School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21 School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21 School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21 School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21
By Elise Butterfield
What happens when we imagine the future? Or, when we remember it? When we write it down, or visualize it, or act as though we are there, are we already there? What does it mean to invite someone into your imaginary future? What does it mean to live into a future you didn’t imagine for yourself?
These are questions that our dreamers in “Irresistible Futures” ask us, and sometimes answer. The works here represent a spectrum of visioning that ranges from tactile and felt, to explicitly articulated in words. They are each playful in their own way, and all unapologetically claim imagination as a powerful tool to make change. These artists ask us to complicate our understanding of the present and suggest new ways of connecting with ourselves, each other, our art, and our environment. What they offer are tantalizing dreams, the ones from which we do not long to wake. The kind of dreams that renew our commitment to making change—indeed that make change through their very existence.
For while hard-won through labor, the futures they craft are also
Luscious
Just
Creative
Expansive.
By Elise Butterfield
What happens when we imagine the future? Or, when we remember it? When we write it down, or visualize it, or act as though we are there, are we already there? What does it mean to invite someone into your imaginary future? What does it mean to live into a future you didn’t imagine for yourself?
These are questions that our dreamers in “Irresistible Futures” ask us, and sometimes answer. The works here represent a spectrum of visioning that ranges from tactile and felt, to explicitly articulated in words. They are each playful in their own way, and all unapologetically claim imagination as a powerful tool to make change. These artists ask us to complicate our understanding of the present and suggest new ways of connecting with ourselves, each other, our art, and our environment. What they offer are tantalizing dreams, the ones from which we do not long to wake. The kind of dreams that renew our commitment to making change—indeed that make change through their very existence.
For while hard-won through labor, the futures they craft are also
Lucious
Just
Creative
Expansive.
Yilin Wang /
Shanghai Qingpu District launched a rural revitalization drive and rebuilt the rural buildings in Zhangyan village. Zhangyan Cultural Center was one of the re-constructed buildings, designed by a famous Chinese architect Ju Bing. I was invited to design an immersive experience in this space through digital video and 3D mapping projection.
Borges once said “a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.” It’s time that we human beings need to rethink our position in nature, and to construct a community of a shared future. I rendered visuals in the projection such as the galaxy and free vortexes; the mountains, shooting stars and butterflies; the blowing wind through a garden in the night. Also, the music used samples from nature. Both were to raise people’s awareness of a poetic, sustainable way to live on the earth. In person, the audience could take off their shoes and walk into the pool to interact with the work in a flexible way.
"Zhangyan Harvest"
Rachel
Kabukala /
Kabukala /
Remembering the Future to
Imagine the Past:
Artists Imagining A New State of Being
This paper was presented in a panel called “How Not to Return to Normal” at the College Art Association’s annual conference in February of 2021.
My name is Rachel Kabukala and it is my pleasure to be with you all for the 30th anniversary of the 2021 CAA annual conference. I join you from Indiana University and acknowledge that I am on the territory of the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people, which was rightfully restored to their care as part of the Indigenous Land Back Act of 2035. As we celebrate this 30th anniversary of the 2021 CAA conference it is important to note it was the first to be held virtually and marked a shift in many ways, including providing more equitable access and proper accommodations for all members.
These changes were in large part a response to the COVID-19 pandemic that began the year prior and precipitated a great number of seismic shifts across the globe, not least of which was the turn to artists and creatives not only to help people endure the pandemic but also to help imagine what a post-pandemic world could be and to actively work towards creating that change. 2020 was the year society turned to artists to carry us through and they not only comforted us, they challenged us, as well. When people cried out for a return to “normal” from a place of fear and desperation it was the artists that taught us how to envision a future that was better and brighter—a new state of being.
For this panel I will be sharing about the work of For Freedoms, a political arts non-profit organization that had a significant role in shaping the improved state of being that we experience today, and the artist collective that emerged from their action called the Wide Awakes. I will track the efforts of For Freedoms in the years leading up to the 2020 presidential election, reveal details about their first ever Congress held in the spring of that year, and explore how this group used inclusive, empowering, and sustainable methods of visualizing and building the future we all deserve to impact the now historic Georgia state runoff elections of 2021 that flipped the US Senate.
In the spring of 2020, just days before what we of course know now as the Global Great Sheltering began, 500 artists, academics, and social justice advocates from all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, convened in Los Angeles, CA to serve as delegates for the first ever For Freedoms Congress. Co-founded by Michelle Woo, Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, and Wyatt Gallery, For Freedoms was a response to the rapid emergence of Super PACs, their influence over political speech and imagery, and their significant impact on the 2012 presidential election.1 The co-founders were alarmed by the overwhelming lack of concern about the new political entities exhibited by the general public and responded by creating their own artist-led Super PAC, with the aim of increasing awareness about the danger of these financially unlimited entities.2 By the end of 2017 the organization made the legal transition from Super PAC to LLC, having determined they would be better able to achieve their goals as a corporation with nonprofit status.3
Now, many decades later, For Freedoms still exists and continues its mission to “deepen public discussions on civic issues and core values” emphasizing a citizenship that is defined more by participation and less by ideology.4 For Freedoms aims to fulfill this mission through non-partisan nationwide programming that uses art as the vehicle for participation.5 In line with this vision is a series of questions that drives the For Freedoms team: “How can artists and other storytellers and creative people come together to move beyond division and uplift humankind? How can we foster non-binary thinking? What does a future look like where no one wins or loses but everyone plays?”6
The project that propelled For Freedoms onto the national stage was its 2018 50 State Initiative, a nationwide art project that featured over 700 public art interventions that incorporated work by 800 artists, and included 250 museums, arts institutions, and universities across the country.7 The largest creative collaboration in U.S. history at that time, the 50 State Initiative was executed at the peak of the 2018 midterm election cycle and prompted new and nuanced conversations about the state of politics in the United States.
