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Ricardo Levins Morales
208 Plays4 years ago
Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He uses his art as a form of political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression.
He was born into the anti-colonial movement in his native Puerto Rico and was drawn into activism in Chicago when his family moved there in 1967.
Ricardo left high school early and worked in various industries, and over time began to use his art as part of his movement work. This activism has included support work for the Black Panthers and Young Lords and participating in or acting in solidarity with farmers, environmental, labor, racial justice, antiwar and other struggles for peoples empowerment. He was a founding member of the Northland Poster Collective (1979-2009).
He also leads workshops on creative organizing, social justice strategy and sustainable activism, and mentors and supports organizers. The worker members of RLM Art Studio are represented by the Newspaper and Communications guild/CWA.
Ricardo’s work is widely used by grassroots movements, organizations and communities.
https://www.rlmartstudio.com/
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Ken Delante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer. Awesome. That sounds perfect. Want to rock and roll? Let's do it. All right. Let's rock and roll and a little bit of jazz improv. How's that? Hey. Hey.
00:00:28
Speaker
You know what? I think you captured, I think you captured the show exactly somehow. Yeah, our work here is done. All right.
Introducing Ricardo Levens Morales
00:00:38
Speaker
This is Ken Volante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. And we have artists here, Ricardo Levens Morales, who I've followed his art for for quite some time and really been moved by the work Ricardo does.
00:00:57
Speaker
I'm pleased and honored, Ricardo, to have you on the show. Welcome to Something Rather Than Nothing. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah.
Influence of Environment on Art and Activism
00:01:07
Speaker
As I mentioned, seeing your art, I've been involved in the labor movement. I've worked in the Midwest in Madison, Wisconsin, but I've seen your work everywhere.
00:01:21
Speaker
It's really added a lot to my activism in my life. But I wanted to ask you, Ricardo, going back kind of a seminal question. When you were born, were you an artist then? Well, when I was born, I was a baby. And so I had certainly, I was a bundle of selves with a lot of sort of curiosity about the world.
00:01:51
Speaker
As I developed as a child, like all of us, I learned, one of the things I learned was how to speak, right? And so if you think about all the different ways we communicate by speaking or making marks on things or singing, which is another form of speaking or movement, which translates into dancing, we learn all of these things through imitation. And you don't get tracked when it comes to speech, like whether you're learning sign language or most of us learn
00:02:19
Speaker
you know, audible vocal language, you don't, the adults in your world don't say, oh, well, you're not doing it right, so you're not a speaker, we'll have you do something else. But they do that with the other forms of communication, right? So that it's really a process of narrowing. And I just happen to be one of those lucky children who didn't have adults around to say, no, drawing is not the thing you should be doing.
00:02:47
Speaker
Right? So I continued learning that at the same time that I was learning to speak, you know, in some other forms
Material Constraints and Artistic Style
00:02:54
Speaker
of art I didn't learn. And maybe I had a sibling, you know, my sister who was better at writing. And so she got the strokes for that. And so my parents always provided me with the two basic things that I needed. Well, three really. One was paper.
00:03:13
Speaker
When my father would take a trip to San Juan, if I was running low on paper, he'd bring back a ream of typing paper and pencils. And the last one being encouragement, which was really just letting me do my thing. I wasn't being encouraged in the sense of being pushed. It was just I got to play the way I wanted to play, which was telling stories on paper. I could make my little pirate ships and all these things and just be lost in a world of telling stories to myself. And of course, this is an environment where there was no television.
00:03:44
Speaker
and where we didn't really listen to radio and there was obviously no computers or anything like that. So this was one of the ways in which I was able to take in stories and then create my own. Yeah.
00:03:59
Speaker
I heard there, and you're talking about it, just kind of the different ways which we speak and can develop within art. I know when I talk to artists, there tends to be a tension between defining yourself in the art form or saying, I do this. I know through a lot of your output, accessible printmaking that you do,
00:04:26
Speaker
that helps create awareness around environmental issues, labor issues, things like that. Do you find that as far as what you have wanted to do at art, given your background, not having those limitations, have you felt in general that you've taken that forward and been able to create in the way that you wish to create?
00:04:55
Speaker
Well, I think that I've been freed from some of the kinds of constraints that keep people from creating and also faced others. Certainly being for much of my life in a position where I really needed what I was creating to bring in income means a certain narrowing in order to create things that will sell to certain groups or that will be able to meet a deadline.
