, let's just see what happens." And of course, what happened is, we're talking about a tiny town. Shuqualak is about one square mile and we're about three miles outside of that, so way out in the boonies. So it's not hard to catch folks' attention when you are magically appearing in a tent on the side of the road in a forest. So, I got the chance to meet just about everybody. I accompanied the pastor on a hunting trip. I rode my first four-wheeler. I got invited to dinners and lunches and church services. I just fell in love with the place and the people. and so I decided I wanted to keep going down there. I've done a photography project. I've had a painting exhibition about spaces down there. It became a real important part of my identity, finding those. There are just so many different historical pockets around this country, so many places where stories are just alive. And I was down there, and it just felt so alive. Nobody there knew my last name. I didn't have any family members that I could find, but I felt like me. And that feeling is what paintings do. And so, for me, I just knew I needed to keep going down there. And I've been lucky to keep in touch with folks and get down there since then as well. So, I think those things combined put me on a pretty irreversible track to be a bit of a troublemaker.

Yeah. Well, pushing against the river is not a hard thing to do in Mississippi. There's a lot of momentum in particular directions. I spent 15 years working in Mississippi with the juvenile justice system down there. Yeah.

I had no idea.

Yeah. Well, who would know? I mean, it's a place where there's a story around every corner that will teach you something you didn't know you needed to learn. I don't fall in love with many places. But when you connect with people that you care about and their stories and the landscape and hard history, which is so much a part of who they are, I mean, there's just no separation whatsoever as far as I'm concerned in Mississippi.

Part Two: Assembling the Pieces

Having completed my CIA investigation of Jordan Seaberry, the thing I wrote up here at the top of my page, painting and policy. So, you talked about how you were estranged from your artwork. And then clearly, you have joined the advocacy and the policy work and the organizing with the making. Could you talk about that?

I think to the outside, it might appear more seamless than it is. People ask me this question and I think they're expecting a pretty clear understanding of how these two sides of myself thread together. And the answer is that sometimes they do. Sometimes it's crystal clear. And other times they feel like they're swimming in the same water, but apart from one another. And so, what I've really learned how to do is just manage that dance, to not force or expect them to be in perfect tandem at all times.

I think a lot of artists, I'm sure folks listening, feel that pressure that because art is such a fundamental part of our identities as makers, that, therefore, every part of us has to be expressed at all times in every piece, every political opinion I have, everything about my family, my history. And I love to offer artists the grace to forgive themselves that burden a bit and to understand that sometimes these things make sense. But really, art, an art practice is called a practice because we are practicing, we are exploring, we are experimenting. And so, you can't know that it's always going to have political resonance or social resonance or, I mean, that it's even going to have aesthetic resonance. But you have to lean into that exploration, that practice.

Now, Jordan, I have to say that that invitation to self-grace and unencumbered exploration for yourself and, I assume, for your students is an incredible gift to give, particularly in this hothouse social-change moment we're in. So, I have to ask, when these disparate parts of your practice do meld, how does that work?

So, the ways that I've tried to weave them together . . . there are projects where each time I have a painting exhibition, I'll generally try to partner, to think about myself as a collaborator, either with a community, with a specific issue, or with a place.

That has morphed into a bunch of different types of projects like that, where I'm arranging my painting exhibition around an accountability, around a responsibility that I have to a group. So, my most recent exhibition last year, I worked with hospice care patients. I partnered with the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Massachusetts and worked with their hospice and palliative care network to have conversations with folks who were looking death right in the face, who couldn't sidestep it, couldn't beat around the bush. They were in hospice care thinking about the end. And so, I wanted to ask myself as an artist, what type of responsibility do I feel when I'm making paintings in conversation with folks who probably won't live to see the finished painting?

You mentioned accountability, which seems to be in short supply these days. Could you say more about why that matters to you?

So, I'm always trying to set my projects up in a way that I'm accountable to somebody. Sometimes that's working with civil rights organizers on pieces. Sometimes it's a space. I did an exhibition specifically about the Noxubee County Library, which is the library near Shuqualak, where my grandfather was from. The library was originally built as the county jail. And in the '80s a group came together and raised enough money to turn it into a library. But to this day, it still has all of the jail stuff: the heavy barred doors, the metal steps you walk up to the balcony. The gallows are still there. You can walk right across them.