The purpose of the initiative was to help facilitate a series of concurrent, decentralized art exhibitions and public events to be held across the nation that worked to elevate nonpartisan issues, support inclusion in a time of isolation and separation, inspire broad civic participation, celebrate diverse voices, and spark dialogue about art, education, advertising, and politics. 8
Additionally, For Freedoms hoped to build upon their growing network of artists, institutions, and civic leaders as they continued to map and connect the “cultural and artistic infrastructure” of the United States.9
The four main modes of participation in the 50 State Initiative were large-scale billboards, public town halls, lawn sign installations, and featured exhibitions at art institutions. The billboard campaign was financed through crowdfunding and featured work by more than 150 artists who partnered with For Freedoms. The resulting signage varied widely in content and was void of any context beyond a small text block that read “Paid for by For Freedoms.” Appearing in all 50 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, the billboards became one of the most visible and divisive elements of the 50 State Initiative. For a culture inundated with an unrelenting onslaught of visual imagery, citizens at that time faced challenges in interpreting images not easily discernible, void of overt messaging, or lacking didactic mediation.
An example of this was a billboard shown in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi that displayed a photograph by Spider Martin that captured Civil Rights marchers facing a line of state troopers in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965 on what became known as Bloody Sunday. The iconic image was overlaid with the easily recognizable campaign slogan from one-term president Donald Trump, “Make America Great Again,” and sparked significant controversy in the Jackson area. Many community members assumed the message was from right-wing extremists and citizens successfully petitioned to have the work removed, provoking new questions about first amendment rights. In spite of the controversy, For Freedoms insisted this was precisely the type of open dialogue they were hoping to inspire, something co-founder Eric Gottesman has described as “productive confusion.”10
“Make America Great Again” by Spider Martin in Pearl, MS. For Freedoms, 2016.
Many of the 50 State Initiative-related exhibitions were driven by curatorial questions posed by For Freedoms including, “What do artists do that others do not? What does art offer to political speech? How can art make social action better?” And “What is the power of synchronicity, of unity? What is the value of discord and disagreement?”11
Also incorporated into the 50 State Initiative were photographs made by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur that reimagined the iconic Four Freedoms illustrations by Norman Rockwell. Featured in Time Magazine, on billboards, and in multiple exhibitions, the 82 variations of Rockwell’s original four depictions went beyond the middle-class, white, protestant demographic and instead presented a multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-cultural vision of the United States.
Photographs by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur, courtesy For Freedoms.
The second major initiative to come out of For Freedoms was the organization’s first Congress held in Los Angeles, California, which ran from February 27 through March 1 of 2020. The For Freedoms Congress included more than 500 artists, academics, and social justice advocates who served as delegates from all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and was a culmination of the organization’s previous four years of networking and using art as means of spurring national conversations about how to unify a divided country.12 I was fortunate enough to experience this firsthand, as I had the privilege of serving as one of the delegates from Indiana.13
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photograph by Rachel Kabukala.
The Congress was modeled after previous artistic and political convenings and programming included game-playing; co-creation and reflection with participants and teachers emphasizing the core values of community, transparency and equity; and programming that addressed issues including climate change, prison reform, and racial justice. Although the goal was to address the increasingly polarized political climate of the US leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the Congress was also designed to create a “more resilient foundation” for the country moving forward.14 The four day-long event was punctuated by a series of art installations, including a small selection I will share here:
Here you see Muna Malik’s Blessing of the Boats, which asked viewers to confront the rise in anti-immigration rhetoric and policies by entering into a conversation about the past, present, and future of immigration in the US through messages written on paper boats that became part of the larger, illuminated boat installation.
Muna Malik, Blessing of the Boats, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
Cara Levine’s project This is Not a Gun invited participants to sculpt a collection of everyday objects that police officers have mistaken for guns during shootings of unarmed, most often Black civilians, and discuss how benign objects can be transformed into perceived threats through the lens of racism and power.
Cara Levine, This is Not a Gun, 2016 - . Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
Alixa Garcia’s interactive installation Who’s Next: Up in Arms featured a collective portrait of the 194 American children under the age of 12 killed by firearms between December 2012 and December 2013, the year gun violence saw a dramatic increase in the US. The display included 194 pencils that lined the room, evoking thoughts of schoolwork and a classroom, 50 lines of red string that referred to the American flag, and the silhouette of a child-sized figure on the floor made from scattered bullets.
Alixa Garcia, Who’s Next?: Up in Arms, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
Congress programming included four public town hall sessions, each representing one of FDR’s Four Freedoms, with participants investigating what those freedoms might mean for people living in the United States today. There were also closed-door sessions held for the Congressional delegates in which they worked collectively to establish an artists’ platform for public action and civic engagement leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The events were held at the host institutions, which included Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the Hammer Museum, and the Japanese American National Museum.
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
The closed-door sessions consisted of participatory performances, poetry readings, interactive presentations, and workshops that explored the evolving potential of public art as an inclusive, empowering, and sustainable method of creativity. Warm up activities included looking into your neighbor’s eyes and saying “I need you” and such simple yet liberating practices as laughing together for thirty seconds. Delegates were asked to sing together, move together, breathe together, cry together, and create together.
