“For All Without Distinction”: Creative Activity as a Human Right

The world is alive with creative activity. Its creative pulse can be felt reverberating in the mark-making of children and teens who enter art classrooms each day. It is embodied in the mix of families and friends who move through art museums on the weekends. It populates informal places like our community markets, Instagram, do it yourself (DIY) meet-ups, and city sidewalks and subways. Creative activity is vast and in constant motion. It grows out of technological innovation, economic exchange, planetary migration, cross-cultural contact, and political struggle. It can be easy to forget that the behaviors, ideas, and things we think of as creative are products of social dynamics and interaction that, for some people, appear to be outside the scope of our immediate concerns as art educators. Perhaps this is because in the United States it is customary to think of creativity as an inside phenomenon—deriving from the internal cognitive functions and personality of the individual.

An increasing body of creativity research challenges this individual orientation (Clapp, 2017). It presents a growing consensus that creativity in the arts, design, and other cultural domains is a social achievement, not an individual, solitary phenomenon. Some liken it to an event or moment when forces in the creative ecosystem—such as technological innovation, economic exchange, planetary migration, cross-cultural contact, and political struggle—coalesce in such a way as to make an idea, object, or performance recognizable as an innovation (Becker, 1982; Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). We might think of individual creative acts as potential provocations in this creative ecosystem:

In their expression of values, artmaking, design products, and other provocative cultural ideas and artifacts create cultural inheritances… which can lead to a sudden cascade of other adapted, mimicking behaviors in others—the fad, the trend, the meme, the “viral” contagion across social networks, the intellectual movement, the cultural revolution. (Rolling, 2013, pp. 11–12)

In a creative ecosystem, creative agency exists everywhere all the time in the form of potential provocations. It is a latent capacity to imagine, invent, improvise, and adapt beyond the seeming limitations of one's present circumstances (Rolling, 2011). Art educators are trained to observe this potential in even the youngest pupils (Bentley, 2013). But the potential of artmaking ripples out far beyond the individual. This is not to say that personal intent and meaning in a creative act is unimportant. Rather, such acts “primarily serve to perpetuate our larger life-sustaining sociocultural patterns” (Rolling, 2013, p. 12). And yet much artistic and creative labor passes without notice. One reason this happens in art education is the unevenness of opportunities for participation as well as the availability of appropriate material and cultural resources (Kraehe, Acuff, & Travis, 2016). Indeed, art, like any ecosystem, is not inherently democratic or just. Although it is common to hear creativity discussed as a societal good, there are numerous historical examples and recent events to remind us that there are times when creativity has a dark side, generating propaganda films and other incitements to violence, hatred, and fear. In other words, every creative act is not intrinsically positive or life-affirming (Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman, & Runco, 2010).

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Art, design, and museum educators are among the most vociferous supporters of creativity. Much of our time we spend thinking about and practicing ways to inspire and nurture creative potential. This was on full display recently at the 2017 NAEA National Convention in New York. In the conference meeting rooms and off-site museums, educators gave presentations and workshops that stimulated discussion about lesson ideas, artmaking techniques, and teaching strategies for creative development throughout the lifespan. As always, I was attracted to the exhibition hall with its offerings of supplies, posters, artful objects, and books from vendors specializing in the visual arts and design.

In 1950, on the second anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, students at the United Nations International Nursery School in New York viewed a poster of the historic document. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a global response to government sanctioned persecution and holocaust of citizens during World War II. Photo credit: UN Photo.

After a full day at the Convention, I met up with a friend just outside the convention enclosure. We hopped into a cab for a quick ride through the city to the next event. She turned toward me and asked, What are we doing here? I glanced at her to get a better reading of what she meant. As I started to pull out my itinerary, she continued, I am an art educator. I look at what's happening to my students and I just keep asking myself, what are we doing? I saw the worry in her body language and the furrow in her brow. They conveyed something real and urgent about the current conditions of injustice in her students' lives. Because she would face these students in the art classroom the next day, her question was immediate and practical. Yet it was also an invitation to a more sustained philosophical dialogue about justice in and through art education. In response to my friend's question, I diverted my eyes. I did not have a ready reply. Look at what's happening… what are we doing? is an incitement to seek out, engage with, and recognize those on the other side of the metaphorical window. It is a call to better articulate how art, design, and museum education benefit not just the cognitive development and self-esteem of individuals but also the wellbeing of whole communities. It is a call to acknowledge the social reach and response-ability of artmaking.

