Dear reader,

In addition to helping create Art Grove every month, I work a full-time job as a writer, and for the most part, I like what I do. Having a full-time gig and a benefits package just for writing a few thousand words every week is a lot more than most creative people get nowadays. As far as writers and journalists go, I’m one lucky sum’na bitch in the year of our Lord 2024. 

Best of all, my commute in the morning is short. I travel only about 2 miles every morning and evening to and from my office in downtown Richmond. It’s such a short trip that after my first month of making it, I stopped queuing up a song on my Bluetooth, as by the time I’d get to work, the song would likely still be playing and my good vibes would be killed. Nowadays, I just listen to the radio, which I’ve come to naively realize is among the best ways to feel a deeper sense of connection with one’s community.

From listening to my local morning radio shows, I’ve learned of events, gasped at factoids, and discovered news headlines about my city that I otherwise likely never would have. I’ve also been surprised with some great classic hip hop, punk, bluegrass, and rock and roll tunes I forgot existed, and have discovered local acts that kick ass too. I’ve laughed my ass off at riffs between hosts and guests, and even have teared up once or twice at some particularly gut-wrenching stories on our local NPR affiliate. 

But nothing golden can stay. Last week, while on my drive to work, I got my first official election advertisement and just about pulled the steering wheel over the curb of Byrd Street at the realization that I will have to endure six more months of this utterly preposterous performance we continue to call a presidential election. 

As each day passes and we creep closer towards that dreadful day in November, things seem to keep getting promisingly worse in America. The past 31 days have been filled with so many things for me and pretty much everyone else I know to despise, or at least it feels that way at times. Things have been a little crazy in the world since our last issue; Israel began a siege on the Palestinian city of Rafah that has led to scores of innocent Palestinian civilians killed; Russia began a new offensive into the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv; The president of Iran died a helicopter crash; Another Boeing whistleblower mysteriously died; And workers in Baltimore continue to pluck pieces of the Francis Scott Key Bridge out of the Patapsco River after a collision with a runaway ship. 

In times like these –– amidst an onslaught of deeply disappointing happenings around the world –– it can be hard to feel like our own personal problems are important, no matter how shitty they might still make us feel. Or at least I get to feeling that way sometimes. And I would bet a good amount of money that most people get to feeling that way sometimes too, but I cannot say for sure because reticence is an implicit factor in the feeling. Furthermore, I would venture to say that most of us just don’t talk about how we are really feeling, even when asked by many of our closest companions. Not because we don’t trust them, but simply because we convince ourselves that nobody really wants to hear about it when they have their own problems going on, meanwhile defense contractors keep getting richer and our atmosphere continues preheating.

When I was a young writer, one of the things I struggled with most was following through on a project, and more often than not my abandonment of a project would come from convincing myself it was uninspired or unoriginal. In truth, I reckon many of those reasons were just excuses to not have to try, and therefore avoid any humiliation from the mere possibility of failure. But as I’ve gotten older, written more things, and gained more professional experiences –– such as my aforementioned day job –– I’ve come to realize how freeing it is to accept that art is inherently idiosyncratic. 

The case is especially of protest art, which is quite possibly the most universally recognizable yet vexing of all creative interests. This month, Art Grove took a peek into the process of using art as a means of creating social justice by speaking with some amazing artists who provided some excellent insight into their own processes, and how they use their creativity to get an audience’s thoughts moving on difficult questions. 

We began by asking four difficult questions of our own to our community at large:

1. How do your values inform your artistic practice? 

2. What role should social issues play in the arts? 

3. Is your artistic process and output a form of protest? What is the relationship between your work and protest or demonstration? 

4. When creating art about “difficult” subjects, what changes in your process? 

Our June reflection by Kat Oros, a Richmond-based performer, teacher, and advocate, offers insight into her work on gun reform. Kat is producing a concert that will premier at Second Presbyterian Church in October, featuring several genres of music that is fundraising for Moms Demand Action, a subsidiary of the national organization Everytown, which fights for commonsense gun laws. (For the purposes of transparency, it should be disclosed that Art Grove’s Creative Director is co-producing this project).