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
When considering a query such as “how not to return to normal,” two breakout sessions offered by the Guild of Future Architects were most applicable. I initially assumed the Guild of Future Architects was an organization of individuals who aspired to be architects, only to realize it was, in fact, a group of artists working together to literally build the future—to apply “a new, disciplined approach to the design of a better future … Transcending a dominant culture that often ignores or dismisses the power of the intangible, future architecture creates the conditions necessary for humanity to thrive.”16
The Guild’s historiography session, facilitated by their Futurist Writers’ Room, very successfully employed ethnodrama techniques and invited delegates to form groups to engage in “speculative historiographies.” This was done using a newly developed methodology which involved “remembering the future to imagine the past,” a technique that emerged from the co-creation of members in the Community of Practice and was influenced and inspired by the Worldbuilding Institute, Emergent Strategy, Octavia Butler, and MIT’s CoCreation Studios, among other sources.17 Development of the methodology was stewarded by Tony Patrick, Robert Sinclair, Madebo Fatunde, Lafayette Cruise, Kamal Sinclair and Sharon Chang.18
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
One of the most moving and unconventional sessions included the unveiling of the new Wide Awakes, inspired by the historic youth organization of the same name that formed as a result of disenchantment with the polarizing and partisan politics of the 1850s. The historic 1860s Wide Awakes worked toward the express goal of abolition of slavery in the US and their efforts were considered a tipping point in the campaign of President Abraham Lincoln. The New Wide Awakes revealed themselves at the Congress donned in brightly patterned, fashion-forward capes, informed by the shiny oilcloth capes of their 1860s predecessors, and adopted the popular slogan “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
In an interview following the Congress, For Freedoms Executive Director Claudia Peña described the Wide Awakes artist collective in the following terms: “We are doing something connected to what the folks in the 1860s were doing, but it’s also very different… it's a new framework of existence in this country. We think about mass incarceration. We think about access to housing. We want to be clear that joy is a form of resistance. We’re concerned with access to voting. We’re concerned with representation and ensuring that the needs of people’s communities are being addressed in political spheres. We’re concerned with gender rights and safety for women and trans people. All of this is still part of liberation and freedom for people, which I think the original Wide Awakes were thinking about. But now in 2020, those needs are slightly different…I can tell you that the only thing that changes people’s hearts and minds, which is what you need in order for there to be social justice, is storytelling. And the best storytellers are artists…Overwhelmingly, people want a good story. They want their heart to be impacted.”19
Wide Awakes, New York, NY, 2020. Photographed by Benjamin Lozovsky.
Wide Awakes, New York, NY, 2020. Photographed by Benjamin Lozovsky.
The outcome of the 2020 Congress was a creative plan of action officially titled The For Freedoms Preamble that was informed by documents such as the National Plan of Action of the 1977 Women’s Conference, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The Preamble was rooted in the quote by American author and activist James Baldwin that says “The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”20
The Preamble synthesized the collaborations that took place at the Congress and highlighted creativity as an essential American value and vehicle for broader civic discourse. The Preamble also served as the catalyst for the For Freedoms 2020 Awakening, which encouraged civic engagement through Wide Awakes activations across the nation on October 3, 2020 in celebration of the 160th anniversary of the original Wide Awakes Grand Procession and was a kickoff for the month-long countdown leading up to the November 3, 2020 presidential election; a new billboard campaign featuring more than 100 signs by over 85 artists in all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (some examples of which can be seen here); the release of the Infinite Playbook, a digital publication intended to inspire readers to action through arts and culture; the creation of a Wide Awakes mobile soup kitchen that provided free meals to communities throughout New York City; as well as robust partnerships with Lift Every Vote and Joy to the Polls, which impacted the now infamous Georgia runoff election of 2021.
“What Have You (Un)learned Today” by Kameelah Janan Rasheed in North Little Rock, AR. For Freedoms, 2020. Photographed by Jonathan Dean.
“Through the Native American Lens” by Edgar Heap of Birds in Fresno, CA. For Freedoms, 2020. Photographed by Andrew Gallery.
Wide Awakes, New York, NY, 2020. Photographed by Benjamin Lozovsky.
During this period of creative action and visual activism by For Freedoms and the Wide Awakes prompted by political unrest and a lingering global pandemic, artists around the world found themselves considering how they, too, could help build a better and more equitable future for all. In 2020, author, poet, and spoken word artist Sonya Renee Taylor said, “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-Corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”21
As we reflect back on this anniversary of the first virtual CAA conference and return to the perennial questions of how not to default to false notions of “normal” and how to affect positive change, I encourage us to look to these examples set by the artists and creatives of the 2020s who helped shape the world we now know and laid the foundation for planning and building a more just and equitable future. May we never forget our individual abilities to impact our own spheres of influence, whether that be through art production or academic pursuits. After all, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
“For the Caregivers” by Aja Monet in East Brunswick, NJ. For Freedoms, 2020. Designed by Sam Shmith photographed by Colin Miller.
1 “For Freedoms,” Partners, Times Square Arts, accessed March 3, 2021, http://arts.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/partners/for-freedoms/index.aspx; Celia McGee, “A ‘Super PAC’ Where Art Meets Politics,” New York Times, April 24, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/arts/design/a-super-pac-where-art-meets-politics.html.
2 Hank Willis Thomas, “Hank Willis Thomas on Starting a Super PAC,” Surface Magazine, September 28, 2018, YouTube video, 0:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH84oJWVnik.
3 Emma Nuzzo, in conversation with the author, January 31, 2020.
4 “About For Freedoms: Mission,” accessed November 12, 2019, https://forfreedoms.org/about/.
5Ibid.
6 Eric Gottesman, Hank Willis Thomas, and Michelle Woo, “In One Month, For Freedoms Will State the Largest Congress of Creatives in America’s History. Will You Join Us?,” Artnet News, accessed March 3, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/for-freedoms-congress-1767150.
7 Gottesman, Thomas, and Woo, “In One Month,” Artnet News, accessed March 3, 2020,
8 For Freedoms, 50 State Initiative Toolkit, (New York, 2018), 3.
9 Ibid., 4.
10 Eric Gottesman, “2017 ICP Infinity Awards: Online Platform – Hank Willis Thomas & Eric Gottesman,” MediaStorm, published on April 25, 2017, YouTube video, 3:01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjlIoD3fng0.
11For Freedoms, 50 State Initiative Toolkit, 14.
12 Gottesman, Thomas, and Woo, “In One Month,” Artnet News, accessed March 3, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/for-freedoms-congress-1767150.
13 I am grateful to Emma Nuzzo, Programs Manager at For Freedoms, for facilitating my participation.
16 “Future Architecture: The Power of the Intangible,” Future Architects, Guild of Future Architects, accessed April 5, 2020, https://futurearchitects.com/.
