How can we as grassroots activists merge our love of the arts with our activism? We make the best activist art when we act on what we are passionate about, as a way to compel the creation of the art, whether its graffiti, zines, drama, film, or any other art form. We express ourselves best in regards to the things we are most passionate about. We do this in our own voices and our own style, not assimilated into the mainstream consciousness, but rather sustained by our own self replicating memes, that we create as activist artists.
It's time to believe in our passions and our dreams again. We must be so bold as to trust in our dreams of a better world, and believe in our fellow artists and activism. We do well to feed each other with activist art that empowers the peaceful revolutions for which we all stand and struggle. We can use art to inspire and activate people, including ourselves, to have faith again...faith in our own creations and stories, faith in our goals of true peace and true justice, faith in the vitality of our common struggles together.
Mass media, including all art forms, have at times been used by the dominant culture to manipulate the masses, to negotiate social engineering across generations, to turn our own creativity against us, by calling us mad weirdos and such. So we take back our creative power, and we make art about it. In doing so, we set ourselves free of the bland cages of the slave masters, and allow ourselves to expand into our true humanity.
Activist art includes many forms, but the most commonly recognized one is protest art. Protest art includes such things as zines, signs, banners, graffiti, and any other art form used by activists to communicate a particular movement, cause or message. Its a way for social justice activists to perform visual actions that make something very clear to the observer. Protest art is often used in demonstrations, but it can be found anywhere that a conscious person chooses to put together the materials that make the art. All it requires is passion and effort.
People who happen to be social justice activists as well as artists tend to be people with intelligent thoughts of dissent. They have chosen to dismantle their own paradigms and programming, and they have chosen to love and struggle for what they believe in. They do not surrender to apathy or depression, or for that matter, anger or hatred. They create art with that passion. They convey messages of liberation, activation, and empowerment through the visual arts, to the masses. The more intelligent, social justice activists who are creating conscious art, the more powerful we are as a movement, a renaissance, a flowering of humanity in these desperate times.
As grassroots activists with a penchant for the arts, we can reclaim our lives, our power and our freedom with such activities as graffiti, especially stencil tags, we can reclaim our educations by telling true stories and visually expressing true realities, we can claim public spaces for communal art, we can teach art and activism to the younger generations, and show them how its done all over the world.
Arts + Activism= Awesomeness
