ART HOUSE & FIELD FINDINGS
In addition to teaching and writing, both prose and sociocultural academic writing, I am also committed to promoting art through products and programs, including providing community power-point presentations addressing youth potential, resilience and risk. In addition to the actual arts and crafts, which some years is displayed amidst cafes and restaurants, objects on display include handmade sterling silver jewelry, paintings and prints all of which are promoted through various urban exhibits, galleries, fairs, and festivals.
Examples of paintings and prints of the work are below:
Graphic diagrams detailing social, political and economic paradigmatic structures in inner-city neighborhoods. In addition, findings will be put forth regarding specific conditions unique to the current period including resource scarcity and opportunity stratification - both considered in relation to disadvantaged youth (other examples of Art House for Social Change seen in writing works, including: Poverty the Hard Sell: Navigating Welfare and the People Who Need It.
An Excerpt from Critical Answers from Those with Their Hands Raised
"The experts said the poor are apathetic, inarticulate, incapable of formulating demands, assisting and diagnosing their own needs. They were wrong. The poor are only waiting for the opportunity to be heard on a subject only they understand."
- Sargent Shriver, director of Office of Economic Opportunity reporting to Congress, 1966
- Community Theater Night, West Oakland, CA 2011
There is a greater need to be cautious when working with those youth groups continually accused when not assumed to be at fault through the underlying social narrative. Yet, their own view is far less considered, rarely found in the universal tone still with its limited understanding of disbelief, suspicion and disillusionment. In their eyes, listening to the authority telling them the way it is, they’re thinking, “Yeh? What I know is that You don’t know ‘til you go – And I know you haven't gone at least not yet.” Still, they’re trying to listen out of a kind of respect; they are continually encouraged to listen to authority despite how authorities of every color always talk in terms of the absolute answer. In their mind, the devilish details make the incidents that they are familiar with far more complicated than the "black-white" reading. For some, the very contradiction forces them to look if not hunger for a way out. It grinds into the social an ecology of frustration and division.
Still, they listen as a kind of courtesy for their elders. Meanwhile, anger manifests for increasing numbers marking social conversation with a certain intensity and conviction. Here in this drifting milieu, drugs promise to find them as they are far more easily gained than the opportunity of on-the-job training tied to a larger employment pipeline. The high is far more easily obtained than the time needed to transition out of the area to save a life, even their own. An old insight on their part, they accept the way it is to justify shooting up and getting high.
When the drugs dissolve into the mixture of division, frustration, a sense of confusion, blame mixed with innocence, weak service systems - anger trumps. Increasing numbers succumb. They “get high on their own supply” undoing the market wisdom that was their earlier guide. At this point, the playing field changes: the wrong become right to some extent. The ones who listened as a matter of respect could not give a damn; dropouts rise; their own "black-white" solutions gain ground while the larger window of socio-historical example closes. Once a completely separate reality than the social world they kicked aside, and yet more than ever they resemble its polarized structures, its weak emaciated socio-communal core, its drift. They no longer listen from their station in a platform of extremes convinced that those who oppose “ain’t got no opinion.” They now manifest their own rotten hierarchies of power believing themselves having arrived all the while knowing “they ain’t got no future,” that only “prison, dying, or acting the snitch” can find them as any kind of end or answer. A society of polarized emotions and unproductive extremes where innocents die and homicide survives, the country, like its people, are fast at work undoing its means disinterested in the unbound potential of a people living exuberance as historically followed being assured of inclusion plus the possibility of an "in."
PAINTINGS FROM ART HOUSE TO FOLLOW:
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