17Kamal Sinclair (Executive Director, Guild of Future Architects) and Lafayette Cruise (Writer and Facilitator, Guild of Future Architects), in conversation with the author, January 4, 2021.
18 Sinclair and Cruise, conversation with author, 2021.
19 Claudia Peña, “For Freedoms,” interview by Rebecca Jamieson, Broadcast, Pioneer Works, accessed January 10, 2021, https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/for-freedoms-jamieson/.
20 James Baldwin, “The Creative Process,” in Creative America, ed. John F. Kennedy (New York: Ridge Press, 1962).
21Sonya Renee Taylor (@sonyareneetaylor), “We will not go back to normal,” Instagram post, April 2, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B-fc3ejAlvd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.
Full text
Imagine the Past:
Artists Imagining A New State of Being
This paper was presented in a panel called “How Not to Return to Normal” at the College Art Association’s annual conference in February of 2021.
My name is Rachel Kabukala and it is my pleasure to be with you all for the 30th anniversary of the 2021 CAA annual conference. I join you from Indiana University and acknowledge that I am on the territory of the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people, which was rightfully restored to their care as part of the Indigenous Land Back Act of 2035. As we celebrate this 30th anniversary of the 2021 CAA conference it is important to note it was the first to be held virtually and marked a shift in many ways, including providing more equitable access and proper accommodations for all members.
These changes were in large part a response to the COVID-19 pandemic that began the year prior and precipitated a great number of seismic shifts across the globe, not least of which was the turn to artists and creatives not only to help people endure the pandemic but also to help imagine what a post-pandemic world could be and to actively work towards creating that change. 2020 was the year society turned to artists to carry us through and they not only comforted us, they challenged us, as well. When people cried out for a return to “normal” from a place of fear and desperation it was the artists that taught us how to envision a future that was better and brighter—a new state of being.
For this panel I will be sharing about the work of For Freedoms, a political arts non-profit organization that had a significant role in shaping the improved state of being that we experience today, and the artist collective that emerged from their action called the Wide Awakes. I will track the efforts of For Freedoms in the years leading up to the 2020 presidential election, reveal details about their first ever Congress held in the spring of that year, and explore how this group used inclusive, empowering, and sustainable methods of visualizing and building the future we all deserve to impact the now historic Georgia state runoff elections of 2021 that flipped the US Senate.
In the spring of 2020, just days before what we of course know now as the Global Great Sheltering began, 500 artists, academics, and social justice advocates from all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, convened in Los Angeles, CA to serve as delegates for the first ever For Freedoms Congress. Co-founded by Michelle Woo, Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, and Wyatt Gallery, For Freedoms was a response to the rapid emergence of Super PACs, their influence over political speech and imagery, and their significant impact on the 2012 presidential election.1 The co-founders were alarmed by the overwhelming lack of concern about the new political entities exhibited by the general public and responded by creating their own artist-led Super PAC, with the aim of increasing awareness about the danger of these financially unlimited entities.2 By the end of 2017 the organization made the legal transition from Super PAC to LLC, having determined they would be better able to achieve their goals as a corporation with nonprofit status.3
Now, many decades later, For Freedoms still exists and continues its mission to “deepen public discussions on civic issues and core values” emphasizing a citizenship that is defined more by participation and less by ideology.4 For Freedoms aims to fulfill this mission through non-partisan nationwide programming that uses art as the vehicle for participation.5 In line with this vision is a series of questions that drives the For Freedoms team: “How can artists and other storytellers and creative people come together to move beyond division and uplift humankind? How can we foster non-binary thinking? What does a future look like where no one wins or loses but everyone plays?”6
The project that propelled For Freedoms onto the national stage was its 2018 50 State Initiative, a nationwide art project that featured over 700 public art interventions that incorporated work by 800 artists, and included 250 museums, arts institutions, and universities across the country.7 The largest creative collaboration in U.S. history at that time, the 50 State Initiative was executed at the peak of the 2018 midterm election cycle and prompted new and nuanced conversations about the state of politics in the United States.
The purpose of the initiative was to help facilitate a series of concurrent, decentralized art exhibitions and public events to be held across the nation that worked to elevate nonpartisan issues, support inclusion in a time of isolation and separation, inspire broad civic participation, celebrate diverse voices, and spark dialogue about art, education, advertising, and politics. 8
Additionally, For Freedoms hoped to build upon their growing network of artists, institutions, and civic leaders as they continued to map and connect the “cultural and artistic infrastructure” of the United States.9
The four main modes of participation in the 50 State Initiative were large-scale billboards, public town halls, lawn sign installations, and featured exhibitions at art institutions. The billboard campaign was financed through crowdfunding and featured work by more than 150 artists who partnered with For Freedoms. The resulting signage varied widely in content and was void of any context beyond a small text block that read “Paid for by For Freedoms.” Appearing in all 50 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, the billboards became one of the most visible and divisive elements of the 50 State Initiative. For a culture inundated with an unrelenting onslaught of visual imagery, citizens at that time faced challenges in interpreting images not easily discernible, void of overt messaging, or lacking didactic mediation.
An example of this was a billboard shown in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi that displayed a photograph by Spider Martin that captured Civil Rights marchers facing a line of state troopers in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965 on what became known as Bloody Sunday. The iconic image was overlaid with the easily recognizable campaign slogan from one-term president Donald Trump, “Make America Great Again,” and sparked significant controversy in the Jackson area. Many community members assumed the message was from right-wing extremists and citizens successfully petitioned to have the work removed, provoking new questions about first amendment rights. In spite of the controversy, For Freedoms insisted this was precisely the type of open dialogue they were hoping to inspire, something co-founder Eric Gottesman has described as “productive confusion.”10
“Make America Great Again” by Spider Martin in Pearl, MS. For Freedoms, 2016.
Also incorporated into the 50 State Initiative were photographs made by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur that reimagined the iconic Four Freedoms illustrations by Norman Rockwell. Featured in Time Magazine, on billboards, and in multiple exhibitions, the 82 variations of Rockwell’s original four depictions went beyond the middle-class, white, protestant demographic and instead presented a multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-cultural vision of the United States.
