Students and faculty highlighted their passions for the intersection of art and social justice through photographs, theatre performances, art exhibitions and coursework this quarter.
Medill sophomore Ashley Xue is one student who uses art as a form of activism.
Xue won the One Book One Northwestern photo contest, which focused on spaces that capture a struggle for visibility, with a photo titled “Grasping the Light.” The photo of light streaming through an abandoned orphanage’s window symbolizes the inside of the mind of an individual struggling with mental illnesses, Xue said.
“Although (inside the brain) isn’t what you would consider a conventional space, it’s even more so important to raise awareness to it because it’s not something that you can literally see with your own eyes,” Xue said. “It’s something that so many people go through, but it also goes so unnoticed.”
Photography is the medium that Xue most connects with, but she also said that art overall is an effective method for raising awareness. She said that the visually appealing elements of art hook viewers and inspire them to explore the piece’s meaning more deeply.
For MFA Directing Candidate Francesca Patrón, theatre is the preferred medium for raising awareness for social justice issues. Patrón’s research focuses on how the power of storytelling can benefit a community, she said.
She directed the play “Esther, Frog Queen,” which was written by Julie Marie Myatt and tells the story of a frog who is being pressured to mate to save her species from going extinct. The show premiered on March 1 in the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts.
The central themes of the play are reproductive rights, societal expectations for women and ecological destruction, Patrón said.
Rehearsal for the play was non-traditional, because there was only one rehearsal the day of the show for the actors. Patrón said she wanted the actors’ organic response to the play. This way, they would be able to tell the story in an authentic way that would create space for the audience to process the polarizing themes through a lens of empathy, she said.
“Storytelling, when done right, has such transformational power,” Patrón said.
Patrón also brought together a therapist and community organizer to further engage with the themes of the play during the talkback after the show. Having these conversations and bringing so many people together was a career highlight for her, Patrón said.
Spanish Prof. Denise Bouras has taught an iteration of a Spanish language course that is based on the idea of art activism for the past three years. In the course, students engage with contemporary art relating to social justice issues.
Bouras created the course in part to push students to think beyond the formulaic idea of activism, so the course’s content centers on “artivism” she said.
“It’s the intersection of art and activism, but to me artivism is going beyond the traditional forms of activism and incorporating the aspect of the imagination to argue or present a point of view,” Bouras said.
Bouras said she hopes by engaging with the artivism in class, students will think about ways in which they can be activists.
The Block Museum of Art also engages faculty and students with art on campus by emphasizing the importance of bringing people together for conversations.
The museum’s two current exhibitions, “Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland” and “it takes a long time to stay here: Paintings by Jordan Ann Craig,” both focus on open dialogue, according to the Associate Director of Communications, Marketing and Digital Strategy, Lindsay Bosch.
The goal is that the exhibitions will inspire interesting conversations, new perspectives and new forms of knowing in relation to the art’s topic, Bosch said.
Bouras echoes this sentiment.
“I think it’s important for students who are in higher education because sometimes we come into it with this mindset that things are set a certain way, and art is meant to get us to start thinking in different ways,” Bouras said.
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