The long arc of social justice struggles in the United States—from public town hall meetings in support of abolition and women's suffrage to the public bridges in Selma, Alabama in 1965 to the public restrooms in schools today—demonstrates that equality, dignity, and humanity itself are not readily given. Instead, these social achievements are hard-won through creative action, activism, and advocacy. In post-Apartheid South Africa, truth-telling and truth-seeking were crucial in throwing back the curtains so that all would look and see with clear vision the infliction of suffering. The result was a new constitution and civil rights for all citizens in South Africa as well as a process of reconciliation aimed at restoring justice.

But what about those who do not have standing as citizens, those without access to the rights and protections of full membership in a civil society? The Oxford Dictionary (2017) defines civil society as a “community of citizens linked by common interests and collective activity.” Civil rights are a fundamental component of justice in many democratic societies, the United States included. Laudable though they may be, civil rights are conferred based on national status or group membership. They are based on notions of belonging versus not belonging, the division of us over them (Benhabib, 2004). This means that individuals whose identities are marked as foreign and whose personal expressions are thereby delegitimated remain vulnerable to dehumanization, restricted in their creative activity, and excluded from participation in the making of culture and a just society.

Creative activity is a human right. It opens up alternate possibilities for thinking, feeling, and doing. In this July 2017 special theme issue of Art Education, 14 short-form articles and an Instructional Resource explore this topic. F. Robert Sabol examines art education against the backdrop of the U.S. Constitution and the right of freedom of speech accorded to all the nation's citizens. Also focused on speech, Jaehan Bae shows that art is always in dialogue with society, never a true monologue. As a curriculum metaphor, he discusses how the Korean activist artist Sung-dam Hong's artwork talks back to the U.S. and Korean governments. In Chicago, Ciampaglia and Kerry Richardson of the Plug-In Studio, a new media art collective, work alongside youth in the development of culturally relevant and socially responsive art video games. Placed out in public as a Street Arcade, the games serve as an interactive platform for naming injustice. They provide African American teens access to art and technology and the wider community a new method for critical dialogue. Finnish art educator Juuso Tervo seeks an alternative discourse that can speak beyond human rights, one that opens up the arts to an ethics of life that does not naturalize the concept of the “proper” human and reduce learning to the linear development of a human kind.

Creative activity is a human right. It opens up alternate possibilities for thinking, feeling, and doing.

But what about those who do not have standing as citizens, those without access to the rights and protections of full membership in a civil society?

Creative activity provides the collective and cultural fuel necessary for human survival, solidarity, and freedom. In the wake of the violence at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Sara Scott Shields examines the responsibility to respond creatively with a social justice pedagogy based on connection, concepts, and conversation. Stephanie A. Baer describes the next generation of art teachers who are continuing the tradition of advocating for creative activity as a human right, giving voice to their own experiences and stories. Vanessa López, Adriane Pereira, and Shyla S. Rao discuss their development of a new Pedagogy for Change framework inspired as a social response alongside protests and community actions in Baltimore, Maryland, following a police-involved shooting death. Joni Boyd Acuff, Sunny Spillane, and Courtnie N. Wolfgang explore how organizations like NAEA might best respond following horrific events such as those in Orlando and Baltimore. They encourage creative action from NAEA, but also reflection from its members.

Creative activity is also a global human right, “for all without distinction” (U.N. Charter, art. 1, para. 3). Angela M. LaPorte and Susan Whiteland illustrate inclusive creative activity as a human right through participatory methods of collaborative planning and creative production with differently-abled adults and preservice art teachers. Social justice for people with disabilities in Russia is aided by the creative agency of art educators, artists, and curators whose efforts Mira Kallio-Tavin describes as quiet and persistent resistance against the state. Susannah L. Brown and Rina Bousalis explore the right to overcome obstacles through the creative formation of ideas and processing of experience in the lives of Hmong refugee students.

Outside the classroom, Cindy Maguire describes partnering with a refugee camp in Algeria to produce an international social justice arts and human rights festival featuring socially engaged artworks. Ross H. Schlemmer, B. Stephen Carpenter, II, and Erika Hitchcock vividly depict Collaborative Creative Resistance, an artistic and pedagogic response to the global water crisis that involved young people in collaborative social action through artmaking. Adetty Pérez de Miles and Scott Peck explore the potential of art exhibitions to perform as human rights art curriculum, using the series of artworks entitled Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females by Linda Stein. Finally, Connie Stewart and Wendi K. Oster demonstrate art as social practice in an Instructional Resource featuring the stories of work and labor justice told by local community members and represented in the artworks of Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Jeremy Deller, Adrian Piper, and Theaster Gates. The authors who have contributed their voices to this issue offer various starting points from which to enter into dialogue, expanding both the meaning of social justice and human rights and its practical applications through creative activity.

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Notes on contributors

Amelia M. Kraehe

Amelia M. Kraehe is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art Education and Art History at the University of North Texas in Denton. E-mail: [email protected]