Maia Owen Interview

Maia Owen Interviewed by Julia Huh

October 2020

1. First and foremost, who are you, and what pronouns do you go by?

   • • Hey, my name is Maia, and I use they and them pronouns.

2. What does resistance mean to you? How are you bringing that definition to the cause for this group?

   • • Resistance means pushing back against power over others. Sometimes that exists in our personal relationships with one another and sometimes that exists in a structural dynamic. When we resist this power we call into question and ask why it exists in the first place. Who is it serving? What is it giving back to a person who has power? As for Youth Voice for Consent, we talk about how young people have a lot to resist because our society is ageist and does not view young people as equal. There will always be power over them. I attended a workshop about a year ago with a local activist named Joelle. The workshop was called Articulating Resistance. Joelle talked about how it is important to teach young people how to articulate resistance in times of oppression. We see young people constantly resisting oppression without having the language and knowledge of what they are addressing. As a result adults tend to use this to their advantage to diminish the serious concerns that young people have. In Youth Voice for Consent we talk about this because we want to allow these youth to take on resistance intentionally in order to better help their health and their wellbeing. We also talk about what rape culture is, what an unhealthy relationship dynamic looks like, police brutality, family trauma, and finally how these issues affect us and relate to each other. These conversations have helped us articulate resistance in ourselves and hopefully help educate others.

3. What motivated you to go into this movement?

• My Motivation stems from my experience as a survivor of traumas that I have lived with. I never considered this movement my calling until I moved to Baltimore and got involved with FORCE. Being in this community with other survivors and others who are intentional about the way that we interact with one another motivates me. Being rooted in consent gave me the feeling that this was something I wanted to be a part of. I believe that activism focusing on sexual violence addresses so much more than the acts of violence themselves. It also addresses structural racism, sexism, and other cultural norms that have led us to live in a society where these abusive ideas and behaviors are normalized.

4. In the best way, what is an art to you, and how do you use that in your works to talk about culture in social justice work?

• Art is, in some ways, seen as cultural. In others, it's about making culture. Every shift in our culture is aligned with art movements in response to what is happening in our culture. So, I would have to say art was always a part of social justice work and the changes that we see in our society. It does help us to name our movement and visualize what it is that we are doing in the world. It also helps people have an open mind about situations. Personally, it gives me hope when I am feeling down because it reminds me of possibilities in this society.

5. The type of art you create, what mediums are you comfortable with, and what mediums would you want to explore and use for this purpose?

• In YVC we are inspired by the people who are a part of it, and what mediums and ideas they bring to the program. For me personally, I would consider myself a painter for a long time. In college, I started to take graphic design, printmaking, and film courses to find ways to make art practical. I however realized that making art practical was heavily rooted in capitalism and oppression of ideas. So, I threw that idea of myself making art professionally away and focused on making art the way I wanted to. Recently I have focused on painting and learning about ceramics.

6. For your work, are there any pieces that created issues among people who were taken down, or possibly re-worked?

• I can’t think of any for my own artworks because personally, I create things that are less controversial. My strategy is not for shock, which is not a bad thing because I believe there are times when some issues should rile people up, but for me tends to be subtle and trying to grab people’s attention by displaying it in a way people would least expect it to be. I want it to be this way to say my work on my own personality and the way that I like to communicate with other people

• There was a project where we discussed what our roles would be in social media. There recently has been a ‘call-out’ group that’s been going around on, I think Facebook and Twitter, that the youth are talking about around Baltimore. People were calling out their abusers on that platform, by naming them and posting screenshots and it blew up. The people who are part of this program brought this up to me and we were discussing how this is beneficial to the survivors, but it also caused disagreements. This is understandable because it is social media, and it is an open platform because a lot of people were getting harassed and being bullied for posting what they posted. When we were talking about this we tried to talk about if there were ways to respond to this. We didn’t come up with a solution, but possibly we could make something like this platform, but better. Possibly having it as anonymously and having a drop box where people could share things and we could repost it or ask questions and we can discuss it together. For this issue, there were ups and downs where the youth would say this group is toxic, to even others saying it’s helpful in some ways.

7. What specific art pieces did you personally connect with and impacted you?

• I learned of this artist named Hank Willis Thomas, in my visual theory class in college and he did this series called “A Century of White Women” where for every year in 1900, he would take a picture from an advertisement of that a year and took out the language that was attached to that. It was striking to see how someone can explore whiteness in art and I thought it was very clear from how he was culturally embedded in the concepts of what whiteness is. He would pull imagery that is a part of our culture and show it as art and what it is. In that series, it taught me a lot about how white women experienced oppression as well as oppressing others, which showed racism and how that developed over time, which I thought was very powerful.

