The New Yorker’s February anniversary cover by artist John W Tomac is beautiful and profound: it speaks directly to the fear and uncertainty of our present moment. That said, with much respect for Tomac’s elegant statement, I felt like an obvious alternative storyline needed addressing:

It’s important to acknowledge the frustration and helplessness that many are feeling right now, which is what Tomac’s image does so poignantly. Still, my personal sense is that in order to feel empowered to take action, it’s equally vital to keep envisioning the courage to move forward. By tweaking one iconic image and pairing it unexpectedly with another iconic image, this is just a quick, nerdy example of how new possibilities can emerge. The mere hint of something looking like a lightsaber in my version at right automatically creates a kind of neural shortcut to other associations.

Beyond my own 5 minutes of fun with Photoshop, it’s been interesting watching the many ways that artists and activists are presently harnessing the power of existing pop culture, cinema, comedy and all manner of embedded Jungian-hero tropes in their imagery and narratives to bolster their messages.

To me, what’s present in the best of this maelstrom of creative output and serious silliness is a profound sense of hope, and a willingness to undertake this journey– not naïveté or optimism in some blank sense, but hope in the very specific sense expressed in this brief essay by the great Václav Havel, another improbable president of an entirely different ilk: it’s wise and absurd in all of my favorite ways.

Never Hope Against Hope, Václav Havel*, Esquire Magazine, 1993

(*Confusing byline in link, but this is Esquire’s 2011 repost of Havel’s essay. Original 1993 scan here. If you know any Czech history, the year this was originally published only adds to its potency.)

“Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.“

Below, a few pics from last Thursday’s opening reception for the Print Public exhibition at Kala Art Institute. Since my project is actually still in its nascent stages, my contribution to the show is more of a premise than a presentation. With everything that’s been going on these past few months, safety has been very much on my mind, and so this theme is how my project will now unfold.

So. As an introductory exercise at the reception, visitors were invited to take a #safetyselfie in my space, holding up a paper detailing some simple actions they’re undertaking to feel safer these days.

I decided to kick this project off with 2 large illustrations of Kala’s 2 nearby fire stations. While there’s no guarantee that anyone from either fire station will in fact collaborate with me on my Print Public project, I felt like these images would set a good tone, either way. I liked the idea of setting these 2 strong, hard boxes in a dreamy, inviting environment to convey a sense of stability, calm, courage, protection and hope.

I also painted out my corner of the gallery in a palette of magenta, purple and yellow to add to this sense of a safe, but energized, environment.

Beyond these initial 2 prints and this paint job, I’ll continue to use this area as a stage set, workshop space and evolving installation over the course of the exhibition. Stay tuned.

“A scrub is a guy that thinks he’s fly
And is also known as a busta
Always talkin’ about what he wants
And just sits on his broke ass…” TLC, No Scrubs, 1999

NO SCRUBS was the boisterous, fun dance brigade that I organized for the Jan 21 Women’s Marches (both Oakland and San Francisco). Why “NO SCRUBS”? Because if you know that jam, you know that it’s an earworm that’s hard to shake. Its lyrics could also be interpreted, under present circumstances, as a fun way to critique the new administration.

Organized around hiphop and pop music, Team NO SCRUBS’ goal was to add some sass to the occasion by dancing: “marching” just seemed so… grim. With that in mind, we got a PA system on wheels, and put together a playlist of fun, feisty pop songs by women of color (and Prince). Team NO SCRUBS then made and brandished quirky, absurdist protest signs quoted from these songs, and got a rolling dance party going with other marchers at both events.

Our goal was to be a focused, energetic burst of sunshine: the color yellow was employed as a motif for Golden State optimism, energy and power, and the music chosen was a deliberate strategy to engage and energize people. By all accounts, it worked well, especially when people were stuck in a holding pattern due to the crowds, and later when it started raining, too. It gave everyone within earshot of us something to do, and something to bond over.

With many more protests likely in the near future, it’s important to come up with strategies that allow for optimism, collaboration and play, most especially when folks are feeling furious, alone or negative. Most activism requires more serious action, so dancing to pop music is by no means a blanket solution: however, Alice Walker did tell the crowd at the Jan 18 queer dance party held outside Mike Pence’s house that these times call for “serious dancing,” so…

While much of Team NO SCRUBS was the result of a great collaborative effort among the women involved, its premise was the direct result of a deep reading of The Culture Group’s “Making Waves” PDF, which I highly recommend to anyone trying to figure out what to do with themselves, creatively and politically, at present.