Photographs by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur, courtesy For Freedoms.
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photograph by Rachel Kabukala.
Here you see Muna Malik’s Blessing of the Boats, which asked viewers to confront the rise in anti-immigration rhetoric and policies by entering into a conversation about the past, present, and future of immigration in the US through messages written on paper boats that became part of the larger, illuminated boat installation.
Muna Malik, Blessing of the Boats, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
Cara Levine, This is Not a Gun, 2016 - . Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
Alixa Garcia, Who’s Next?: Up in Arms, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
The Guild’s historiography session, facilitated by their Futurist Writers’ Room, very successfully employed ethnodrama techniques and invited delegates to form groups to engage in “speculative historiographies.” This was done using a newly developed methodology which involved “remembering the future to imagine the past,” a technique that emerged from the co-creation of members in the Community of Practice and was influenced and inspired by the Worldbuilding Institute, Emergent Strategy, Octavia Butler, and MIT’s CoCreation Studios, among other sources.17 Development of the methodology was stewarded by Tony Patrick, Robert Sinclair, Madebo Fatunde, Lafayette Cruise, Kamal Sinclair and Sharon Chang.18
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles, CA, 2020. Photographs by Rachel Kabukala.
Wide Awakes, New York, NY, 2020. Photographed by Benjamin Lozovsky.
The Preamble synthesized the collaborations that took place at the Congress and highlighted creativity as an essential American value and vehicle for broader civic discourse. The Preamble also served as the catalyst for the For Freedoms 2020 Awakening, which encouraged civic engagement through Wide Awakes activations across the nation on October 3, 2020 in celebration of the 160th anniversary of the original Wide Awakes Grand Procession and was a kickoff for the month-long countdown leading up to the November 3, 2020 presidential election; a new billboard campaign featuring more than 100 signs by over 85 artists in all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (some examples of which can be seen here); the release of the Infinite Playbook, a digital publication intended to inspire readers to action through arts and culture; the creation of a Wide Awakes mobile soup kitchen that provided free meals to communities throughout New York City; as well as robust partnerships with Lift Every Vote and Joy to the Polls, which impacted the now infamous Georgia runoff election of 2021.
“Through the Native American Lens” by Edgar Heap of Birds in Fresno, CA. For Freedoms, 2020. Photographed by Andrew Gallery.
Wide Awakes, New York, NY, 2020. Photographed by Benjamin Lozovsky.
As we reflect back on this anniversary of the first virtual CAA conference and return to the perennial questions of how not to default to false notions of “normal” and how to affect positive change, I encourage us to look to these examples set by the artists and creatives of the 2020s who helped shape the world we now know and laid the foundation for planning and building a more just and equitable future. May we never forget our individual abilities to impact our own spheres of influence, whether that be through art production or academic pursuits. After all, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
“For the Caregivers” by Aja Monet in East Brunswick, NJ. For Freedoms, 2020. Designed by Sam Shmith photographed by Colin Miller.
1 “For Freedoms,” Partners, Times Square Arts, accessed March 3, 2021, http://arts.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/partners/for-freedoms/index.aspx; Celia McGee, “A ‘Super PAC’ Where Art Meets Politics,” New York Times, April 24, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/arts/design/a-super-pac-where-art-meets-politics.html.
2 Hank Willis Thomas, “Hank Willis Thomas on Starting a Super PAC,” Surface Magazine, September 28, 2018, YouTube video, 0:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH84oJWVnik.
3 Emma Nuzzo, in conversation with the author, January 31, 2020.
4 “About For Freedoms: Mission,” accessed November 12, 2019, https://forfreedoms.org/about/.
5Ibid.
6 Eric Gottesman, Hank Willis Thomas, and Michelle Woo, “In One Month, For Freedoms Will State the Largest Congress of Creatives in America’s History. Will You Join Us?,” Artnet News, accessed March 3, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/for-freedoms-congress-1767150.
7 Gottesman, Thomas, and Woo, “In One Month,” Artnet News, accessed March 3, 2020,
8 For Freedoms, 50 State Initiative Toolkit, (New York, 2018), 3.
9 Ibid., 4.
10 Eric Gottesman, “2017 ICP Infinity Awards: Online Platform – Hank Willis Thomas & Eric Gottesman,” MediaStorm, published on April 25, 2017, YouTube video, 3:01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjlIoD3fng0.
11For Freedoms, 50 State Initiative Toolkit, 14.
12 Gottesman, Thomas, and Woo, “In One Month,” Artnet News, accessed March 3, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/for-freedoms-congress-1767150.
13 I am grateful to Emma Nuzzo, Programs Manager at For Freedoms, for facilitating my participation.
16 “Future Architecture: The Power of the Intangible,” Future Architects, Guild of Future Architects, accessed April 5, 2020, https://futurearchitects.com/.
17Kamal Sinclair (Executive Director, Guild of Future Architects) and Lafayette Cruise (Writer and Facilitator, Guild of Future Architects), in conversation with the author, January 4, 2021.
18 Sinclair and Cruise, conversation with author, 2021.
19 Claudia Peña, “For Freedoms,” interview by Rebecca Jamieson, Broadcast, Pioneer Works, accessed January 10, 2021, https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/for-freedoms-jamieson/.
20 James Baldwin, “The Creative Process,” in Creative America, ed. John F. Kennedy (New York: Ridge Press, 1962).
21Sonya Renee Taylor (@sonyareneetaylor), “We will not go back to normal,” Instagram post, April 2, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B-fc3ejAlvd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.
Full text
Bee
Losee /
Losee /
A Conversation with Bee Losee
Elise :
I'm so excited to be talking to you Bee! I just wanted this opportunity to talk with you about this glass work and your relationship to the material and the process of it, and what it means for you. So, I thought maybe we could start out by talking about just what drew you to making glasswork?