And so, in that case, I wanted to be accountable to this space and honor the folks who had put this work into its transformation while also complicating what does it mean for. . . . thinking about if they hadn't fled, if my dad had grown up here, if I had grown up here. But this is the place you go to see the reptile guy and the magician and where I read books and do story time. And it's all under the executioner's hook that the rope used to hang from. Always trying to ask those types of questions.

In a more direct way, I recently started a comic book project, which is a practice I had not touched on since middle school. But I was in Guatemala during the inauguration last year and I was doing a Spanish language immersion program. Every day was Spanish. I was sort of in a bubble. And then I flew back to the U.S. and it was just chaos in the first weeks after the administration, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. And so I decided I wanted to go back to middle school. I just wanted to have somebody make sense of this world for me. So, at the USDAC, the team, we developed what we called Vital Conversations, where we are working with experts and artists and just all-around geniuses to answer that exact question: What the hell is going on and how do we wrap our minds around it and get active?

So, the first comic I did with was a conversation with Dan Denvir, who hosts a really incredible socialist podcast called The Dig. And he treated me like a middle schooler and just helped me make some sense of it. The second issue was with Nadine Bloch from Beautiful Trouble, adapted a training that the USDAC and Beautiful Trouble did together about artists against authoritarianism. And I've been really fortunate and surprised. I've always thought of myself as a painter. But the feedback on the comics has been really positive, and it seems like folks are finding some real usefulness out of it. So, I'm going to try and keep that going as well.

And then, of course, the USDAC itself is a performance piece. It is part of my artistic practice just like the paintings are. I try to see these things all looping together. Sometimes they're really clearly related, other times they're not. But I try to stay open for the experimentation. I try not to beat myself up if they're not swimming too closely together at any given moment.

Part Three: The Ear in the Canvas

So, one of the things you've talked about in terms of your own painting process is listening, which is also. Gee, it's connected to advocacy. It's connected to organizing. Pretty much everybody that I talk to on this show, one way or another, identifies themselves as having a listening practice that advances the notion that there is no collective power without listening. Could you talk a little bit about how the canvas becomes an ear?

Yeah. That's a great question. I love talking about this because students come up to me all the time. They know I'm the politics guy around. And so they'll ask me, "Can you look at my painting? Can you look at my sculpture? I can't figure out if I'm getting my message across. I can't figure out if my ideas are clear. Will the audience get it?" And they're really white-knuckling their paintbrush to make sure that they can beat their audience over the head. And I tell them the exact same thing every time. I say, "Worry less about what you are trying to say. Don't ask yourself what message you're trying to get across, whether folks will get it. Ask yourself instead, who do you want to listen to? Who do you want to bring into the painting with you? And if you do that responsibly and honorably, then the message will be felt. If not heard, it will be felt."

I try to carry that through all of my practices, asking myself less about "What do I want to say through this megaphone?" and "How do I turn the megaphone toward my ear and listen to others?"

Yeah. I may be wrong here, but I would venture that that listening imperative is a through line that runs through all of the hats you've worn on your journey.

You're absolutely right. That same posture exists in organizing. As an organizer, especially working in the field I did, where you're working in prisoners' rights and you've got folks coming straight out of prison and you have family members of folks who are currently incarcerated. And the world is a chaotic place. These folks are coming out on probation, ready to be violated by the state for any tiny infraction. They're walking on eggshells. They've spent sometimes 20, 30, 40 years under the oppressive thumb of the state. And so, how do you come out and make a life that makes sense out of that? I mean, it's extremely difficult. And I think we overlook just how hard that transition is to just make a life for yourself.

