Arts Speaking Truth to Power
CLA artists are making music, films, and multimedia art installations, and connecting the arts to communities.
Carl Flink: Leaping Out of Bounds
Jan Estep: A Feast of Media
Hisham Bizri: Notes from Underground: The Art & Physics of Film
Noel Zahler: Keeping Time
Margaret Werry: Off the Beaten Path
In 2004, CLA partnered with the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to host Coexistence, a traveling exhibition of images and text created by artists from around the world. The exhibition evoked a global landscape marred by humankind’s cruelties and crimes—from the camps of Nazi Germany to the killing fields of Rwanda and Sudan, from the farms and factories of the Americas to the mean streets and sweatshops of cities worldwide.
It also delivered an eloquent and urgent plea for mutual understanding—for coexistence.
The exhibition invited us to question the orthodoxies that drive people and nations to armed conflict and genocide. It also asked us to reimagine our world as a place free of the hatreds and ideological schisms that set us against each other on the world’s streets and battlefields and in the halls of state and corridors of power. It asked us to refocus on the collective good and on the good that, we hope, lies within each and every one of us.
Wherever the exhibition traveled, it brought people together in searching dialogue—from across cultures, belief systems, and national origins, and from all walks of life. In the one conspicuous exception to the prevailing good will, vandals in Jacksonville, Florida, the exhibit’s first U.S. host city, defaced the images with racist graffiti. Ironically, this desecration, like the homage paid by the vast majority of visitors worldwide, spoke eloquently to the power of art to move us—to tears, to joy, to reverence, to enmity and rage.
Filmmaker Akira Kurosawa said, “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” The most powerful works of art compel attention. Artists show us the world and ourselves through new prisms and stretch the boundaries of what’s possible in ways that few other people do, save the occasional scientific genius who turns the world on its head with a breakthrough discovery.
The arts transform what we see and can imagine, and how we experience and understand our world. They reveal to us the seedling in a toxic landfill, the chink in the armor, the crack in a heart, a teacup, or a nation. In the words of Virginia Woolf, the arts show us “the diamond in the dustbin.”
This issue of CLA Today focuses on just a tiny cross-section of CLA’s hundreds of artists—faculty, students, and alumni/ae working across disciplines and media, from concept to creation, with film and with clay, with cameras and computers, palettes and words, movement and sound.
It asks us to think about the role of the arts in our lives.
It asks us to celebrate the transformative artistic imagination, which often casts its most powerful gaze from the cultural and political margins, viewing from a distance what poet Ray Gonzalez calls the artist’s “immediate and obsessive subjects.”
In the end, it asks us to celebrate the arts as a powerful form of cultural expression that both defines and bridges cultures and reminds us of the world’s possibilities.