Creative Action, Part 3: What Can We Do?

Seeing and Drawing Our Community's Labor

Hello friends!

Today is part 3 of our three-part series on Creative Action. A reminder, I’m taking the paywall down for the whole darn thing. If you have enjoyed this series as a free subscriber, I would be honored if you would join us as part of the paid community and support the work that makes free series like this possible.

We started with WHY, then went to HOW, and now we’re going with WHAT — what do we do?! Some folks might say we’re going backwards, from the more complex questions to the “lower-order” questions. But honestly I think the question most of us struggle with is “What can I do?”

Part of what makes that question so hard is that the “what” will look different for each of us. There’s no one answer. We have to find it for ourselves. Beth Pickens’s questions from her self-inventory suggest that we all have different strengths to contribute and different causes that motivate us. Each of us has our own contribution to make. One thread I am confident will run through everyone’s answer to the “What can I do?” is that we need to do things together, in community.

To do that, we first have to see one another.

Reverend Cecil Williams said these words to me when I spent some time with the staff at Glide in San Francisco in 2018.

You’ve heard me say it a million times: “Drawing is looking, and looking is loving.”

This is the heart of my work, and the foundation of DrawTogether. You can see this ethos clearly in “Meanwhile”, my series of drawn journalism stories I did for nearly a decade (and won’t ever stop). It started as a column in The Rumpus, went onto become the back page column of California Sunday Magazine for four years, and then moved to the New York Times. It’s also a book, Meanwhile in San Francisco, The City in Its Own Words. My approach combines social work, art, and journalism practices to tell people’s stories in their own words.

I knew stories were all around me, right under my nose, if I just looked closely.

Noticing Labor

One overlooked area I noticed was the care people put into their work, work that we often take for granted. The underappreciated, undercelebrated labor that is essential in our communities.

For example, the care that a bus driver offers their customers.

From Meanwhile in San Francisco

And how the workers at the San Francisco Public Library offer so much more to the community than books.

From Meanwhile in San Francisco

There are stories of people supporting our communities through care, hard work, and acts of service everywhere. We just have to take the time to look. In my “Meanwhile” series, so many inspiring, everyday people generously allowed me to see them. What I saw: they are looking at others, too, seeing each other’s needs and supporting one another. That is Creative Action.

And using drawing to notice it? And share what we find? That is Creative Action, too.

Drawing is looking, and looking is loving.

The Assignment: Seeing Our Community’s Labor

In the United States, tomorrow is Labor Day. When we look back at the labor movement, their successes show us the power of communities working together. We also know that building and maintaining solidarity is hard, and yet crucial to making change. It all starts with noticing what care, time and effort goes into the work in our communities. When we value that work and we see how it changes or strengthens the place we live in, it in turn reinforces who “is” our community and what binds us together.

Step 1: Pay attention to the interactions you have today. With that extra attention, where do you see effort and care being done by those around you? Taking a sketchbook around the city is one way to widen the scope of your attention, but not the only way. As you shop for groceries, get a cup of coffee, or heck, listen to the weather report on the radio, keep your eyes and ears open for the small things people around you are doing as part of their jobs and work. Try and scribble five things down.

• Bonus points for getting curious and asking a few questions to a person you interact with. :)

Step 2: Draw the labor that you may not always notice or consider every day, but that you did see today. Translate what you saw in a person’s efforts to get their workplace set up, or the care that goes into making your sandwich. Do a 10-minute sketch highlighting that effort and care that is happening.

Step 3: Share in the chat AND respond to someone! I can’t wait to see the ways we all start to document the labor that enriches our communities. We can use each other's eyes to see the nuance of what is happening in our larger communities by sharing this week. I want to encourage everyone to also see what insights or connections you make as you see others documenting their communities.

While we’re making our Creative Action lessons and assignments free for everyone, we are keeping the community chat closed to paying members to make sure the community is a safe space for all. Want to join in the conversation? Become a member:

One final note: This Labor Day weekend is also a great time for folks to check out Corrie and Jude’s suggestion in the chat to learn about the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. She was the first artist-in-resident for the New York City Department of Sanitation and developed what she called “maintenance art". Her piece Touch Sanitation took place over 11 months when she shadowed sanitation workers on their shifts, and she made sure to thank and shake the hand of all 8,500 employees.

Love it!

Pencils UP! ❤️✏️❤️

xoxo,

w

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GUT GALLERY

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance: "Handshake and Thanking Ritual" with Sanitation Workers of New York City Department of Sanitation, 1979-1980. © Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York. Image via Sanitation Foundation.

D’Lena: Lorraine O’Grady made her debut as a performance artist in 1980 at the age of 45, a creative path that didn’t seem likely in the years when she worked for the Department of Labor as a translator and analyst - but one she wanted for herself even then. (Though she had always been a good writer and had that as a creative outlet, there was more she wanted to try and another community she wanted to find). This biography speaks to me - at 42, I have been trying to find my way to another sort of life than the practical careers and such I’ve pursued thus far, and it makes me feel like it is still possible to do. And her work lays out the contradictions and constraints of race, gender and class that frame what is available for us to choose. Mlle Bourgeois Noire, the character she created to critique the muted work she was seeing from black artists trying to find a way into a disinterested white art world, wore a gown made of many pairs of white gloves and carried a “bouquet” of flowers that was also a cat o’nine tails, which she used to whip herself once she had given the flowers away. The image of that flowered cat o’nine tails sticks with me. She wanted to make the violence of internalized repression explicit. And by suddenly whipping herself, she broke with the usual script - staging the performance unprompted, in a mixed crowd. Her performance didn’t get the coverage she hoped for at the time, but she said in an Art Forum interview in 2021 (youtu.be/zDhV2tI9img) that she knew she was performing for an audience to come. That is striking to me, because that question of “who will see it?” gets bound up with “why do it?” and makes it so I don’t make things. I am glad Lorraine O’Grady took a longer view and made things anyway. (And meticulously documented her own art career, so that there’s a robust self-curated archive now that she’s no longer here).

Cathy R

Grace Sweeney: I have been intrigued with collages. I read about Hannah Hoch. 1889-1978. She was know for her activism in art making photomontages and collages. In 1917 she joined a group of male artists called Berlin Dada. This group critiqued German culture and society.

Rachel and Tyler: As I consider the issues I engage with on a political level, the environment floats up front and center for me, and inevitably tangles directly with other issues of justice and equity. I had the amazing opportunity to attend a talk by this incredible artist, Klara Maisch, this year. She skis out into the back country and paints landscapes! She collaborates with scientists to document their work! She described her own work in near-scientific terms of studying the natural world. Echoing what Wendy says about "looking is loving," she said, "attention is a form of care." I spoke to her after the talk, complimented her work profusely, and she gave me a pencil! The most beautiful form of artistic encouragement, just literally passing on the tools! What a beautiful human. Check out her work and be inspired. Here's the beginning of a sketch I'm doing of some lichen. It takes lichen many, many years to regenerate, so imagine: caribou populations survive on lichen in the winter, large animals eating huge quantities of lichen they forage under snow cover. Then that patch of lichen needs fifty years to regenerate, so the vast arctic landscape that looks wild and empty to us: it's barely enough. The political message is: oppose drilling and development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Yukon Flats. The study is: beautiful nature in all its glory!