And so, when you're sitting with these folks, obviously, the questions they're asking, the ideas they're presenting, all of it's generally going to just be all over the place. And as an organizer, it's your job to be able to hear underneath that. Not the exact words they're using, but what are you hearing? What are they feeling? What are they experiencing? And how can you identify that and figure out ways, not for you to support them? It's not a service agency. How can you figure out ways that they can empower themselves? Because what the prison is really good at doing is regulating your life. You know exactly when you're going to eat, when you're going to go outside, when you're going to go to bed. And so now you're out in this world and you've got this young guy across from you wanting you to stand up and fight for your own rights. Well, you've just spent 20 years being told that you have no business thinking for yourself.

And so, the project of listening is so intensive, but when you are able to really hear someone who is in crisis, and someone who is desperate for help and coherence, when you are really able to hear them and reframe it back to them, just to mirror it back, use your words and mirror it back to them and let them know that you've understood them. That is a miraculous thing and something that so few folks really get the opportunity to experience, especially marginalized folks, especially folks who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, folks who are poor or unhoused. To have someone who actually really is putting in the effort to hear you, that can be a pretty special thing.

Well, especially when the creative process is involved, it's not just a listening exercise. It's actually a generative exercise. And because you are also an educator, you share skillsets with people so that sometimes when it clicks, they have access to more agency than they ever imagined they would ever have with a paintbrush in their hand or a pair of scissors.

When you talked about the library in Shuqualak that was once the jail . . . . You've been to South Africa, so you're probably aware that the South African Supreme Court in Johannesburg is built into the Old Fort Number Four prison, the apartheid prison. And all those artifacts that you described that still exist in that library, the bars, the hanging station, well, they're still there in Johannesburg at the Supreme Court, and it's there for a reason. So folks will know and see what went down for themselves.

It sort of felt like being in Mississippi. We were in Cape Town. The parallels to the civil rights struggle here and the ways in which, obviously, organizers were learning from each other, but it's a practice. There are so many things that they improved upon in this future iteration. And it gives me so much hope for the next iteration and the next and the next. It's a practice. It's all an experiment.

Well, one of the things that you're up to, which is, you know that it's not a practice that learns from itself unless the learning is share. A practice is many, many, many layers of humans learning, a thing, improving on a thing, building on a thing, and then passing it on. And in the American commodified art world, we're taught, You do the show, you're done.” What happened? What were the ripples? How did that affect the community? And one of the things that USDAC does is provide a network for those kinds of ripples. Have I got that right?

I think that's right. The ripple image in particular. We are a small team. It's four of us. We are all part-time. We are all juggling other projects and art practices. And for us, we have to be really strategic about how we can best leverage what food we do have at the cafeteria to give out. And so, yeah, we have to be really conscious about how much other work is happening by organizations all across the country, like Art.coop, fronteristxs, all of these incredible projects that we want to amplify, that we want to bring to our folks. And we see it as sort of twofold.

Yes, we want to prepare artists to join social justice movements. We believe in that. We believe that artists are core to any movement for change, but that artists also have a responsibility to recognize their role in that work, that it's not enough just for us to be happy making those landscape paintings. We also really have to complicate and question our position, which is what you're alluding to, whether that's a financial position or in my case, I'm very lucky to be a painter who is able to exhibit in galleries and museums and support myself that way. And also, it would be a real shortchanging of my beliefs if that were my only aspiration. I feel a responsibility, really. If you know better, you got to do better. There's an ethical responsibility there.

And so, we want to push artists to get involved in social justice work. We believe that. But at the same time, we also have to prepare social justice organizations to receive artists. And what happens way too often is, and I did this, when I was a young organizer doing this prisoners' rights work straight out of art school, and I had RISD students and Brown University art students coming to me saying, "I want to get involved. How can I help?" And you'd think I would be uniquely positioned to be creative about this. And still, I fell into this trap where artists just get put to work on beautification projects. They make nicer T-shirts and cooler posters and maybe they get to design a website. But it needs to be, and it rarely is, a really creative intervention strategy, pulling artists into the strategic planning process itself.

Artists are so weird and smart and energetic. And you will get so many ideas that make no sense, and you will get so many ideas that are just utterly brilliant. And because it is a practice, you never know which is which. But it's such a rare muscle for organizations to have, to receive, artists and actually be prepared to absorb and deploy them strategically and not just toward beautification. So, we see it as sort of a both-hand. We want to prepare justice organizations to receive artists and we want to build this sense of responsibility in artists to join those movements.