Sing with me now:

“NO I don’t want no scrub
A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me…”

brief video clips here and here.

This was the cover to my summer course reader for Global Perspectives in Contemporary Art. It’s a portrait of Sifiso Candace Leonardo, by the South African photographer/visual activist Zanele Muholi.

I make a  point of having the first image that my students see each semester in all of my classes be by an amazing, but typically less-represented, artist: a person of color, female, trans, non-Western, queer, non-binary, and/or any of the intersections therein. This image is either the cover of a reader or the first image on my syllabus.

I do this because these artists are still too often an after-thought, not front and center. It’s not charity when I do this: it’s the 21st century, it’s common sense, it’s great art, and it’s still not happening enough. Some of the artists I choose are in fact well-known international art stars, like Yayoi Kusama: often, my students still don’t know who she is. (The lesser-known Muholi image was one that I loved anyway, but coming into the summer course just days after the Orlando Pulse shootings, it felt that much more important to center the beauty, strength and fierceness of queer voices of color.)

First images from other recent syllabi (artists Lava Thomas, MM Yu, Jaime Hernandez):

One significant exception to my “first image” policy was this piece by Robert Longo. It was an exception because it was this incredible drawing:

-and therefore a way to talk not only about great technical drawing skills, but about how to apply those skills to relevant contemporary issues.

What we think of as the art world still dismays me in its passive racism and sexism. It’s a world I love and have been part of for decades, but it still disappoints me when it’s not as tolerant and inclusive as it flatters itself that it is. What’s happening in recent news in America should not be mistaken for something that the arts are immune to. We do all right, but we need to do better.

Last Friday January 20th, I was scheduled to give a brief noon talk at SFMOMA. I had deliberately selected Inauguration Day for this conversation, but was compelled to cancel it in solidarity with the J20 Art Strike that day.

I had chosen to discuss Student, 1968, by Wayne Thiebaud:

It’s a piece that I genuinely love, but my selection was also a way to talk about some of the points I’m bringing up in this post. SFMOMA was gracious enough to publish my statement, which is more or less a skeleton version of the points I had intended to address. This statement was also on display in the gallery, next to Wayne’s painting.(Pic below, someone reading my statement in SFMOMA that day.)

Anyway, back to Global Perspectives, summer 2016. In my Day 1 lecture, showing images by a number of artists of African descent, I talked with my students about the irony and problematics of sharing these images without a single Black student being present, at a school with few Black students in general. (It’s not that one must be Black to appreciate this work, of course, but the richness in so much of it seems to bounce around the room without the resonance of familiarity, at times.)

As we stare down the barrel of this intensely turbulent moment in U.S. history, I want to gently and lovingly challenge many of my colleagues in art education to look at ways they could diversify the artists and themes that they teach to. Look hard at numbers: when you show male/White/western artists, what percent? How could you change it up a bit? Beyond personal identity,  how often are you showing work that engages social and political issues, rather than just formalism in a vacuum? I also want to gently and lovingly challenge my friends and colleagues in arts institutions to look more authentically at issues of inclusion, and how to do the work of curating and organizing exhibitions and events that truly attract and connect with more diverse audiences. When you look around your galleries, who isn’t there?

Some of these challenges are easy things to do, some are harder. They’re by no means the only things to address, but they don’t hurt. And they’re definitely more immediate than the bigger challenges of structural racism, sexism and epidemic violence we’re confronting right now in this country. This week, when I’m feeling sadness and impatience for change, continuing the quiet, insistent work of change and inclusion feels more important than ever.

Catching up on some items I’ve been neglecting on the blog: below, video footage from the Rainin Foundation‘s “Exploring Public Art Practices” symposium at Oakland Museum of California back in September 2016.

First, there’s the high-speed 8-minute presentation I gave to a sea of invisible ghosts, followed by the more populated round table portion moderated by Christian Frock (this, in conversation with Mike Arcega, Kota Ezawa, Dee Hibbert Jones and Nomi Talisman, Cliff Hengst, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Alison Pebworth and Chris Sollars.)

Jenifer K. Wofford | Exploring Public Art Practices 2016 from Kenneth Rainin Foundation on Vimeo.

Afternoon Roundtable Discussion | Exploring Public Art Practices 2016 from Kenneth Rainin Foundation on Vimeo.