Art ain’t innocent. Art is accountable.
Why We’re called Art Ain’t Innocent.
Art Ain’t Innocent emerged from converging conversations regarding art, race, community, funding and the city. In a meeting at Monét Marshall’s home, Saba Taj said something brilliant about artists and arts institutions not taking account for their harm and claiming innocence. Monét responded “Art ain’t innocent”. She started saying it more. Other folks picked it up and it became a line we kept coming back to.
We wanted to remind ourselves that art is powerful. It can be a tool or a weapon and it surely ain’t innocent. Often people try to use art as a sort of least common denominator, something simple and inherently good no matter the context. We don’t believe that art is something that can be separated from context. Art and actions taken in the name of art still need the same equitable considerations of living wage, pay, uplifting disenfranchised people, dismantling white supremacy and other systems of oppression and more. We are still learning to make sure that these words are evident in all we do. Art Ain’t Innocent is both a name and a practice that we embody and engage together.
“In a democratic society art should be the location where everyone can witness the joy, pleasure, and power that emerges when there is freedom of expression, even when a work created evokes pain, outrage, sorrow, or shame.
Art should be, then, a place where boundaries can be transgressed, where visionary insights can be revealed within the context of the everyday, the familiar, the mundane.
Art is and remains such an uninhibited, unrestrained, cultural terrain only if all artists see their work as inherently challenging to of those institutionalized systems of domination (imperialism, racism, sexism, class elitism, etc.) that seek to limit, co-opt, exploit, or shut down possibilities for individual creative self-actualization.
Regardless of subject matter, form, or content, whether art is overtly political or not, artistic work that emerges from an unfettered imagination affirms the primacy of art as that space of cultural production where we can find the deepest, most intimate understanding of what it means to be free.”