Leading voices in the arts from around the world convened in Los Angeles recently to take part in “Arts in Times of Crises,” a two-day conference on the role of artists in weakened democracies put on by the Villa Aurora Thomas Mann House (VATMH).

Zócalo was one of the co-hosts, alongside REDCAT and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and as part of the conference presented two public panels. Both explored how, in polarized times, artists and civic leaders can bridge divides and tap into our shared humanity—but only if they’re able to ask questions and stage their work without censure from narrow discourse or institutional might.

Social practice artist Suzanne Lacy and photographer Catherine Opie took part in the first panel, which asked, “Must Artists Be Activists?” Karen Mack, founder and executive director of LA Commons, moderated.

To get things started, Lacy read aloud the definition of activism—”a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action, especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.” She called attention to buzzwords that jumped out to her: “direct,” “opposition,” and “one side.”

“I’ve done some of that work,” Lacy said, “but I’m much more interested in educational strategies and in coming together and working out difference.” She shared that she sees a clear delineation between activist work she takes on “as a citizen” and work she does “as an artist” where she is, above all, trying to “make meaning, understand, and ask questions.”

Opie offered a similar sentiment: “At times when I don’t have a camera on me, and I’m at a march, there is a moment that maybe I’m an activist,” she said. “But whenever I have a camera on me, I’m no longer that same kind of activist because I’m bearing witness, and I’m really looking at the world from my own questions that I’m trying to answer.”

During the conversation, Mack asked the panel, as educators, how they “cultivate this next generation” of artists and activists in today’s polarizing times.

Lacy, who is a professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, said she makes a point of inviting a community organizer to speak to her classes. Arts schools need to incorporate such voices, she argued. My students, she said, “have great compassion. They want to act. They understand critical theory. But they don’t know how to build coalition.”

Opie lamented the pandemic’s impact on students today. Young people are struggling with how to have real dialogue “without prosecution,” she said. Having recently retired from UCLA after 25 years, Opie expressed a desire to spend more time with grade school students in L.A., helping them bridge sharpened divides. “I’m really concerned with what social media has done to our culture and our world and our ability for speech,” she said.

After a coffee break, the next panel took the stage: a roundtable, featuring artistic director at large Nataki Garrett, Center Theatre Group artistic director Snehal Desai, MOCA director Johanna Burton, and Whitney Museum director emeritus Adam D. Weinberg. The moderator was Kristin Sakoda, director of Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

Tasked to answer “How Should Arts Institutions Navigate the Culture Wars?,” they talked about the potential for cultural institutions going forward to create connection in contentious times.

The panel began by discussing how they bridge difference in their institutions—from fostering a sense of community among their own employees to making sure that visitors feel welcome in their space.

Weinberg spoke about trying to make all employees feel like they had a stake in his institution—”not just the artistic people” but also the engineers and maintenance people.

Burton prioritized listening: “What space do we produce not only where we teach the audiences that come into our institutions but we learn in turn?”

Desai said that he works to feature voices who can share non-dominant perspectives and stories.

And Garrett said that she looked after the most vulnerable first: “From my experience when you’re serving the most vulnerable then everybody gets served,” she said. “When you’re serving the most privileged, they’re the only ones who get served.”

The panel also discussed the merits of “building” versus “fixing” at an institutional level.

“Are agents of change able to work within the systems of arts as we have them now? Or must we change the system to make change?” Sakoda asked. She noted that today cultural institutions are appointing more women and people of color to leadership positions than ever before. However, after such “high-profile announcements,” often, just a few years later, she’ll read about “quiet exits” that come with a “sense that the person’s vision or their change agenda was not always supported.”

It’s hard to talk in generalities, said Weinberg, as “each situation has to be taken and molded around the conditions of that community, that institution, its history and past.” He equated his job to that of a potter—tearing and building again and again.

But some patterns persist across the board, said Garrett. “As a Black woman leader, I’ve never been appointed to a position where I didn’t have to clean up the job coming in.” Which is why, she said, it’s important in “these moments of sea change” to consider whether when a woman, and a Black woman in particular, is offered such a position, whether the system she’s entering is set up to support her and her vision. Those taking over embattled institutions need to consider: Are the constituencies that brought you on board open to change? And are they prepared to support whatever it takes to clean up the operation?

