making art matters more now

It is not up-lifting, or pleasant. It is sad, and it is true.

Your art matters even more now.

I write today not with a forced “keep going, we can do anything together!” smile, but with angry, vigorous, aggressive, violent, hope. I do not think hope is optimism. Hope is not pretty. It only works ugly. 

I have hope. Hope and trust in myself. In artists. Hope that swells so much that it hurts. My cheeks are full and flushed, my joints heavy, my chest leaps in heartbreak, it doesn’t sink. I thought what I have been feeling is fear (I am scared), but what’s scarier to recognize, what’s harder to swallow, is that what I think I am actually feeling, is affirmation. 

I write today with credence. The commitment of knowing I have chosen the right path in this life. The clarity of knowing we cannot go farther without going deeper. The resolution that art is the ONLY tool we have to understand ourselves, one another. If the even more happens - even more rights are stripped, even more channels break down, even more earth goes unprotected – where will we turn? How will we remember our humanity? Through art. 

This tool matters more now. I cannot let this tool I know so well – art making, or these hands, heart, brain, body, go extinct by my own privilege of a warm bed and “my life won’t change that much”. While tired, I cannot stop. Because that is what they want. They want me to put my pen down, and walk away.

When I think about the ways in which movements, communities, people have kept going in the face of unprecedented times, tragedy, I think about how art is integral to the survival of our humanness, to the ways in which we know ourselves to be enough, to be valuable, worthy, hopeful, and alive. Art and adversity have an agreement between them. 

I think about the artists in Ukraine who are keeping language alive in underground collectives, who are protecting their history from being destroyed, dodging bombs to conserve art. I think about the teenage musicians in Gaza gathering displaced children on the streets just to hear some other sound. I think about code poems in WWII. I think about art drawn on prison walls. I think about pop art warning us about mass consumerism. I think about work songs and spirituals. I think about Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and Juanita McNeely’s, “Is it Real? Yes It Is!”. I think about the string quartet playing as the Titanic sank. 

Toni Morrison wrote this after Bush was re-elected, and I continue to go back to it over and over. Pinned on my phone and my wall:

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

Here is what they want: 

They want us scared silent. Disoriented, confused, shut down, disembodied, less and less human. We know this. We know this is how divide and conquer/power over works. 

Oppression works to fracture us.

Art works to weave us together.

Artists, we cannot give in. 

“Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.”

Get louder, get bolder, get weirder, is how some will go. That’s great. But even if you don’t get louder – keep going. Write one song, publish one poem. Please, do not stop. Keep going scared.

Share your art because it will hold us together, it binds us, but also because it quite literally might be the only thing left one day. If anything, art documents, making the invisible, visible. 

At DYE, we craft the space + community to give you the confidence to tell your story, and fall in love with your creativity.

We are here for you to keep going, together.