00:05:24
Speaker
I started out, my printmaking origins were with woodcut because after we moved to Chicago from Puerto Rico, I could always find scraps of wood. You know, my father might make some shelves for the house and there'd be scraps of wood. And my mother, who had previously done some block printing when she was younger, had the tools to loan me or to let me use. I didn't have ink or rollers, but at least I could carve the wood. Right. And so just using the
00:05:55
Speaker
kinds of materials that I had access to provided me with a way to develop my skills, but also I didn't pursue any art forms that cost money that required access to presses or to expensive paints and solvents. And in fact, my art really still carried the imprint of my early pencil and paper days because my art has kind of a
00:06:24
Speaker
woodcut linoleum block vibe, even though I'm working in clay, I'm working on scratch board. But I think that, so if you took one of my full color posters and made all the color disappear, you'd still be able to get the story of the poster, because my art is still essentially black and white art. It is outlines that I then add the color to, which may or may not have anything to do with the question that I have already forgotten.
00:06:54
Speaker
Let's keep moving. I find that in talking about art, and just talk about two words, art and artist, I find that people's responses to the question of whether they're an artist or not tend to be
00:07:09
Speaker
dominated by the simple conception of what art is. I think a lot of times I mention it to folks, they say, well, I don't paint fine things that show up on a gallery wall. I'm not an artist. I wanted to ask you, Ricardo, as far as you developing as an artist, the big question about what is art?
Art as Communication and Healing
00:07:30
Speaker
What do you think art is fundamentally? It's a form of communication.
00:07:37
Speaker
So if I make a piece of art, I think this is true for all of us. If I make a piece of art, it's created so that somebody will feel something or think something or do something. That's communication. That's the same reason that we speak to each other. Now, it could be directed at myself. It could be to remind myself to feel something.
00:08:04
Speaker
or think something or do something, but that's still a form of communication. So I think in its simplest terms, that's really what it is. Yeah, thank you. I have a question that I want to just to actually get a little bit of the feel for the work you do and the environment that you do it in.
00:08:22
Speaker
I'm kind of outside of the art world and I become recently fascinated kind of in the areas that artists work and produce. I understand work in an art studio and work with others collectively. What is your art studio like and how does it lend to
00:08:46
Speaker
you creating all these things, whether collectively or individually for yourself? Right. Well, first of all, what we call the studio is also essentially a shop. It's a storefront on a street next to a coffee house, which of course is very important to a Puerto Rican. And within it, it's divided up. We have a meeting space.
00:09:13
Speaker
where we can have community meetings as well, a storefront where people can just come in and buy things, areas for making buttons, for doing mail order, for doing bookkeeping. I have my little area. I'm the only person whose art is featured here. This is really a studio built around my art. The collective that I was once part of closed down in 2009, and it was really necessary for me for my own survival just to create something
00:09:42
Speaker
that would do this, although we manage it collectively, it's clearly just my art. And, you know, I come out of an organizing background, out of an activist background. Sometimes I'm creating a lot of art. Sometimes I'm mostly doing other things, speaking or organizing or doing that. And to me, it all comes down to the same root. They're all sort of branches off of the same tree in terms of
00:10:10
Speaker
what I consider to be my mission in life. And, you know, what we have created here is really just accessible to the street when we were looking for a place, and I say we, there's a group of about seven of us here who are working in various amounts of hours, mostly part-time in one way or another, very flexible. But, you know, I was getting invitations to be part of, to move into different buildings, right? You know, there's the Sabathini Center, which is
00:10:40
Speaker
really rooted in the Black community. There's the resource for the Americas building, which has a vibe of sort of Latin American exile community. There's the vine arts building, which is sort of more of the art scene, right? And each of those is like a particular filter.
00:11:00
Speaker
You know, it determines who walks through that door effortlessly and who has to talk themselves into walking through it, right? But I've always found that having a storefront makes you accessible to anybody. Anybody can walk in. And as an artist and a group that really serves a wide variety and diversity of communities, that always felt really important. Yeah.
00:11:26
Speaker
I wanted to ask you, Ricardo, about the role of art and not assume any component of your answer. Because you create the definition of art, what is art, as communication. And I always ask artists connected to the question of what art is. The question is, what is the role of art and what is it supposed to be doing for us as humans?