No, but it actually . . . I mean, one thing that I've been involved in for most of my career, which a deep commitment to cross-sector training as for artists. So, in seven American cities, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in Minneapolis, and particularly in St. Louis, Creative Leadership Institute’s six-month training programs for artists and their non-arts community partners. So, basically, with the idea that you can't have one without the other. And what you're doing is you're doing is incubating creative partnerships, that partners learn each other's languages, they learn to trust each other, they identify challenging issues that they both are passionate about, and then they roll up their sleeves and they work together, not as strangers, but it is a practice.

It is. And I feel, in many ways, lucky that I had this kind of bifurcated story where I've had many years of my life where I thought both sides were stupid. I had many years thinking politics was stupid and not for me. And then I had years thinking art was stupid and had no role for me. And so, I feel uniquely positioned to understand the skepticism and the hesitance that comes from both sides, because it is real. I think organizations, justice organizations, ones that are particularly maybe set in their ways or have a sort of way of working historically, if you throw an artist in there without any kind of preparative conversation or training, that artist isn't going to really have any place to shine. And they're going to be misunderstood and people are going to continue on thinking that art doesn't have a role, that creative intervention doesn't have a role in this work. So, we do have to be careful.

Part Four: People, Institutions, and Systems

Jordan, you have a lot of chapters to your life. So, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask if you could tell a story where you saw the mixture of resources and ideas that you carry around with you really come to fruition?

I'm a big believer in three different ways to change the world. If you're familiar with the Momentum training institute, they talk about this. It's sort of a old-school idea. There's the three segments. There's alternative systems, there's personal transformation, and then there's challenging dominant institutions. And the idea that we need all three of these, but we need to be explicit about it. We need to be clear on what we're doing, whether alternatives being things like co-ops; personal transformation being things like yoga, self-improvement; and then challenging dominant institutions being organizing and protests and unions.

And so, I see my role increasingly in that personal transformation world. I'm working with students individually, trying to help them see themselves, understand themselves, which is what I needed to find my political way. But then also trying to make sure I'm working with alternatives. I mean, there are so many incredible alternative systems that I've been lucky to get to know. In Mississippi, for example, Sipp Culture.

Absolutely. Carlton Turner, yes.

I mean, Carlton and Brandi Turner, if folks listening aren't familiar, please give them a Google. And for me, that started me thinking about alternatives. That started them thinking about building a school. And now they've got this digital training lab and the Rural Performance/Production Lab, all this incredible stuff they're doing. But it started out thinking about how to build an alternative system. And then when I think about challenging dominant institutions . . . .

It is a very powerful example. So, how did seeing that and experiencing that affect your own work, your own path?

The way that really came home — and that I encourage other artists to think about — is the building that my painting studio is in. I share my studio with a group of other folks. We're in a collective, and it's been a building that has housed Providence's weirdest, coolest, most outrageous and most unexpected communities since time immemorial. It is just a real hallmark. And it has been purchased and there are plans to turn it into luxury developments. And so, one, I want artists to think about our role in gentrification.

One way to push back on that is, we decided to unionize as commercial tenants of this building, as artists. And it was the first commercial tenants union in the state. But it was an opportunity where all of these artists, many of whom had no idea how to run a union meeting or strategize the best way to put pressure on a buyer, all of this stuff was so new for a lot of folks. And it was really beautiful to see folks coming out of their usual lives into this new world. But also, I think it's a really important reminder to artists anywhere that we are people first, that we live somewhere, we eat somewhere, we take public transportation somewhere. All of those are opportunities to be people who can organize other people. Everywhere you find yourself, you can build people power. If you are an artist who happens to be in a world of curators and gallerists, those are people you can organize. If you're an artist who teaches second grade, you can organize with your peers. Anywhere there are people, as they say, there is power.

