At the Power of the Arts National Forum, the Black Lives Matter movement is first brought up by , an Ottawa-based artist with Ethiopian roots. As he speaks, images of his art are projected on the screens to either side of the stage. The first piece is a mural memorializing Sandra Bland, a portrait of her smiling face done in a vibrant pallet.

He speaks at first about being contacted by Bland’s family, who were moved to see that their daughter’s story had spread so far, that it continues to produce a reaction beyond national borders by those who recognize its profound injustice and refuse to remain silent.

But he also speaks about vandalism. For an artist that creates murals, I guess that’s something of an occupational hazard – but what Assefa shows to us when he moves to an image of the mural with the words ALL LIVES MATTER sprayed in white paint across Bland’s face and name goes beyond vandalism. This, as Assefa explains, is a hate crime. This is an attempt, under the guise of equality, to aggressively push black lives out of the spaces they’ve fought to carve for themselves.

The incredible part, though, is what comes next. He tells us about people from across the boundaries of race, class, and gender coming together, not only to fix the mural but to stand guard over it for several days. Something similar happened with the mural Assefa painted to of colour, where people fought back against vandalism by “re-vandalizing” Assefa’s art to reflect its original message.

So what does it say about art and social change? That public art can be provocative, sometimes even uncomfortable in its visibility, is obvious – that it is also necessary is even more so. Part of this is because, as Assefa points out, public art is a dialogue: there’s the statement of the original piece, but the vandalism and resistance that follow also function as communication. And that leads to the question of space: it’s pretty clear that the few spaces that do exist for public art are precious, precious real estate, forcing any public artist to struggle to carve out their niche and get their message heard (or rather, seen).

Visibility is one of the lynchpins of another discussion on Black art that takes place on Saturday with a bunch of the folks involved in the , including representatives from the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Black Experience Project, Nia Centre for the Arts, plus two of the artists whose had their art featured in the exhibition.

A little bit of background: the Scratch & Mix Exhibition was a Toronto project displaying the work of 11 GTA-based young artists at the Art Gallery of Ontario, with the theme of “Empowering the Black Community.” Thinking back to some of Assefa’s comments, this is a pretty significant move in providing more spaces for black youth in their own community.

This is more than just another exhibition. Bringing the work of youth who so often get pigeonholed as “just” community artists into the AGO helps to validate their work as art, as well as their experiences as black youth artists. And sure, you don’t need validation to be an artist; all you have to do is create art. But the AGO is a notable and recognized institution in the art world—well, that’s pretty powerful.

For more information:

• ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Alicia

Credit for all photos: Kalkidan Assefa

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Health – both mental and physical – was a hot topic at this year’s Power of the Arts National Forum, and for good reason; based on all the projects covered by Saturday’s workshop and Sunday’s dialogue sessions, there’s a lot going on when it comes to pairing these two together.

The discussion wasn’t relegated to the professionals, though. It really started on Friday night, when singer Kellylee Evans got up on stage and told us she’d been “frappé par la foudre.” In French, she said, this can mean one of two things: that you’ve fallen in love (here everyone giggled) or, literally, that you’ve been struck by lightning.

For her, it was the literal sense that held true.

The chances of being struck by lightning in Canada, according to the superficial and questionably reliable Google search I just did, are slightly less than one in a million for any given year. And for most people – certainly for me – that’s all it is: a statistic, convenient for comparing against your chances of winning the lottery or getting attacked by a shark but not much else.

What you don’t think about is the aftermath. The recovery. And what kept Kellylee motivated to recover, to work past the limitations of a one-in-slightly-less-than-a-million accident, was her music. She wanted to keep touring, keep singing, keep playing guitar and ukulele.

If the story sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard something similar before, in various iterations. Maybe it’s even something you’ve experienced yourself. When one of the presenters asked participants in Saturday’s Mental and Physical Health workshop to think back to a hard time in their life and share what helped get them through it, there were certainly a lot of people whose answers involved some form of art, from singing in a choir to dancing to painting.

My answer, unsurprisingly, was books—either reading them or writing them. If I’m upset or stressed out, there’s nothing like submerging myself in the beauty of someone else’s reality (or struggling to create my own) to help me out. Like other forms of art, it gives you an opportunity for self-expression—an opportunity, moreover, where you’re in complete control. It’s a pretty powerful experience, one many people gravitate towards intuitively.