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, as in so many things, I can answer that for myself. I can't answer it in the name of art or in the name of artists. But I think it's a similar question to what is the role of cooking, right? If you're a cook, if you're a culinary artist, you're making creations that have a component that's flavor.
00:12:25
Speaker
You're dealing also with texture. In some traditions, that's really important. And smell and color and nutrition. And different foods are for different times of day or parts of the meal, right? The sequences to it. So that different cooks might emphasize different aspects of that. But you're not trying to create food that poisons people.
00:12:54
Speaker
You know, and hopefully, you know, maybe it's not all the most nutritious, but at least has some value. So that's how I feel about art. It's there for a purpose. It fits into people's lives. It's meant to be nutritious. It's meant to be healing. And in fact, that's really become the fundamental framework for me of my art, is that for myself, my intention is that my art be medicinal. That there are
00:13:22
Speaker
different ways in which the toxicity of our world, the toxicity of our culture, the toxicity of our economy harms our emotional, cultural, physical, immune and nervous systems. And my art is intended to help the inherent resilience of people to overcome those obstacles.
00:13:44
Speaker
My mantra in general is that soil knows how to heal itself, the body knows how to heal itself, the community knows how to heal itself.
00:13:53
Speaker
And whether we're organizers or healers or farmers, our job is to basically try to shield our community, whatever it is, from those toxins so that those natural processes of healing can come into place. So that even though, through my art, I'm dealing with a lot of issues that have to do with pain and oppression and so forth, I'm not a reporter. I'm not there to say, hey, look how shitty things are. People know that.
00:14:21
Speaker
Whether they're in denial or not, their bodies know that. What they don't know often is that we actually have what it takes to overcome that. We have the capacity to heal. We have the capacity to overcome trauma, which gives us the message always trauma tells me that I'm stuck here. I'll never get out of it. Other people might heal, but I can't.
00:14:45
Speaker
And the one thing I learned, and it took me a long time to realize this, is that a lot of my art is essentially reframing narrative for traumatized people. And I really figured it out in those terms by listening to speeches by Malcolm X. By the time I came from Puerto Rico to the States in 1967, Malcolm wasn't around anymore.
00:15:13
Speaker
I was most influenced by his heirs, groups like Panther Party and other groups that I encountered in Chicago. And so I really didn't have a real sense of his presence until much later when somebody did me the favor of inventing the internet. And then I was able to actually listen and realized that one of the dimensions of Malcolm was as an orator.
00:15:36
Speaker
a very talented, and that was an art form. And he used humor wickedly. Oh my God, he was good. But what I realized in listening to him is that he was doing that same thing. He was essentially, one aspect of his work was as a therapist. He was reframing narratives for traumatized people from the traumatic narrative of you are nothing, you deserve it, it's all your fault, you can't overcome it.
00:16:06
Speaker
to a narrative of you're powerful, you're beautiful, you don't deserve to be treated this way, you have a right to be fully human, and if that means defending yourself, then so be it. And the Earth is still shaking from that.
Influence of Malcolm X and Activism
00:16:20
Speaker
You feel the Earth's tremors, some of that are still from
00:16:26
Speaker
the supernova that was Malcolm. But that's kind of the role, and it's not always on such an explosive basis. Sometimes it's just vibrations through the bedrock, but that I see is my role, which means that when I'm working with a community, when I'm working with a union, when I'm working with an organization, when I'm working with individuals, part of my role is to listen for the diagnostic question.
00:16:52
Speaker
which is what is it that's keeping this person, these people, this organization, this community, this nation from understanding its own power? Yeah, I appreciate your mention of Malcolm X and the vibrancy and the echoes of that. I have viewed Malcolm for me as the courage to pursue
00:17:21
Speaker
intellectually to discard old beliefs, to discard old systems, and to move forward and understand the world and try to build up more humanity. That power for me, like the film Malcolm X was seminal in my experience, listening to Public Enemy
00:17:40
Speaker
and hearing Malcolm X through that medium has been deeply, deeply important to me. I wanted to ask you in the sense of what art does in connected to the labor movement, I wanted to ask you,
00:18:00
Speaker
So I've been working in labor for 21 years and I was in Madison with Scott Walker in 2011, Madison teachers who I worked for at the time. And as a movement, as the movement that I've been employed in, it's a unique history.