Art Grove’s June feature is about Samantha Rose Williams, an arts activist, performer, and producer of American Patriots, a theatrical song cycle based on 50 interviews with Americans from across the United States. It has quickly become one of my favorite features this publication has ever created. Simply put, Williams does not mince words. The thoughts she offered on her own work are gut-wrenchingly true. Not only does Williams effectively break down a lot of what I think is wrong with America today, but she also eclipses the very essence of what makes art such an awesome and indescribable concept no matter how polarizing its manifestations might be. 

The sole purpose of art is to evoke a reaction of any kind. Through this, art allows humans to connect in infinite ways like nothing else can, oftentimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. It is the great leveler of any and all discussions because art does not seek to necessarily be right. There is no right or wrong way to experience art, much like there is no right or wrong way to make art too. I believe that any attempt to put such constraints on it comes from an institutional impulse rather than an organically creative one. Art simply seeks to exist, like some kind of invisible endosymbiotic organism that is fighting to stay alive in our universe. And when an artist makes that realization, the creation of art tends to become more pleasurable than painful. 

But I do believe there are pitfalls to be made, at least in the case of protest art. In many ways, protest art is its own thing altogether. Protest art fully depends on the suffering of someone as a topic of discussion and subsequent vehicle for change, whether it be the suffering of the artist, someone the artist knows, or a whole population of people. How each person perceives and experiences suffering is not such an easy thing to put parameters on. Similarly, how an artist chooses to express that suffering should be allowed to take almost any form. But with protest art, an artist is seeking a reaction to their interpretation something that any audience member can attach themselves to. The same can’t be said for other common inspirations of art, such as parenthood, scenic locations, or moments in history, because not every beholder knows what it’s like to be a parent, see Yosemite, or feel the heat of a historic battlefield. 

So, if an artist seeks a reaction to their interpretation of real-world suffering that any audience member could theoretically attach themselves to, then I believe some expectations for how that artist creates their protest art is not an unreasonable ask. 

I believe that a painting worth framing does not seek to provide an answer to the Israel-Palestine issue. A song worth listening to does not seek to proselytize. But they might seek to discuss those topics, and they might surely have a message they are trying to convey. In fact, a topic and a purpose are pretty much the only prerequisites for something to be considered an example of protest art. Whereas all other things calling themselves art are valid so long as they exist in some form, if something calls itself protest art then it invites the type of scrutiny that questions if it is effective. 

I believe that question is a valid one to ask when scrutinizing protest art because no other form of art necessarily requires suffering to exist. I do not believe it is valid to put parameters on what can and cannot be considered protest art however –– that is a judgment reserved solely for the creator of the work, and to be sure, there is such a thing as crappy protest art. For every Marcus David Peters Circle, there are a million AI-generated Instagram stories for Gaza liberation. For every square of the National AIDS Quilt, 10,000 novelty tee-shirts are being sold outside of the courthouse where Donald Trump awaits sentencing.

In my humble opinion, a piece of protest art is truly effective when and only when its manifestation is accessible and its methodology is ethical. These two hyper-broad prerequisite attributes are where the particular “rules”, for lack of a better term, rear their troubling heads. The words “ethical” and “accessible” get thrown around a lot these days. Just how “ethical” is it to sell a nation on lab-grown meat as the solution to climate change? Just how “accessible” is a building’s entrance when its ramps are too steep for most wheelchair-bound individuals to climb on their own? It is one thing for a piece of art to call itself accessible and ethical. It is quite another thing to break down precisely what that means. So, let us isolate these two necessary qualities of protest art and examine precisely what I mean when I say effective protest art must be “accessible” and “ethical.” 

Accessible
Adjective

1. (of a place) able to be reached or entered

2. easily understood or appreciated.

