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Mission Statement Arts, Education and Activism: A Call to Action From as early as 410 B.C., when Aristophanes penned the anti-war play Lysistrata, to the radical democratic teaching philosophy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Schools in the 1960s, from Paulo Friere’s transformation of Brazil’s farming class through revolutionary education, to new dialogues on race relations prompted by Spike Lee’s provocative film Do the Right Thing, people of cultural influence have employed both arts and education to work for social justice. In all cases, the aesthetic aims of such work are deliberately active, calling onlookers to do something about injustice and inequity. In the African-American tradition, Pearl Primus advanced the cause of racial justice with such choreographies as "Strange Fruit," and Langston Hughes inspired his generation to social consciousness with the poem "A Dream Deferred." Picasso shocked the staid European art world with his mural Guernica. Thirty years later, the Chicano civil rights and farm workers movements gave rise to Chicano mural art. In the `90s, Eve Ensler used the theater to call attention to a variety of women’s issues in The Vagina Monologues. Rap music today pushes the boundaries of music and spoken word to give altogether new expression to American racial inequalities and the cultural complacency surrounding them. Duke’s 16th annual commemoration of King is concentrated on those who use any artistic medium - dance, painting, drawing, photography, film, music, literature, spoken word and so on- to enlist others in "the cause." Such activists may be artists themselves or those who employ the artistic talents of others in acts aimed at achieving social justice. Whatever their preferred form, these figures work at the intersection of art and activism, inspiring heart and mind alike to imagine the possibilities for change. |
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