Bee :
Actually, one of my friends had a little studio and there was a gentleman there that was going to do a weekend workshop on his mosaic glass. And I thought, "wow, I think I'd like to try that." And it just seemed to really open a door. I hadn't done a lot of work for a while artistic wise, with my M.S. I'd done a lot of sketching and everything was inside notebooks, but nothing was out beyond that. And it was so freeing because there seemed to be not a lot of rules, but yet it allowed me to embrace a lot of things I had learned in my past.
Elise :
I'm just thinking about that transition from working in your sketchbook and having it be 2D to this very tactile 3D mode of working. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit more what it was like to go from the sketching to more of a tactile way of building something.
Bee :
Glass even though it's a 2D form, it's very 3D spatially. Cause it seems to go in and out and dive within different planes. So, it's almost like even though it's 2D, I'm working with 3D.
A lot of times people refer to it as stained glass and this is so very different than that. I would always have shied away from stained glass, and I wasn't interested in that because you usually have something that's very planned, it's all laid out and you're going to follow a pattern. And this, just to see that you could take random pieces of broken glass and even the leftovers from someone else's stained glass that they were getting rid of, it reminded me of walking on the beach when I was little and picking up each glass and just being able to go home and put that together into something where other people might walk by it, that it's just like a treasure just waiting to be found and explored and played with.
Elise :
I think I'm correct in saying that you don't lay out your glasswork ever ahead of time. Is that right?
Bee :
That's correct.
I've tried that a couple of times where people have actually commissioned me to do something and they had this idea and I finally had to go back to them and just say, “I just don’t work that way, I hope this is okay if I go about it in this other direction.” And they are very happy with that.
Somewhere in there, there is the content and the spirit of what they were hoping for, or talking about, it's just not what people preconceived, maybe of what it was going to look like.
I guess in my mind I might've thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be neat if every piece fit together?" and then I saw something like that, which is probably aided by laser cutting, and it's like, "Oh yeah, I don't even want to go down that direction." I mean, it just looks too perfect. That humanity and that brokenness is taken out of it. And I think there's so much beauty in our brokenness. The random brokenness, too. Nothing that we planned for.
Elise :
It feels like you have such a strong intuition and it's exercised so much in these works. So what is it like for you when you start out with this pile and then you end up with this beautiful piece: can you help me understand how those gaps are filled, how you decide what goes where, and how you work with the material to create that final product?
Bee :
Each time it's very new, and I pick colors that… I almost say that they're calling to me. It just seems like those colors want to be on that piece of glass and I will take those and kind of just randomly break them and then start to put them on the piece of glass and see how the patterns maybe work next to each other.
It can be really frustrating because it just doesn't even seem to be doing anything. Just for example yesterday, I had quite a bit laid out, and then I came back and I'm like, “what was I even thinking?” And I moved them all around and it quickly flowed together.
So also, nothing is sacred in the process. As soon as I think I'm liking something, it's amazing that I can walk away and come back, and it wants to be changed.
There's just some beauty about that, that I can break that, and it'll still work.
Even the sharp edges, (which they do cut me sometimes when I'm using it) they reflect light and catch light in a certain way that if you were to sand them, they don't. And even the colors in themselves change, just like the snowy mountains, you know, they're white, but then they're pink and then they're purple and then they're blue.
Elise :
I wanted to talk a little bit about the scale of your work too, a lot of your pieces are quite large. And I wondered if you could talk about that and what drew you to be making at that scale.
Bee :
I think the largest piece I've done is four by four, and I'm working on one that's more like six feet by five feet. And I can envision them even larger than that. But then my mind says, “how would I ever get that done If it takes me six months to do a four by four piece?” I just see it big in my mind, and so sometimes it's really hard to put it small. Like if you're looking through a camera, it's a very large space, but then you're looking at it in a very small hole. It's kind of like that.
I think I mentioned it takes up to six months to do something. And I actually personally at first thought that was really good as an artist, coming from the architectural world where buildings can take up to seven years from schematic to having them built. So, I was like "six months, woo! This is awesome, I can do So. Much. Work." And then I talked to an “artist artist” who said that they do sometimes one, two pieces of work a week, at least five or six a month. I think it threw me into a rabbit hole - actually a pit - for a minute, because I thought, "well, what am I doing?" So then it took me awhile to realize that this is what I do. And it takes me a long time and that that's okay.
I'm continually thinking about things. In my mind, I'm always designing or working on something else.
Elise :
There's the making that happens when you're actually doing the act of it - your hands are doing the thing. And then there's all the making that happens in the lead up. Everything that you're processing and thinking about and understanding. So, I don't mean to reduce that to, just physically putting things in their place because it's not just that at all.
Bee :
I can't wait until I have more time or more physical energy time to do that, but we'll just go with the flow there. That's the part that can be so frustrating.
Elise :
You know, I often think about this in this work: the level of control that you have, and then where you don't have control. There's this sort of interplay that I think is really interesting and is something I've heard you talk about, too, when you talk about M.S. and even the labor around creating these works.
Bee :
There's definitely a lot there. I probably wouldn't be doing this if I didn't have M.S.
I remember sitting with the group of my friends - we used to get together for lunches and there would be up to 30 of us - and we all have M.S., I guess people would say in varying degrees. You know, we'd meet at a place for lunch and there were obviously a lot of businesspeople that would go there too. And there was always that perception of, "don't you wish you could be like them again, or are you missing that?" and yet there was so much that we had learned from not being like that anymore, or even being able to, even if we had wanted to.
I think if there was that magic pill, we would all say “no, we don't want to go back to that.”
Elise :
That's such a powerful statement because the perception of disability is like, " Oh, well, why would anybody want that?" But there's so much gained outside of the expectations that are oppressive on most people.
I'm thinking about the fact that, maybe a lot of people don't know a lot about M.S., and also, it's experienced differently by everyone. I'm wondering if you feel comfortable talking a little bit about your experience with it and about what your day-to-day looks like?