00:18:23
Speaker
and read a certain way, it's pretty Don Dower in declining. Now, I want to say to you, Ricardo, that when I've seen, you're just talking about like labor art and the color and the vibrancy and you connecting labor to environmentalism, we've never met, I've seen those type of things and there's been some, I don't know, some soul or some energy that comes through that that is kept
00:18:50
Speaker
That, in reading the powerful stories of labor, that kept me going. But with, say, the labor movement, or say even if you used environmental concerns, which you bring about in your art, it's tough times. What does, do you think art has just that continued role, the way that you describe it, to kind of energize me, energize you, energize people who are concerned
00:19:19
Speaker
in tough times? Well, yes. I mean, I think if we go back to the medicinal aspect of art, if we look at the ways in which people are harmful to each other, it really is propelled by a belief in scarcity. There isn't going to be enough. The brilliance of capitalism is
00:19:49
Speaker
that it can generate unimaginable surpluses while imposing a narrative of scarcity so that we're all scrambling at each other and are hyper-vigilant and are defensive, right? And that really is based on lies. You know, that scrambling ruthlessly is the only way to get things, right? And what I find, especially in studying nature, is that if you
00:20:18
Speaker
approach life from a perspective of abundance, you can find solutions even if there really is scarcity. You can find ways to share what little there is and not leave people behind so that the antidote to lies is truth, right? The antidote to toxins is nutrients to support the immune system so that in the hard times, these things become more important than ever.
00:20:46
Speaker
And that's also why we who live through these hard times need to be very grounded ourselves in our understandings of history and life and truth and lies. Because too often we just think in the short term and we adapt to whatever the climate happens to be. Because you figure, well, if I'm going to survive in a toxic environment, I need to learn how to
00:21:15
Speaker
survive on toxins. Yeah, you know, and you know, crap in crap out, right? Yeah. And for me, the way I think what has grounded me is the fact that I grew up in the forest, that I grew up in my playground was a natural ecosystem. And that teaches about cycles and flows. And
00:21:43
Speaker
abundance and replenishment and depletion and time lags, right?
00:21:52
Speaker
You can't hurry an egg when a bird lays an egg. There's no fast forward button. There's no pause button to get to the good part, right? To cut to the chase. So that means that when I came to this country, it was in a time of mass movements, right? Immigration, adolescence, and revolution all at once, right? Perfect storm for a growing kid.
Art, Truth, and Social Movements
00:22:16
Speaker
But that meant I was prepared when those movements evaporated.
00:22:21
Speaker
when they were either crushed or bribed or replaced into submission, it did not create an existential crisis for me. It was like, oh, OK, now I came here in a period when the tide was in. Now the tide has gone out. So what do I need to do? What are the tasks that I need to do in order to be prepared for the next time the tide comes in? Yeah.
00:22:44
Speaker
how do we prepare it so that when the tide comes in, the stories have been maintained, the history is still there, the lessons have not been lost so that we can make the most advantage of the tide as possible. And now we're in a time of mass movements. And part of what I'm considering is what are the stories that we need so that when the tide goes out again, for one thing, it won't go as far out because with climate change and such, we can't afford to have long periods between the tides.
00:23:14
Speaker
but also so that we get to keep enough of as many people as possible who just have been mobilized and that their shifts of consciousness are profound enough that they'll be with us through the dark time, through the time when the tide is out, hopefully for a short period, and the next tide will come in and rise even higher.
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate your explanation too, because I think that's always a really tough task for people to understand who are interested in history and development of things repeating themselves or like a linear type of development and just thinking about what you can do, you know, what you can do, you know, at that time. And the thing about history is that it moves in a spiral, not in a circle.
00:24:04
Speaker
So whenever we come around to the same point, right, to the north side of the circle, we're still always in a different place. Yeah. Right. And how do we make advantage of that and push that on so that at each point in the cycle, it can be at any ecology. You have this, too. You can have a downward spiral in an ecosystem where it becomes more barren, where the soil is washed away, where gullies develop, where no nutrients are retained and fewer and fewer life form can exist. And you can reverse that.
00:24:31
Speaker
And there's strategies to reverse a downward spiral in an ecological field or a stream so that you begin the reverse process. And that's really what our struggle is, is how do we create an upward spiral toward liberation? Because when you do that, things become easier and easier. It's like having the wind at your back as opposed to in your face.