As the old saying goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Since the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, our society has become more attuned to the concept that social justice is often a question of design. Federal buildings now must have ramps and elevators. Bathrooms have handicap stalls. And yet, in many ways, it feels like little has changed to make things in our society more accessible to everyone. As the income gap widens, federal aid programs are gutted, and a bootstraps mindset permeates our society more and more every day, it feels like the norm is shifting towards only making space for those who have the power and resources to play ball.

Many of us still might think accessibility only extends to physical design, such as handicap ramps and parking spaces. But accessibility ought to be thought of in a much broader, holistic approach. In the case of protest art, an example that strives to be as holistically accessible as possible is effective.

I believe this means creating art that is viewable and interpretable to people of all abilities. Equally important, it also is a matter of meeting the financial abilities of any potential audience member. In other words, effective protest art must be free and well documented –– any attempt to produce a profit off of a piece of protest art is, in my opinion, a cardinal sin based on capitalist impulses, which are the very thing that I believe has allowed a lack of accessibility in our society to run rampant.

Ethical
Adjective

1. relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these.

Human beings have debated questions of ethics for millennia, never to any concrete resolution. Ethics are subjective, and they have been even before Socrates was exiled or Gilgamesh hesitated at immortality. Human beings, our needs, emotions, and ways of fulfilling them through the use of the world around us, are all endlessly complicated things in and of themselves, which all feed into the endless ethical dilemmas we run into in our daily lives. 

So, it is somewhat obvious that ethical questions are involved in the creation and display of protest art. Especially if we are to expect protest art to be accessible, which is an unfortunate requirement of humankind’s own narrow minded doing in the first place. Accessibility is required because of failures in ethics to maintain equity and equality for all members of society. This compels us to maintain a set of ethics for effictive protest art, to ensure it does not produce harm in its pursuit of disrupting harm.

This is where I will likely cause the greatest debate over the beliefs I have described herein. Nevertheless, I believe it is still important to place as few restrictions on any kind of art as possible, including protest art. The goal is simply to ensure that protest art does not exploit suffering, which serves a sum total of nobody.

At least in 2024 –– god only knows how much this list could change in five years time –– there are only three things that I believe effective protest art must achieve in order to remain within reasonable ethical parameters. Effective protest art must:

1. Be made with non-exploitative financial or social intentions, and be thoroughly researched to ensure that intention is executed in a way that does not exploit an audience for financial or social gains.

2. Be made using materials and methods that are ecologically sustainable and do not exploit human labor. 

3. Be made entirely by a human being. Any use of artificial intelligence risks endangering the aforementioned requirement of non-exploitative materials and methods.

As long as a piece of protest art follows all of these guidelines, I will consider it fully effective. Of course, it is still art, which means even an effective piece of protest art might not speak to me. Resonance with art –– even the most non-exploitative and accessible example of protest art –– is more of a question of personal taste than raw efficacy.

As we roll into what seems to be a hot summer, I encourage you to adopt this simple practice that might help you get your own thoughts moving about protest art and creative social justice:

Seek out artists in your town or city who use their art as a vehicle for change, even if it is a topic you do not understand, agree with, or even particularly care about. Find a gallery you haven’t been to before; Find an organization putting on a performance that seems odd or uncomfortable; Listen to a musical artist that you’ve always found to be “too out there” for you. Engage with new perspectives, people, and problems. Approach them with kindness, patience, and open-mindedness. And while you do, ask yourself if each experience checks the boxes of accessibility and ethics.

If at some point you find you are uncertain if the experience does check those boxes, take note of it. Think about it some more over the coming days, and write down whatever thoughts come to mind as you do. Underline the ones that stay with you and cross out the ones you grow to disagree with. After a while, see which of those social issues you are gravitating towards the most, and find ways to engage with the issue in your own creative way. It could be something small and simple, like sharing a link on social media to a fundraiser. It could also be something more intensive, like creating a song cycle about different perspectives of patriotism. Either way, let it guide you toward the places that will allow you to fight against the issues that trouble you most, and create a better world in the process.