Bee :
I'm going on 21 years now with M.S. and it's a continual journey of learning, but, one of the things I learned pretty early was that I have to move every day to remind my body how to keep working and just to keep the muscles from atrophying.
What often could be that best part of the day energy-wise definitely has to be devoted to like an hour, sometimes an hour and a half just to get the body reworking. But at that point, then I get tired, so then I don't get as much done as I would love to do.
And that's where the 20 years has definitely been a balance because there's times where I really want to do my artwork. Of course. So, I will devote more time to doing things I love to do, but then physically I lose my ability. So, then I don't get to do those things. And just to appreciate the time I do get to do things and realize that there's probably a method to this madness.
I'd love to make things go faster. Like get things done a lot quicker, or to see something through to fruition, or at least have a game plan of where it's going. But I guess that's just the grace of life. Just letting that go.
Elise :
I have to say, I mean, just this project, right? This process has been so ebb and flow and you have been so patient with me and have given me so much grace. I think that's something that I have experienced the most when working in communities that are communities of disabled people, right. Or that are centering the experience of people with disabilities. Because there is just such a different level of expectation around... not having such rigid expectations, right?
Bee :
I always wonder, do you think those rigid expectations, is that healthy for anybody?
Elise :
I don't think so.
Bee :
And yet I think since the body can do it, you know, we can all join that race, we can all try to participate - but is that really the best way to be?
I think the slowing down, definitely there's some beauty to that and allowing others to also, and that's where I see the M.S. as a gift, because it's allowed me the opportunity to slow down and see that.
I think when we are able bodied, we don't even get the opportunity sometimes and it's really sad.
Elise :
I have chronic illness, but it's like most of the time, pretty manageable if I'm doing all my things that I should be doing to take care of myself and manage it. But I can go a little harder for a while and then I'll pay for it, you know?
Bee :
Right.
Elise :
And it can be very hard to not give into that pressure, right? There is a lot of pressure: be productive all the time and have so much output.
Bee :
I think of even the years right after I was diagnosed, I didn't move much. It took me a long time to get my ability back to move. So, a lot of time was spent being able to read and read. But we definitely have perceived ideas of how to get through life and ways to be: like the quicker, the faster, the more alert. But you realize: that's an expectation that's probably not real. And to embrace all those different ways of being, and maybe if we embraced all those, we wouldn't have to try and get rid of them or fix them but realize that they're all part of the "norm" and what a gift they have to offer versus trying to get us to all like maybe fit the same.
Elise :
Yeah. I think we've been so conditioned to have this fear of anything that is outside of, you know, quote unquote "normal," but also the thing that you and I have been circling in this conversation is like: normal does not exist, right? It’s actually an impossible construct that not only deals with ability, but also race, gender, sexuality, and more.
Bee :
Yeah. We try to get to that central norm and in so doing we erase all the other things. There's a beauty and all those little those separate notes.
But none of us should have to justify our existence to anybody. Just being here, we're justified.
Full text
I'm so excited to be talking to you Bee! I just wanted this opportunity to talk with you about this glass work and your relationship to the material and the process of it, and what it means for you. So, I thought maybe we could start out by talking about just what drew you to making glasswork?
Bee :
Actually, one of my friends had a little studio and there was a gentleman there that was going to do a weekend workshop on his mosaic glass. And I thought, "wow, I think I'd like to try that." And it just seemed to really open a door. I hadn't done a lot of work for a while artistic wise, with my M.S. I'd done a lot of sketching and everything was inside notebooks, but nothing was out beyond that. And it was so freeing because there seemed to be not a lot of rules, but yet it allowed me to embrace a lot of things I had learned in my past.
Elise :
I'm just thinking about that transition from working in your sketchbook and having it be 2D to this very tactile 3D mode of working. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit more what it was like to go from the sketching to more of a tactile way of building something.
Bee :
Glass even though it's a 2D form, it's very 3D spatially. Cause it seems to go in and out and dive within different planes. So, it's almost like even though it's 2D, I'm working with 3D.
A lot of times people refer to it as stained glass and this is so very different than that. I would always have shied away from stained glass, and I wasn't interested in that because you usually have something that's very planned, it's all laid out and you're going to follow a pattern. And this, just to see that you could take random pieces of broken glass and even the leftovers from someone else's stained glass that they were getting rid of, it reminded me of walking on the beach when I was little and picking up each glass and just being able to go home and put that together into something where other people might walk by it, that it's just like a treasure just waiting to be found and explored and played with.
I think I'm correct in saying that you don't lay out your glasswork ever ahead of time. Is that right?
Bee :
That's correct.
I've tried that a couple of times where people have actually commissioned me to do something and they had this idea and I finally had to go back to them and just say, “I just don’t work that way, I hope this is okay if I go about it in this other direction.” And they are very happy with that.
Somewhere in there, there is the content and the spirit of what they were hoping for, or talking about, it's just not what people preconceived, maybe of what it was going to look like.
I guess in my mind I might've thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be neat if every piece fit together?" and then I saw something like that, which is probably aided by laser cutting, and it's like, "Oh yeah, I don't even want to go down that direction." I mean, it just looks too perfect. That humanity and that brokenness is taken out of it. And I think there's so much beauty in our brokenness. The random brokenness, too. Nothing that we planned for.
It feels like you have such a strong intuition and it's exercised so much in these works. So what is it like for you when you start out with this pile and then you end up with this beautiful piece: can you help me understand how those gaps are filled, how you decide what goes where, and how you work with the material to create that final product?
Bee :
Each time it's very new, and I pick colors that… I almost say that they're calling to me. It just seems like those colors want to be on that piece of glass and I will take those and kind of just randomly break them and then start to put them on the piece of glass and see how the patterns maybe work next to each other.
It can be really frustrating because it just doesn't even seem to be doing anything. Just for example yesterday, I had quite a bit laid out, and then I came back and I'm like, “what was I even thinking?” And I moved them all around and it quickly flowed together.
So also, nothing is sacred in the process. As soon as I think I'm liking something, it's amazing that I can walk away and come back, and it wants to be changed.