00:24:52
Speaker
It's an extremely powerful idea. And I've talked to guests at times as I've done the podcast where I started out. It was never just intended to be conceptual about art. It was supposed to be about life. But I think when you mentioned philosophy and art to folks, it could easily move towards
00:25:12
Speaker
you know, being esoteric or a conceptual type of discussion. But I think with the way you describe it around creativity, medicine, philosophy as therapy, art as there's this healing component. And I wasn't able to learn that until I started doing the podcast and talking to a very diverse group of folks and hearing from Indigenous communities as running is medicine and creating things are medicine.
00:25:41
Speaker
It was very powerful, particularly if the mind's caught up in a negative track of, I don't know, commercialism or objects and that type of thing. So the power of your ideas is very helpful as medicine in and of itself. Ricardo, I wanted to ask, related to the question, you know, when you're an artist, where you're born, but to take into account
00:26:07
Speaker
people or things that have impacted you. And the question is this, who or what made you who you are? Well, the phrase it takes a village comes to mind. But really, it takes a whole ecosystem. So one of my most profound teacher I've already mentioned, and that's the forest.
00:26:33
Speaker
where I grew up, you know, all the water we got came from the sky, right? And we collected it on the roof and sort of being in touch with those kinds of things. And it took me a long time to realize that that actually underlies my understandings of how you organize for change, is based on those kinds of cycles and rhythms and patterns. Definitely my parents who were involved, they were activists long before I was born, and they were involved in the Puerto Rican independence movement.
00:27:02
Speaker
had this sense that change comes, even if we won't live to see it, we can still contribute to it and that that matters, right? So that in some ways, that's one of the reasons I think I was spared a lot of the things that triggered despair in people, that I'm able to, and I guess one of the ways in which I like to talk about that is that I think I was,
00:27:31
Speaker
have the good fortune to have developed, to some degree, a healthy policy on disappointment. And I think that the real key, I think for all of us to ask ourselves, what is your policy on disappointment? And around what things, like if you're involved in social change, for example.
00:27:52
Speaker
And there's a setback. And you're disappointed. People you had faith in turned out to be assholes, right? Or what you hoped would be bringing immediate change turned out not to. Is your policy that you will, is it a cynical policy? Which is to say, oh, dang, I knew nothing worked anyway. So I'm going to go back and, you know, sit margaritas on the beach, right, in Margaritaville.
00:28:22
Speaker
Because, oh, I need to learn what is wrong here. What went wrong? What went right? Where is the resilience in this picture? What do we need to support to move forward? Yeah, and there's a part there I think I hear in what you're saying that I think is a dynamic to handle in any movement.
00:28:46
Speaker
is like the knee-jerk reaction, right? Well, we filed the grievance, management sucks, it didn't work out, the union didn't advocate, therefore I don't give a shit about the union anymore. There's this kind of like service-minded, whether it's labor or anything like that, I think your question
00:29:03
Speaker
is a great one. How do you handle when things have gone wrong? What is your policy on, I believe you said, disappointment or frustration? I think without one, I think the reaction is kind of abandoned or not have a connection to what it is that you're up to.
00:29:23
Speaker
I love that question. Yeah. We're going to interject there. The way that first sort of formulated itself in my mind was when I was asked to participate in a workshop organized by inmates in one of the state prisons here who were working with a community organization. And the people participating, a lot of them were, this was a men's prison, where there were a fair amount, a large number of people who were looking at being released in the fairly
00:29:52
Speaker
near future right within perhaps within a month a few months or a year or something like that and that's the question that I explored with them it's like what does it mean if you've been thinking about nothing for the last eight years or 10 years or 15 years and getting out to get out and then and discover that the people who you were counting on to hold you are expecting you to hold that or that
00:30:21
Speaker
doors are slammed in your face because now you have a felony record. Or that things have changed enough that you just don't know how to navigate that. And it's just, it's disappointing. Right? So it's like the waves that you have to get through. If you're leaving the beach and want to get out to the calmer water, you have to get make it your way through the surf. And a lot of people go through that when they first enter prison.
00:30:46
Speaker
all this storm of emotions, right? That you need to get through. And if you think about being released in a similar way, it's okay. When you know that, then you can have your eyes on that calmer water on the other side. And then whatever is buffeting you doesn't feel so overwhelming because you have a narrative for it. You have an understanding of it. It's not just being experienced. Yeah. I, um,
00:31:14
Speaker
I really appreciate it. And it just places, for me, I've been following a project in, and there are different ones around, but in Australia about indigenous individuals in prison and their creative, the creative work of thinking about wherever any human being is positioned, they're gonna still have the same needs from art or expression.
