I’ve been trying to find the right words. I think they might be “belonging,” purpose,” and “pleasure.” Remember in the first Clinton campaign, when the candidate became famous for a sign that summed up the essence of his message: “It’s the economy, stupid”? I’ve been trying to find a few words that do that for …
A new study correlates racism with reduced creative capacity. Those holding strong prejudices, such as beliefs that inferiority is an essential quality of other races, rely on “rigid, categorical thinking” that “might actually cause people to become unimaginative.” I could have told them that. Back in the 80s, I was involved in a consulting project …
Where have I been, people keep asking. Right here, it turns out, giving birth to two books I’ve been incubating for many months. If you’re on my e-list, you received a notice yesterday that my two new books, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave, have been published. I’m almost …
I’ve been spending long delicious hours in a tiny world, the space bordered on one side by my computer and the other by my chair. I’m doing a last pass through my manuscript, reading aloud as I edit. In a week or two, I will send it to a few lovely people who’ve agreed to …
A quotation from James Baldwin has been making the rounds of some friends on Facebook this week. I like to observe this phenomenon, how a snippet of text gets unmoored from its intended context and eddies through cyberspace, washing up on shores of meaning its author surely never intended. People latch onto scraps of text …
Father’s day on Facebook is filled with sweet smiles and tributes. I am touched by my friends’ photographs and texts, but that’s not what brings tears to my eyes this morning. My father died suddenly just after my tenth birthday. “The last day of my childhood,” I always say, because he was the tenuous tie …
I spoke last night at the Diekeou Collection in Denver, the venue for a talk on cultural policy cosponsored by WESTAF and Arts for Colorado. My subject was “Getting Our Hopes Up: Envisioning Art at The Center,” an exploration of the fear of disappointment and how it has shrunken our vision of art’s public purpose, …
Note to readers: This is the third in a series of blogs I am delighted to be writing for Harmony: The WomenArts Partnership Project. They will appear biweekly on the WomenArts site, and I will also reproduce each one here. What can be accomplished when women artists and activist organizations work together? Most activist groups …
What does it take to dislodge undigested assumptions? I’m thinking of the worlds of education, art, and finance, but I got there via Thanksgiving. There can be a claustrophobic quality to Thanksgiving dinner (apart from being stuck at table with an army of seldom-seen relatives). Often, there are so many dishes that even if you …
The title of this essay is a quote from Lily Tomlin I’ve had for at least a decade: I used it in my email signature for a few months half a dozen years ago, and it seemed true then. But after the utterly cynical way racism and antisemitism have been used this week to market …