There's just some beauty about that, that I can break that, and it'll still work.
Even the sharp edges, (which they do cut me sometimes when I'm using it) they reflect light and catch light in a certain way that if you were to sand them, they don't. And even the colors in themselves change, just like the snowy mountains, you know, they're white, but then they're pink and then they're purple and then they're blue.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the scale of your work too, a lot of your pieces are quite large. And I wondered if you could talk about that and what drew you to be making at that scale.
Bee :
I think the largest piece I've done is four by four, and I'm working on one that's more like six feet by five feet. And I can envision them even larger than that. But then my mind says, “how would I ever get that done If it takes me six months to do a four by four piece?” I just see it big in my mind, and so sometimes it's really hard to put it small. Like if you're looking through a camera, it's a very large space, but then you're looking at it in a very small hole. It's kind of like that.
I think I mentioned it takes up to six months to do something. And I actually personally at first thought that was really good as an artist, coming from the architectural world where buildings can take up to seven years from schematic to having them built. So, I was like "six months, woo! This is awesome, I can do So. Much. Work." And then I talked to an “artist artist” who said that they do sometimes one, two pieces of work a week, at least five or six a month. I think it threw me into a rabbit hole - actually a pit - for a minute, because I thought, "well, what am I doing?" So then it took me awhile to realize that this is what I do. And it takes me a long time and that that's okay.
I'm continually thinking about things. In my mind, I'm always designing or working on something else.
Elise :
There's the making that happens when you're actually doing the act of it - your hands are doing the thing. And then there's all the making that happens in the lead up. Everything that you're processing and thinking about and understanding. So, I don't mean to reduce that to, just physically putting things in their place because it's not just that at all.
Bee :
I can't wait until I have more time or more physical energy time to do that, but we'll just go with the flow there. That's the part that can be so frustrating.
You know, I often think about this in this work: the level of control that you have, and then where you don't have control. There's this sort of interplay that I think is really interesting and is something I've heard you talk about, too, when you talk about M.S. and even the labor around creating these works.
Bee :
There's definitely a lot there. I probably wouldn't be doing this if I didn't have M.S.
I remember sitting with the group of my friends - we used to get together for lunches and there would be up to 30 of us - and we all have M.S., I guess people would say in varying degrees. You know, we'd meet at a place for lunch and there were obviously a lot of businesspeople that would go there too. And there was always that perception of, "don't you wish you could be like them again, or are you missing that?" and yet there was so much that we had learned from not being like that anymore, or even being able to, even if we had wanted to.
I think if there was that magic pill, we would all say “no, we don't want to go back to that.”
Elise :
That's such a powerful statement because the perception of disability is like, " Oh, well, why would anybody want that?" But there's so much gained outside of the expectations that are oppressive on most people.
I'm thinking about the fact that, maybe a lot of people don't know a lot about M.S., and also, it's experienced differently by everyone. I'm wondering if you feel comfortable talking a little bit about your experience with it and about what your day-to-day looks like?
Bee :
I'm going on 21 years now with M.S. and it's a continual journey of learning, but, one of the things I learned pretty early was that I have to move every day to remind my body how to keep working and just to keep the muscles from atrophying.
What often could be that best part of the day energy-wise definitely has to be devoted to like an hour, sometimes an hour and a half just to get the body reworking. But at that point, then I get tired, so then I don't get as much done as I would love to do.
And that's where the 20 years has definitely been a balance because there's times where I really want to do my artwork. Of course. So, I will devote more time to doing things I love to do, but then physically I lose my ability. So, then I don't get to do those things. And just to appreciate the time I do get to do things and realize that there's probably a method to this madness.
I'd love to make things go faster. Like get things done a lot quicker, or to see something through to fruition, or at least have a game plan of where it's going. But I guess that's just the grace of life. Just letting that go.
I have to say, I mean, just this project, right? This process has been so ebb and flow and you have been so patient with me and have given me so much grace. I think that's something that I have experienced the most when working in communities that are communities of disabled people, right. Or that are centering the experience of people with disabilities. Because there is just such a different level of expectation around... not having such rigid expectations, right?
Bee :
I always wonder, do you think those rigid expectations, is that healthy for anybody?
Elise :
I don't think so.
Bee :
And yet I think since the body can do it, you know, we can all join that race, we can all try to participate - but is that really the best way to be?
I think the slowing down, definitely there's some beauty to that and allowing others to also, and that's where I see the M.S. as a gift, because it's allowed me the opportunity to slow down and see that.
I think when we are able bodied, we don't even get the opportunity sometimes and it's really sad.
Elise :
I have chronic illness, but it's like most of the time, pretty manageable if I'm doing all my things that I should be doing to take care of myself and manage it. But I can go a little harder for a while and then I'll pay for it, you know?
Bee :
Right.
Elise :
And it can be very hard to not give into that pressure, right? There is a lot of pressure: be productive all the time and have so much output.
Bee :
I think of even the years right after I was diagnosed, I didn't move much. It took me a long time to get my ability back to move. So, a lot of time was spent being able to read and read. But we definitely have perceived ideas of how to get through life and ways to be: like the quicker, the faster, the more alert. But you realize: that's an expectation that's probably not real. And to embrace all those different ways of being, and maybe if we embraced all those, we wouldn't have to try and get rid of them or fix them but realize that they're all part of the "norm" and what a gift they have to offer versus trying to get us to all like maybe fit the same.
Elise :
Yeah. I think we've been so conditioned to have this fear of anything that is outside of, you know, quote unquote "normal," but also the thing that you and I have been circling in this conversation is like: normal does not exist, right? It’s actually an impossible construct that not only deals with ability, but also race, gender, sexuality, and more.
Bee :
Yeah. We try to get to that central norm and in so doing we erase all the other things. There's a beauty and all those little those separate notes.
But none of us should have to justify our existence to anybody. Just being here, we're justified.
Full text
Katia Pérez
Fuentes /
Fuentes /
"ABOVEBELOW"