00:31:41
Speaker
And, um, it's so vibrant and I think, uh, I appreciate you mentioning that and opening up the space because there's just not a lot of space once people have been termed criminal or criminality. And, um, by mentioning that, I really appreciate you, uh, opening up that, that space. I got a big question. I got a big question. It's the titular question of the show. Uh, Ricardo, why is there something rather than nothing?
Existential Inquiry: Why Something Rather Than Nothing?
00:32:08
Speaker
Dang to find out. Yeah.
00:32:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think the answer, when we make it more specific about any one thing, then the answer is because something happened, right? In fact, something is still happening in verb-based languages, like a lot of indigenous languages. And interestingly enough, in Marxist dialectics as well, objects are simply a snapshot of processes.
00:32:38
Speaker
Right. In the Ojibwe language, the word chair has contained within it a time before it was a chair and a time after it will no longer be a chair and a bunch of other tenses that I don't even understand in between. So that objects are in motion all the time, becoming something else, which we don't have in noun-based languages.
00:32:59
Speaker
where things are simply set. So why is there something other than nothing? I don't know if there is. There are processes, certainly, and they're there because they happened and they grew from something. And I think it's one of those healthy questions that always remains a question. Because there's no answer.
00:33:30
Speaker
Ricardo, I wanted to ask you, and I mentioned this in the sense that
Accessing Ricardo’s Art
00:33:38
Speaker
your work has adorned union halls where I've worked and in the Midwest and out here on the West Coast. I've mentioned to you how important it is, the color, the message, the vibrancy to have the art about something that's so important to me that I put my life towards it. I really appreciate that. I'd like listeners to be able to connect with what you do. Can you mention,
00:34:06
Speaker
where to find you, where to find the art, where to access it, either physically in person or online? Well, physically in person, certainly anybody who comes near the point on the globe known as Minneapolis can stop in our shop once we're open again to the public, depending on the vagaries of pandemics.
00:34:36
Speaker
Our hope is to be open in September. I do go to conventions sometimes, union conventions, or we do. I'm not the only one who can do that. It's most easily accessible for people who are far-flung by ordering online. The website is rlmartstudio.com. And I think our Instagram is something like,
00:35:02
Speaker
RLM Art Studio or Ricardo Levins Morales or something like that. I have far more savvy minds in the shop who generally handle the Instagram available under the studio name on Facebook. So yeah, you can find us. We're around. Yeah.
00:35:24
Speaker
and thank you for being around. And I tell you Ricardo, I've learned a lot from you and there's a certain self-serving part of this I could see within the questions about the labor movement, working for justice, the medicine that's there and the fuel that's there. I didn't know that I was striving for it.
00:35:49
Speaker
But I have been striving for it. And part of it is are these conversations where I can understand how we can connect with each other, you know, how where the hope is. And so I want to tell you how important it is to me. And the popular aspect of what you do, I think, helps others experience that. So I just wanted to let you know that absolutely directly into
00:36:15
Speaker
for you to understand that it's a deep honor to have your answers to these questions and to come onto the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure to meet you. Well, I certainly appreciate that. And really, conversations, connections, having coffee with people is in some ways one of the most important parts of the work that I do. And being visible as an artist, it's like putting out a flower is to attract the hummingbirds, right?
00:36:43
Speaker
And you can have those more intimate conversations. But I also wanted to mention for your listeners, because there's a lot of mysticism around what it means to be an artist and how you become one.
Encouragement for Aspiring Artists
00:36:54
Speaker
And I just want to say that after moving to Chicago, I dropped out of high school, never went back, didn't know that there was such a thing as the so-called art world. Recently coming up through the grassroots, now I get invited
00:37:13
Speaker
to apply for things or to be in galleries or whatever, but that wasn't my universe. I grew up doing art in graffiti, cartoon conversations on factory walls, right? And in those kinds of community venues and doing wedding invitations for people. So I just want to say that as sort of a form of encouragement that there's no particular route, there's no particular qualifications
00:37:40
Speaker
In my entire life, nobody has ever asked me for credentials. One of the few things, you know, of course, as an artist, I can always design and print a college diploma if I wanted to. But people just want to know, what can you do? Do you have medicine for me?
