Chloe Hope Roberts

CRAFT as Social Justice

California College of the Arts

December 2017

What is the most productive way to go about solving a problem that you would like to fix without negativity? How can we fix a broken system? With our hands and our persistence for justice, we can strive to make a difference. The artists in this exhibition directly influence other people through their special ways of mending something that is broken, both literally and metaphorically. There is a very clear need to mend and heal through craft as a form of social justice. It is important to shed light on these artists and projects as inspiration to heal yourself and others. All of the artists in this exhibition use craft to speak to the injustices that they want to help, and injustices that they have experienced themselves, and know that others have experienced them as well.

Artists around the world use the injustices that they have encountered as tools to make their voices louder. Whether they have experienced these injustices or not, they have chosen to use art to assist in being a source of real news, vs. “fake news.” Shahak Shapira is a wonderful example of this. As an Israeli artist, he had enough of the injustices he was facing as a Jewish person, and the stigma around being Jewish that is still very prevalent to this day. Shapira’s project called Yolocaust was inspired by images he had stumbled upon on social media, taken at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Shapira re-posted them with his own artistic input online, combining these disrespectful selfies taken at the Memorial with historical images from Nazi extermination camps. The artist then proceeded to demand a written apology in turn for taking the now-viral altered photographs off the Internet. Every person who submitted an apology expressed their embarrassment. Altered photographs of those who did not submit an apology are still part of this ongoing project as examples of injustice.

Textiles as a whole are a literal common thread between every human and are something everyone relies on to walk out of the door in the morning. Without cloth, we are naked. Michael Swaine has been an artist and activist for most of his career and uses a multitude of mediums, installation/ performance, and textiles to portray his important and relevant relationship with nature and life itself providing sustainable ways to approach this relationship.

Swaine created a very special project that began in 2002 called Reap What You Sew Generosity Project. He went down to the Tenderloin District in San Francisco with a portable sewing machine and table. His aim was to help anyone who needed their clothes sewn back together or patched, as well as to teach them how to do so. Most of those who showed up were homeless and they were grateful for this kind act, showing their gratitude in different ways. This project was originally intended for this to last a day as a performance/act of kindness but the artist was pleased to say the least by how much it impacted the community, and decided this was an important project to continue to genuinely help people. This project is still going on currently with volunteers leading it.

There are many different ways that these artists have expressed their emotions through various acts of social justice, which can be done in many different forms, iterations, and mediums. Claudia Tennyson’s work can be viewed as another type of mending. In Tennyson’s long-term project called the Repair Project, she fixes donated objects that were broken or forgotten and then returns them to their original owners as “new” items. Some items are functional, and others are transformed into sculptural objects, objects with new meaning. Though more a fine art approach to the act of mending, Tennyson’s project is still relevant and sustainable in its nature and holds true to fixing something that is broken to then work again and live a new life; a beautiful metaphor for this lifetime we are all living together.

There is something obviously renewable about taking an object and simply repairing it to its original function or completely reconfiguring it, using parts from multiple items and creating something new. This is the act of mending. Mending once personal items into refreshed items that can now last longer and prosper until they fall apart and a repair is made again. Giving these “broken” objects care and attention is a beautiful way and metaphor to cope with broken situations, situations life brings all of us.

What journey or adventure could you encounter by reacting with love? What act can you take on yourself as an artist? How can we transform this world with our craft and help and empower people along the way?

“We are not separate identities in the struggle for recognition but are already involved in a reciprocal exchange, an exchange that dislocates us from our positions and our subject- positions and allows us to see that community itself requires the recognition that we are all, in different ways, striving for recognition.”

-Judith Butler