“There’s a rite of passage for certain right-wing blogs,” said Desai, that “when you come into these positions, they want to nail you.” When he started at CTG, he added, interviewers always asked: “Is your program going to be woke? Are you going to be politically correct?” The reason? “They want to brittle the divide between you and the community you’re trying to create,” he argued. “That’s what needs to be called out.”

“Our panel is about navigating the culture wars,” said Sakoda. How do you feel that manifests today?

Desai spoke about the problems of the binary. “So much of human existence is about a gray area,” he said. “When you say ‘war’ you have factions and you have a winner and a loser. You’re set up in a way where someone’s going to win and someone’s going to lose.” Compromise, and a willingness to come to the table, should be seen as signs of strength, not weaknesses, he argued.

Weinberg nodded to his privilege as a white man and noted that even given that, he found it difficult to make change at an institutional level. “I was director of the Whitney for over 20 years,” he said, and it took him a decade to start feeling like he was making meaningful headway in the work.

“I do have a strong sense of promise in institutions and the role of the public sector in supporting the arts,” Sakoda said, noting that she’s coming up on marking 15 years as a leader in the public sector for arts. She asks panelists what promise they see in arts and culture institutions.

“The promise of institutions might be to work differently—not only within our own institutions but with each other, and I do think it’s possible,” said Burton.

Desai shouted out Garrett’s Professional Non-Profit Theatre Coalition, which makes the case that theater, like other civic institutions, provides a public good by promoting dialogue and working “to humanize the troubles that are ailing us.” This is how we find common points of connection, he said.

Before the discussion wrapped, panelists also offered young leaders advice on how to work with their boards, who might have different visions and agendas for the institution.

“You have to be prepared to be in a dialogue on the things you’re trying to do together,” said Garrett.

“Get to know each board member,” said Weinberg.

“Know yourself and your brand and your True North,” said Desai. “It’s a dialogue and conversation, but you have to know where the line is without compromising yourself.”

Sakoda agreed. “Know your vision. Steward what you have.”

“Other than that,” Weinberg said with a smile, “it’s all very easy.”

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“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Audre Lorde wrote in A Burst of Light, 1988.

After 20 years of working and volunteering in a mixture of direct anti-poverty services, Jewish community organizations, and the arts, I find there is almost no situation that writer, poet, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde hadn’t already anticipated, considered, and conquered. At a moment of local, national, and international crises, when I consider the role I must play—and the space the organization I lead, Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center, should occupy—I find reason and answer in Lorde’s indelible wisdom.

Lorde—who was Black and queer—lived the daily reality that her very being had been politicized, with or without her art and activism. This is the experience of many non-dominant artists and culturally specific institutions today: Your very existence is, apparently, political. You don’t have the luxury of deciding whether you are or are not an activist. You will be perceived as such, and as engaging in culture wars, regardless of your intention or action.

That assumption, and others that underlie it, are worth pushing back against. Especially right now.

I am not an artist, but as the head of a Jewish-identifying cultural institution, I have encountered such assumptions in small, largely innocuous, ways. I have been assumed to have a political agenda vis à vis Israel. I have encountered an assumption of progressive politics and feminism in my work. I have been assumed to work in the nonprofit sector to enjoy more time at home with my young children (ha!). And I have seen far more problematic instances of assumption and even aggression impact my colleagues of color, different cultural backgrounds, or minority sexual orientation.

It is infuriating to be reduced to one aspect of myself, without regard to the merit of my whole person, or the effect of my demonstrable efforts. It makes me appreciate those moments when I do have the freedom to decide to engage in activism. Or not. What extraordinary luck of birth and circumstance to have the freedom to make art without political retribution. It seems to me that the least those of us with that privilege can do is attempt to extend that freedom to others. This includes the freedom to choose not to be an activist, or to choose what issues to address and when and how.

Many artists I have had the privilege to know stress that their work is in dialogue not just with external influences and influencers, but with the audience itself. For them, the art is completed in the reaction and response of its consumer. Activism is, by definition, intended to persuade. To force artists to engage with audiences as activists is to narrowly define what creative interaction can entail.