8. Are there any other pieces of work from other artists that inspired you?

• In college, I took a documentary class, and in that class, I was working on this project with this theater I was working with. It was organized by refugees and they wanted to create this play about their stories and their experiences before seeking asylum in this new country, their experience of moving here, and being here in this new country. This showcased different levels of oppression and it inspired me. By the way, these people I was working with were so brave and insisted on being seen, which is challenging for me and other survivors.

9. How do you create artwork without triggering any type of trauma to your young audience?

• I tend to be understanding of others and their concerns. It comes naturally to me to be aware of that and understanding how trauma operates. Even if you have an experience of trauma it's best to know and educate yourself on what it looks like and what it means. I believe in being empathetic and there are ways to without censoring yourself. I think it’s okay to have some triggering warnings and other difficult works that might cause concerns because it gives a consent culture to give them the choice to either engage with it or not and to mentally prepare themselves to engage with it. Typically, people will choose to engage with it if they feel prepared.

10. How are you personally engaging with these people?

• For the YVC program, I started to build upon the program by working from the relationship I already had, schools, and other people in the communities. Before COVID I went around different schools around Baltimore to talk about what this program is and what it is going be like. I really wanted to encourage young people to sign up and the teachers would be supportive of it because they wanted the youth to have this type of resource available to them. It was easy to find that type of engagement with young people. Now that this program exists and we are trying to engage young people, their families, their parents, and the older generation that are more prone to be not accepting of this idea of educating young people about consent. We have tried to find a solution to make it easier.

11. Are you using social media mainly to engage with a younger audience, or is the group using a different method?

• We use social media a lot to engage with young people, especially our Instagram. For Facebook, it's mostly the parents who would use that and find us out through that platform. We also communicate a lot through texting, since young people don’t really like doing phone calls and meetings on Zoom. I appreciate it this way too because most of the time it's easier and it gets to the point straight away.

12. Were there any difficulties in this field? How were you able to overcome it?

• It has been difficult to engage with these two different groups of parents. There are multiple types of parents who are opposed to educating their children what their body parts are and believe it isn’t appropriate. Then there are the progressive family’s parents who say they taught their kids about it and believe their kids should already know about this. We have tried to advertise the program and trying to make it a fun activity to do after school with their parents and building that trust in the community. Because we work with some schools, it helps build extra trust with parents and they perceive it as something that is relevant, let their guard down and engage with it more.

• Working with young people you must be understanding. We brush off a lot of misunderstanding of people’s actions by labeling it as them being kids. But when you talk to them about what is happening in their lives at an equal and respectable level, you’ll be able to narrow it down to a solution and better understand their circumstances.

• The YVC biggest challenge was getting organized in the beginning. And for me was trying to find a balance between being a source of leadership and letting it be a youth-led program. There are times when I would start to feel uncomfortable addressing people who wouldn’t show up or weren't participating. But I was able to overcome this by thinking that this is for their benefit to take part in this program and learn something out of this program. Usually, I can get to a place where we can work it out just by talking about it. A lot of the problems that come up are mostly due to the lack of communication or the lack of understanding one another, and in most cases, those can be easily solved if you have a better understanding of each other.

13. How does the group help empower young people to speak up and express themselves?

• This program is a place for the youth to feel safe and they built this community with one another. They are learning how to build those relationships with consent with one another. They can take that skill and take it out to the rest of the world to teach others. Also, the issues we talk about in the program are the things the youth are learning how to articulate more about and how to talk about it with their peers as well. I really think they are learning how to be advocates and activists in their communities. The youth in this program also learn how to educate parents, learning new ways of interacting with each other, and interacting with different generations.

14. Are there certain activities or opportunities you give them?

• We do these workshops where the youth in the programs educate the parents and their young children about their bodily rights and teach them how to name their body parts, and how to say no to things they are uncomfortable with. We also give the youth the responsibility for the recruitment for these workshops. The graphic designers in the group would be responsible for advertising this program.

15. What was the reason to set the location in Baltimore?

• Young people in Baltimore have a lot to offer and I learned so much from working with these groups of youth. I believe there is a lot of incredible youth activism potential here. The youth here have a lot of experience that points to that direction, which is unfortunate, but I think it stirred a lot of passion in our community to make things better. When we work in Baltimore, we give this opportunity to young people to express that passion that they have developed and build that into something that would create change. They can do that, but just need opportunities and resources to do that.

16. Were there other locations you and the group wanted to branch out to?

• Since we have worked virtually, we have branched out more. Some of the youth in this program aren’t from Baltimore and some families are as well outside of Baltimore. I still think we are a program that is being formed in Baltimore, but it's nice to have different experiences from others to learn from. We have one in Florida, Texas, and even a family that joined from Australia.