00:38:03
Speaker
Yeah. And I, I, I thank you for saying that because even from, you know, for me and I, many, many folks I talk to, it does seem to be something otherworldly about it. It does seem something, you know, that you have to have a few things dotted and I think.
00:38:19
Speaker
your invitation as far as creatives to say, hey, it's in the action, it's in the doing. And that's particularly inspiring. And part of this podcast has been philosophy for the masses. I think little kids ask questions of like, why is that? And I think it's kind of crushed out of them or their artistic creativity.
00:38:46
Speaker
I want to draw it this way. And that's kind of not the right way. So I think conversations, as you mentioned, can kind of open up the idea of possibility and allow access. And the proof is what you're able to do or say. One of the things that disillusioned me with school and that helped contribute to me ultimately dropping out was the only art class I ever remember taking.
00:39:10
Speaker
It was a class in which the teacher would pick the drawing that one kid did and hold it up and tell the class, this is the way you're supposed to do it. As someone who would always love to draw, my picture was often the one that was held up. But intuitively and viscerally, that just felt so wrong. That's not what this should be about. And also, I mean, when you were talking, what it made me think about was that art is really
00:39:40
Speaker
I guess what I would say is that the way we figure out how to do art is to listen for the heartbeat, like the heartbeat, that our bodies operate on the basis of circadian rhythms, cycles, some of which take a fraction of a second, some of which happen on hourly cycles. There are different kinds of times of day when we absorb different kinds of nutrients and use them differently.
00:40:08
Speaker
There's the day and night cycle, there are lunar cycles, there are annual cycles, and art, music, dance are, I think, all ways of stating and therefore being able to be more aligned with the rhythms of the natural world. And that in fact, when I look at the histories that I have immersed myself in to try to understand how we change things, that when our movements fail, it's because we have
00:40:36
Speaker
lost track of or are not really aligned with these natural rhythms. What are the rhythms of healing? Why is it that movements that are victorious sometimes replicate the oppressions that they are meant to overcome?
00:40:53
Speaker
And I think that's where the hope is, that the more we can delve into, understand, decipher, and collectively get a grip on what these cycles, rhythms, nature is, what nature is demanding of us, the more we can effectively organize, the more we can be an effective union local, and the more we can work for deeper, more long-term transformational change. Yeah.
00:41:21
Speaker
And thank you. One of the things that I thought as far as, you know, working with my locals is to develop a zine, just a different way of presenting information to members because I know
00:41:38
Speaker
the grievance form is enough to make you go to sleep or stick your head in the sand. But, you know, a depiction of maybe the work that you do in the school to try to teach a student might be inspiring to you and, you know, just kind of ways of presenting
00:41:54
Speaker
maybe connecting to that RP or connecting to like what people want to come in contact with. That's maybe less mundane or inspiring, so. Yeah, no, it's like for decades at union conventions, I've often taught workshops on creative organizing. And it breaks my heart that there even needs to be such a phrase. You know, it's like health food, right? Or affordable housing. Yeah.
00:42:24
Speaker
right consensual sex right um you know living wage i mean my goal is to make all of these terms obsolete yeah all right they speak truth so we need to use them but to make them unnecessary right why should you have to specify a particular form of organizing that's creative that speaks to people deeply that awakens their passions and sets them on fire right it's because we've come to accept these
00:42:52
Speaker
strange ideas that the way to reach people is by deadening their imaginations. Yeah. Yeah. It's tap into the medicine, tap into the creativity and Ricardo Levens Morales, again, a deep pleasure connecting with you, learning from you and your art
00:43:21
Speaker
does a lot of work for the people. Thank you again. I look forward to all the things you create and I encourage all listeners to
00:43:32
Speaker
to connect to the medicine, to connect to this, you know, which, as you said, heartbeat, I never thought about it in natural rhythms, but a profound idea and very helpful for me. So there's some medicine for me, right? Thank you. And thank you to all of the people out there who I cannot see or hear, but who I know will be listening to this conversation at some point. And I thank all of you.
00:44:01
Speaker
for bringing your own heartbeats to the jam session and for all that you are doing in order to support our collective resilience. Thank you, brother. In solidarity with Ricardo Levens Morales. Hope to talk to you again soon, brother. Okay, be well. You too. This is something rather than nothing.