Workshops as a Means to increase inclsuive and widen access to Art Activism
Research Question:
I will facilitate workshops to ask the question: can textile workshops be an effective tool for inclusive & accessible art activism?
Inclusive & Acessible: what it looks like in Art Activism and How I Plan to use it in this project
I am wanting to increase inclusion and widen access in terms of location, timing, lack of group and vulnerability, so that people who do not live in major metropolises, or who work nights or shifts when most protests happen, when aren't able to join a group, or who for various reasons are not able to risk possible arrest that normal protests may present, can still engage in artistic protest. Not all of my strategies will encompass all of these interest groups. My own challenge to participation in activism is primarily location, I used to live in a major metropolis in Canada and now I live in what is technically a city in Germany, but is a very small and insignificant place.
Within art activism, workshops are prevalent, two of my art activism literature sources were intended as workshop material (Boyd and Mitchell, 2012; Duncombe and Lambert, 2021).
Some are even utilized with the intention of inclusivity and accessability. The Center for Artist Activism, operating out of New York, holds workshops all over the world to share artistic activism principals with activists. (Duncombe and Lambert, 2021). This taken art activism out of a few cities worldwide[1] and has helped bring it to many more cities.
inclusivity and accessability can work in many ways. Lindy Richardson’s Politics in Stitch: giving prisoners and students a united voice project (Richardson, 2019) managed an aspect of inclusivity and accessability where inmates stitching banners that were used at the head a celebratory procession of women having the vote for 100 years. Their stitch work allows elements of them to travel, at a head of procession, a place of power.
Creating protest banners for others to march with is also used with Aram Han Sifutentes’ Protest Banner Lending Library project(Han Sifuentes, 2016; Sifuentes, 2021). Han Sifutentes held workshops for vulnerable people who are unable to protest due to arrest fears to create banners that are then lent out and used at various protests. The banners can and do travel to various protests and are made by people who are vulnerable—people with precarity, often with tenuous immigration status or care-giver responsiblities as Han Sifutentes herself used to be.
My project Protest Pin Workshops uses workshops as a method to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism and protest textiles. While Han Sifuentes’ project might be seen as shadow protest (insert reference to my chapter on shadow protests), the art activist and craftivist workshops mentioned previously are not active protests, but training or protest item creation for protest. My project envisions the workshop as a place of active protest. Participants craft a textile pin or accessory within the workshop that is then gifted, mostly through mail, to a public figure to encourage them to make good choices to mitigate the climate catastrophe.
The Efficacy of Protest
Protest has the efficacy of riding a bike across a dry sand beach. Protest is not about results. Even so-called successful protests tend to have moderate gains over years or even decades-long campaigns, like ending slavery, decolonization, women’s rights. Even smaller gains such as wage increases at a national chain[2] can take multiple years.
One protests because they hope. One protests because they believe they must. One protests to change themselves and each other. One protests on a hope, a prayer, with breath held because maybe, just maybe, this will be the brick that makes the walls crumble. There has never been one march that changed the world, Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus did not end segregation in the United States, the #metoo movement was the spark that ignited after countless failures.
How to Determine is My Research is Successful
Protest is not about direct results-based efficacy, but my workshop method as a way to decentralize art activism still requires verification of successful. What would success entail? To draw decisive conclusions from the workshops, participants will answer a questionnaire to find out if they have or will send out the pin they made, if they are more likely to engage in art activism in the future and if they are from a category of people with less access to protest that is seeking to protest.
Summery of Preliminary Results
The preliminary results from the 6 person workshop shows promising data workshops may be a good method to decentralize art activism: 75% of the participants mailed the pins they made at the workshop. While only one participant felt it was quite likely that they would send more pins and two felt it was possible. Art activism was promoted through the workshop. 50% of the participants had engaged in art activism previously, 5 of the 6 participants felt they were quite likely to engage with art activism in the future and the last participant felt they were more likely to engage with art activism after attending the workshop. As the group was comprised entirely of artists, it is not surprising that the participants would express their intentions to engage in an art activism with their own methods.
[1] Originally most practioners were based in New York or London in the English-speaking world.
[2] see craftivist project (Corbett, 2019) that was successful in getting a retailer to join and pay a fair wage, after two years of an unsuccessful protest campaign.