What’s interesting, though, is where it starts to go beyond intuition. The moderator for Saturday’s workshop on mental and physical health was a doctor himself, and he opened by saying that the medical profession has a lot to learn from the arts. Medicine is heavily curative right now, when it needs to start being more promotive. And combining the two isn’t just an fun thought experiment: for all of the presenters, and for a significant portion of the audience, it’s a reality. It’s their job.

Between the workshop’s three presentations – put on by representatives from Ontario’s ARTS-REHAB project and B.C’s On the Map project, plus an independent study by M.A. candidate Janet Creery – a few things started to become obvious. One: it’s important – essential, even – to start developing a whole-body approach to healing. We tend to focus on the physical, but how you feel about yourself and your life depends on a whole lot more than how well your body works. Two: the people who run arts-and-health related projects need taking care of too. If you’re running a small program in a small community, it’s easy to start feeling isolated; just like any other profession, there need to be opportunities for networking and sharing resources and knowledge. Three: arts-and-health programs can’t be all about art, nor can they be all about health. It’s all about being interdisciplinary, from research to implementation.

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“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Those words – from German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht – came up a lot at this year’s Power of the Arts National Forum.

It’s a very appropriate statement (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “motto”) for a conference with the 2015 theme Sustaining Social Change. Let’s think about it for a moment, because I’ve taken far too many English courses to let a sentence like that slide unanalyzed. Brecht’s image is pretty powerful: you usually think of using a hammer to break, not “shape.” But if I’ve learned anything this weekend, it’s that often the force of a hammer is exactly what it takes to create change, and that art is sometimes the best – or only – way to achieve that.

Using art… to talk about art?

It’s daunting to come into a room full of professionals and entrepreneurs on Friday night – every time someone asks me why I’m here, I find myself admitting, “Well, actually I’m still finishing my degree,” like it’s some kind of guilty secret.

Right up until Jali and André Dédé Vander get up on stage, that is. The apprehension that descends on the room when they ask us all to stand up is palpable. Then, even worse… they ask us to dance.

For the first song, people shuffle awkwardly around, making eye contact with their neighbours and laughing uncomfortably (aside from the guy in front of me, that is, who immediately starts breaking it down). But when the second song starts you can see people starting to relax, letting go of some of their self-consciousness as they realize it’s more fun to let go and just, well, have fun. It’s strangely surreal, seeing a bunch of people in their business getups swaying and twirling; but that’s the power of the arts, in a microcosm. Breaking down barriers. Getting people – from different places, different jobs, different social backgrounds, different ages – to connect.

That point comes up over and over again on a larger scale. Art isn’t often talked about in terms of utility – and to consider it only in terms of utility is, I think, to miss the point by a substantial margin. But hearing about how Kellylee Evans’ profound passion for music pushed her to recover after being struck by lightning, or about the power of representation generated by Toronto’s Scratch & Mix Exhibition—and these are only two of the myriad of inspiring conversations this weekend—it’s unequivocally clear that art doesn’t exist in isolation. The meaning of a term like “community engagement” can start to fade from overuse, but what it’s describing hits us powerfully when we hear these people sharing their stories. Art isn’t a passion but a necessity for our diverse array of speakers and the people their work has affected (and also, I suspect, for many of us in the audience).

This is the whole weekend, from the West African dance Sanaaj Mirrie teaches us on Saturday morning to the spoken word performance Killa Atencio opens with before speaking about her business during a Saturday afternoon workshop to the game of healthy relationship charades the representatives of FOXY pull us into during their dialogue session on Sunday afternoon.

Art isn’t just the topic of conversation, it’s the medium. This is art as communication. Art as representation. Art as business, as advocacy, as health.

Art as change.

– Alicia Haniford

Alicia Haniford is a fourth year English co-op student whose interests include medieval studies, creative writing, and human rights. As a co-op student, she has worked with Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada in addition to the Department of Justice, experiences she recorded for the English Department through her co-op blog.

Haniford spent this past weekend (November 6-8, 2015) attending the 2015 Power of the Arts National Forum.  She kindly took some time to blog about her experience. 

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