Strategies for Success
Developing a Logic Model for Social Justice Art Projects for Social Work Practice: Interviews with Artivists View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Meri Stiles
Social work community-level efforts can benefit from art-based approaches. Art can facilitate creative engagement with social issues and stimulate new insights and knowledge of participatory processes. This is meaningful for environmental justice because it gives people a sense of being supported in their efforts to make changes. This qualitative study explores the motivations, expectations of impact, and experiences of socially engaged artists. Gaining a deeper understanding of the factors that motivate and support socially engaged artists in promoting social change through their art is helpful for developing artivism logic models for social work practice. Methods: This study utilized a qualitative phenomenological research design to explore the experiences of socially engaged artists. Participants were selected using snowball sampling and included 10 socially engaged artists. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis in ATLAS.ti. The findings reveal that socially engaged artists have a strong sense of place and belonging to the communities they work with. Artists described feeling a sense of connection to something larger than themselves and identified a range of impacts resulting from their work, including raising awareness of social issues including environmental justice, creating community engagement and dialogue, and effecting positive change. The findings of this study suggest that socially engaged artists can provide insights into the potential outcomes and impact of artivism projects focused on environmental justice. This has implications for social workers collaborating with socially engaged artists and begins to inform the development of logic models for artivism projects.
Fruitful Failure: Teaching Creative Process Through Disappointment View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amy Williams
The process of ideation for 3D art forms can be a particularly intimidating task for students new to studio art — their first impulse is often to mitigate a fear of failure by closely adapting ideas from another source outside themselves. In Williams’ small liberal arts college context, she primarily teaches non-major students in her beginning ceramics courses where she often hears the phrase, “I found this idea on Pinterest…” Within the field of ceramics, failure is a common part of the creative process (even for lifelong professional ceramicists) as things like unintentional cracks, uneven walls, and slumping forms often occur. Williams’ paper explores a pedagogical framework that approaches students’ struggle with ideation through addressing fears of failure. Utilizing a variety of voices familiar with the creative process (i.e. Ira Glass, Anne Lamott, Linda Lopez), celebration of failed attempts, and personal narratives of disaster in the studio, Williams seeks to reframe failure as an integral and rich component of ideation. When experiences of collapsed forms and cracked pieces may seem like wasted time and energy to students, naming these experiences as fruitful and necessary parts of the process allows them to pursue ideation with greater freedom and therefore greater success.
Disability Isn't the Tragic Flaw: Teatro La Plaza's Hamlet View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jason Dorwart
Hong Kong’s No Limits Arts Festival, a disability-inclusive art platform, features performances, films, dance pieces, and art installations by and about disabled artists. The 2024 edition featured a Spanish-language production called Hamlet by Teatro La Plaza performed by actors with disabilities hailing from Lima, Peru. The devised piece is a fresh and powerful take on Shakespeare’s timeless play, enriched by the unique perspectives of actors with Down Syndrome. The play rejects the common notion that life with disability is inherently tragic. By using the tragic form itself and reinterpreting the role of the chorus in the performance of tragedy, this production refocus the audience’s gaze back upon itself. Drawing loosely from Shakespeare’s original text, Hamlet by Teatro La Plaza delves into the existential question and the role of tragedy in shaping who is or is not marginalized. Historically, disability, both mental and physical, has marginalized many, hiding them away. The actors here give candid performances and share personal stories that challenge audiences to reflect on societal taboos and the question, “How can disabled people exist in a world that excludes them?” In this play, the audience — rather than the performers — becomes the scapegoat at the center of the tragedy. Yet the play never becomes accusatory and instead ends in uplifting fashion in order to unify and commemorate the existence of all, regardless of (dis)ability. By reinterpreting the performance of tragedy, the play posits Down syndrome as a celebration rather than as a sacrifice.
Inhabitance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tacie Jones
While the concepts and imagery presented in Inhabitance are not necessarily autobiographical, there is no way to fully detach lived experience from the process of making and theorizing this work. And although its impetus is a lifelong journey of healing, the focus in this study is transforming the inhabitance of trauma into an awareness of embodied presence. From a space of reflexivity, Inhabitance asks you to come back to your body through heart-minded creative action. This practice-based interdisciplinary methodology integrates the emancipatory powers of women and gender studies, consciousness studies and new media art. Through this hybrid approach, Inhabitance creates space for reconciling an imposed fracture between the sensory and cognitive aspects of our lives to rewrite the restrictive narrative that trauma can hold over both.
