The arts continue to transcend restrictions and ongoing oppressions that stem from inequalities. As the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) states,
NO CRISIS TOUCHES ON A SINGLE CAUSE OR ISSUE, all are intersectional, with overlapping impacts connecting race, gender, religion, orientation, ability, and every other characteristic that has been targeted for oppression. Every emergency, whatever triggered it, is also a social emergency, and social emergencies demand cultural responses (Art Became the Oxygen, 2017, p. 7).
Artists and cultural workers continue to bring people together through performance, song, visual imagery, and stories. At the same time we continually need to re-examine, as a global creative community, what is culture for? Who is it for? Who is present and who is absent?
As a collective we, ArtsAction Group, are a work in progress. We commit to continually questioning our own privilege, to ask difficult questions and to carry forward, with our partners, the work of individual and social transformation through the arts, culture and education.
As an international organization based in the United States, we call upon the elected officials of that country to start a formal process of truth and reconciliation centered around our history of slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the theft of land and resources, and the persistent racism that continues today. We support H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act put forward by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee in 2021. The bill is "to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes". We also direct people to the work being done by Campaign Zero and #8cantwait.
We believe this work can't wait and intentionally center our work around love and social justice across theory and practice.
The ArtsAction Group Collective.
As a collective we, ArtsAction Group, are a work in progress. We commit to continually questioning our own privilege, to ask difficult questions and to carry forward, with our partners, the work of individual and social transformation through the arts, culture and education.
As an international organization based in the United States, we call upon the elected officials of that country to start a formal process of truth and reconciliation centered around our history of slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the theft of land and resources, and the persistent racism that continues today. We support H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act put forward by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee in 2021. The bill is "to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes". We also direct people to the work being done by Campaign Zero and #8cantwait.
We believe this work can't wait and intentionally center our work around love and social justice across theory and practice.
The ArtsAction Group Collective.
