The Resistance Turns to the Arts

Gregg Chadwick speaks at the AACN Symposium at UCLA
on Art as a Tool for Social Justice

by Gregg Chadwick

Last Thursday, I spoke at the AACN Symposium at UCLA on Art as a Tool for Social Justice. It was an honor to speak at my alma mater. UCLA's proud history of advancing civil rights was a prime reason I attended the university as an undergraduate. I was inspired by the heroic stories of  UCLA alums: 

Jackie Robinson as he broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

Kenny Washington as he broke the color barrier in the National Football League in 1946

Ralph Bunche at the UN.  And as I learned later the advocacy for social justice by UCLA Nursing Grad AfAf Meleis.

As I write this, I am reminded that six years ago today, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed for simply being black in America. His death fueled a movement. I also remember that with millions of others, I marched on January 21, 2017 in the #WomensMarch. Our crowd in Los Angeles numbered around 750,000. This year on January 20, 2018, I marched again, and the crowd was estimated by L.A. Mayor Garcetti at 600,000. Artists often use their creations as a sort of reflecting device that mirrors and focuses the viewer’s attention on social and political change.  As Marvin Gaye sang so poignantly- “What’s going on.”

Margy Waller on her blog The Bright Ride has a powerful post up entitled Artistic Resistance In Our America .  Poignant and on point.  She points to Jeffrey Kahane's minor keyed interpretation of America the Beautiful. In our time, where does art stand in the current climate of Resistance against violence, racism, sexism, and anti-LGBT bigotry?  As I said at UCLA, art possesses an uncanny ability to communicate ideas and feelings that journalism  sometimes struggles to convey. It seems that especially in times of struggle or unrest, art helps us connect to the personhood of others. Jeffrey Kahane helps us connect to the intertwined history of the United States. Kahane seems to play a lament, not for our lost innocence - as Americans we never were innocent with our history of enslavement and brutal conquest. But instead, in Kahane's notes, I hear the slow, dogged pursuit of justice. In my mind's eye as Kahane plays, I see the heroic faces of the justice workers who have come before us and the faces of the current generation of students fighting oppression, gun violence, and tainted water supplies. As Margy Waller writes,"We will resist. We will return.Thank you, Jeffrey Kahane—for a moment of stunning artistic protest."

From Teen Vogue
Photo by Michele Sandberg/Getty Images

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

                                                     Martin Luther King, Jr.