Activist Art as a Vehicle for Personal and Collective Transformation

Past is in the Present

Activist art can be a vehicle for both personal and collective transformation and healing. My own art activism is motivated by personal history and driven by current social, cultural, and political issues. In global-minded textile narratives, I interweave the problems of the past with the struggles of the present. Lingering echoes of the Holocaust in the modern world disturb me. We are living in a world of disposable humanity, disposable clothing, and indifference. Members of my family were once disposable too. They were murdered during the Holocaust. The surviving family members ended up in the displaced persons camp where I was born.

Despite that dark lesson of history, racial hatred, intolerance, genocide, and other human rights violations continue in today’s world. Innocent human beings are being subjected to biological experimentation, chemical poisoning, dehumanization, exploitation, brutality, torture, execution, and slaughter while many turn a blind eye and remain silent. Millions of people have been forced to flee their homes and their homelands, their lives uprooted by disasters, war, chaos, racial and religious hatred. We are witnessing the biggest wave of refugees since World War II, their treatment evoking memories of Europe’s darkest hour. With hundreds of thousands more asylum seekers trapped in overcrowded displaced persons camps, the historical parallels are inescapable.

Activist Art Confronts Indifference

Those who commit unspeakable evil are emboldened by the world’s indifference, by the fact that most turn a skeptical eye on such horrors, do not believe the stories of inhumanity, barbarity, and suffering. I depict distress, uncover feelings, manifest the trauma I inherited in order to wake up the viewer. I am willing to shock the audience, unafraid to make viewers feel awkward by raising issues that are disturbing, overlooked, and frequently dismissed. I use activist art for social and political commentary to raise awareness, make an impact, touch people’s lives, communicate new ideas, inspire people, open a dialogue, promote tolerance and understanding, prevent indifference. Activist art that confronts and provokes viewers with uncomfortable topics encourages them to react rather than look the other way and forget.

Medium, Process, and Subject Intertwined

I address serious societal issues through a non-traditional art form. Discarded clothing is my paint, a metaphor for discarded humanity which I rescue and transform. Clothes originally intended to conceal now reveal atrocity and suffering. My process consists of cutting, a violent, destructive act, and hooking, historically used to make rugs. I depict and expose subject matter usually swept under the rug on its surface. The rug transformed into art is elevated onto museum walls. In the featured image each head is mounted onto a frisbee, alluding to lives tossed away without a second thought.

I give new life to the used, discarded, downtrodden, forgotten, and unwanted. I unmake a traumatic past by deconstructing the clothes to create a new whole. I depict non-high art subjects and feelings to demonstrate that all people matter, that all people have feelings. I bear witness to the lives of ordinary people who are suffering and go unnoticed. I give voice to those who have not yet shared their stories in powerful emotional textile portraits. I bring the viewer face to face with disturbing themes. My artwork reveals how it feels to be affected by hatred, discrimination, oppression, genocide, and displacement. Activist art tells the unvarnished truth.