What can you do to help instill “social justice art” in the next generation?
“Art activism is a practice combining the creative power of the arts to move society emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change,” writes Jiya Gupta in the International Journal of Advanced Research.
“Activist art originates from the intersection between the artistic and political climate.”
And Abbetuck is all about that.
Gupta goes on to review “Social Justice Art: A Framework for Activist Art Pedagogy” by Marit Dewhurst, Professor and Art Education Program Director at The City College of New York.
“Dewhurst has examined how art is an effective way to engage students in thinking about the role they might play in addressing social injustice,” writes Gupta. “Using interviews and observations of sixteen high schoolers participating in an activist arts class at a New York City Museum, Dewhurst identified three learning processes in the act of creating art that have an impact on social justice: connecting, questioning, and translating.
“Dewhurst outlines core strategies for an ‘activist arts pedagogy’ and offers suggestions for educators seeking to incorporate activist art projects inside or outside formal school settings.”
In social justice art education, Dewhurst examines how to teach artmaking to address systems of injustice, how to talk about the process, and the role of activist art projects not only in school classrooms but also within museum education, afterschool education and other youth programming.
In 2023, Marit Dewhurst gave a talk at the University of Cincinnati as part of the Bastos Family Creative Educator Series. Titled “Doing Our Homework: Preparing to Facilitate Social Justice Art Education,” Dewhurst states that, at its core, social justice arts education demands that art educators approach their visions of teaching and learning from a dramatically different angle than what most have experienced, read about, or facilitated in their lives as learners and educators.
Prof. Dewhurst argues, social justice arts education “asks us to set aside the hierarchical power dynamics of conventional schooling. It invites us to imagine and recall forms of collaborative solution-finding that prioritize compassion and possibility. It urges us to embrace the messiness and ambiguity of unfolding artworks and community building.”
“It asks us to critique the dominant ways of thinking, making, and doing that we have absorbed from social structures and to resist the ways that harm us while uplifting the ways of equity, justice and love.”
Sounds challenging … and exactly what we need to be building into students’ arts training and critical thinking skills.
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