Really, what you're talking about is a thing that people are desperate for right now, which is relationships that help them make meaning and sense of the world. "What's my place? And how do I not become mute and immobile and paralyzed by this designed performative event that's happening all around us?" And so, at a time of growing pressure on artists and cultural institutions, what role, if any, do you feel the arts have in sustaining and advancing democratic life?

I mean, that's a biggie.

Yeah.

There are a lot of folks who look at art and really do wonder what role it has in greater society, what role it has in making change. And to those folks, I would say, you might be defining art a little too narrowly. You might be thinking about only what's in the big blue-chip galleries in Chelsea, Manhattan, and what's being performed at the Philharmonic. And so, really, I think the first step is expanding your definition, because what makes these arts institutions so powerful is exclusivity. It is an artificial scarcity, especially . . . I mean, I'm saying this as a painter. That's our bread and butter. There's only one, and someone will own it. And that type of individual authorship, ownership is very Western and very silly when you really think about what art can and should do. And so, I'd encourage folks to give themselves some time to say, "Actually, maybe this isn't all that art has to offer."

But when I think about culture, not just art with a capital A, but culture, how folks in our neighborhoods are dealing with this moment, I mean, there's awful, inhumane oppression, and there's also so much hope. How do folks find their ways? There's a reason that the administration and any authoritarian regime is afraid of artists. Because you spread ideas. You spread hope. You can criticize in a way that feels more felt than what's in The Washington Post. As an artist, you never know who's listening, you never know who's paying attention and watching your example.

So true. And you never know when or how others are going to interpret or understand what you've created as meeting the moment, meeting their moment, as you hoped, or in ways you never intended. Yeah. I think that's a good place to end. So, our final question, have there been any books, movies, artwork that have sparked you that you'd like to share with our audience?

So, a couple books that have really resonated with me lately. The first one is Bewilderment by Richard Powers, which is his follow-up to The Overstory.

Right. Great book.

And it presents some really hard questions about the activists' relationship to climate change in particular and how we can build empathy for the earth and each other.

The second is maybe going to be a little bit of a curveball. It's this Netflix film that folks are talking about, A House of Dynamite. And it's this new Kathryn Bigelow film about a nuclear missile heading toward the United States. And the reason I was interested in it isn't because I love apocalyptic political thrillers, but because I think it actually does a really interesting job of demonstrating how the government can interact with community members and individuals as pawns on a chessboard. I think it captures that dynamic really interestingly. And I don't think that's its intention. But I think it does a really fascinating job of demonstrating the smallness of people in the scheme of the government.

The third is actually going to be a sort of I'm going to cheat and do two. The third is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and this book called Punishment-Free Parenting. And the reason I lump those two together is because New Jim Crow I read forever ago changed everything about how I think about criminal justice. Punishment-Free Parenting I finished last week, and it's changing everything about how I think about parenting, and specifically with respect to discipline, with respect to how we can build a family where kids experience the logical consequences of their actions without retribution, without punishment that is designed to inflict pain or discomfort. It sounds weird, but the parallels between how we've built this retributive criminal justice system, the more I've been chewing on it, the more I realize how much of that practice can happen in even as simple a relationship as your individual household, trying to understand why infliction of pain and punishment is often much more about us than the actual action that took place. So, I'll do those 3.5 recommendations.

Okay. Fantastic. Thank you very much. And thank you for this conversation. Yeah.

Bill, I'm happy that you invited me on to share a little bit about my story and my work. I encourage folks to check out usdac.us to see some of the work we're doing and reach out. We love hearing from folks who are just finding us for the first time. We'll get you involved.

Absolutely. And you mentioned Sipp Culture and-

I did, yeah.

Carlton Turner, who we heard from last year in episode 78. We'll have links to both that and USDAC in our show notes.

Oh, wonderful. Wonderful.

Yep. We are all a big, hardworking, happy family. So, thank you so much. And-

All right, Bill.

Have a great week.

Thank you.

And thanks, listeners, for tuning in. ART IS CHANGE is a production of the Center for the Study of Art & Community. We'd like to thank the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for partnering with us for the 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 soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hand of the maestro Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org. And our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.