I know this because I am one such audience member. On bad days at the office—when the office was a homeless shelter, a street clinic, or a courtroom during my time as a civil rights lawyer—the artists who brought me comfort, joy, distraction, and ultimately resilience were those who took my mind off my work. Who reminded me of my humanity. I would sit as the sun set on the Temple of Dendur. I would rest beside Whistler’s “Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink.” I would take a break from trial at the Irvine courthouse and have lunch in the Noguchi Garden. In each of these moments, the art felt just for me, no matter how many hundreds of other people were walking by. These scenes touched something in me. Not because of their subjects, much less the political context in which they were created, but because of the works’ aesthetics and mine.

Activism is inherently time-bound. To force artists to speak only of the here and now is surely to deprive them of their chance at timelessness. Their chance at connection to the as-yet unborn, whose needs we can hardly imagine, but might yet be healed centuries from now, by the art of today.

I think of Peter Krasnow, the Ukrainian refugee whose oil paintings we showcased in a collection spotlight at the Skirball this past spring. In response to the events of World War II and the Holocaust, he transformed his artistic style completely, moving to the abstract and a color palette of highlighter greens and bubble gum pinks. He explained in his autobiography that this was his personal therapeutic approach to the depression he experienced as war raged and his family and homeland were annihilated. Seventy years later, his work not only feels current, but his clutching for beauty and light in a period of overwhelming darkness is resilient and instructive. I saw visitors to this show smile, cry, wonder aloud, point, decipher, get close, take a step back, and move forward.

Would we say to the Peter Krasnow of today, “No, your emotional expression, your desperate attempt to heal yourself, this is insufficient”? I hope not.

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Since leaving Burning Man, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role that principles play in a society, and what to do when people don’t live up to them.

Burning Man attracts more than 70,000 people each Labor Day weekend to an inhospitable dry lakebed called “the Playa” in northwestern Nevada. Burners marvel at incredible art installations, boogie to electronic dance music, and create and engage in hundreds of different participatory experiences at camps with a staggering variety of themes. These activities range from walking the catwalk after picking out a new (free) outfit at a pop-up thrift store to hanging from bungees attached to a geodesic dome.

But this year, there was another unexpected activity: waiting out two-and-a-half days of rain and the thick mud it formed on the Playa’s surface. News networks ran breathless stories about how the participants were “trapped,” and interviewed people who fled instead of listening to the requests to stay until the lakebed dried out again.

What really happened, and what lessons can we draw from it given that the event is trying to create a particular type of culture?

The non-profit organization that runs Burning Man was chartered in 2011 to better manage the event, and promote its principles throughout the year. It is very clear about its theory of a good government for society, and that vision is basically libertarian. Among its 10 key principles are “radical self-reliance” and “community effort.” Many of the other principles have to do with the event itself, including a focus on its gifting economy, the immediacy of experiences people have there, and leaving no trace of participants’ presence on the Playa.

For those of us who take these principles seriously, the two days of mud were simply a challenge to be embraced and overcome, even enjoyed. “You get the Burn that you need,” a common saying about the experience goes. The vast majority of people who came this year took the opportunity of the massive rainstorms to connect more closely with their campmates, to create clever art from the mud, and/or to keep on partying their faces off through the deluge.

There’s a growing contingent at Burning Man of newer folks, though, who seem to see it as another version of the Coachella music festival—even though it is held in a patch of desert that might be the most inhospitable place for human life in the lower 48 American states.

I ran into two such party people as the storms were rolling in, and the ground was becoming impassable. “Pretty soon it will be every man, woman, and child for themselves,” one of the women warned me. “This happened before, and people were stuck here for 10 days.”

This precise kind of weather had not, in fact, happened before (at least not since I first came in 2000), and people were not, in fact, stuck for 10 days, nor were we at all likely to be. But two things struck me about her sentiment.

First, in spite of all of the pervasive propaganda around the 10 Principles, the woman had absolutely no idea where she was. Over the course of the next three days, I was overwhelmed with the generosity of the people who were constantly checking on their neighbors, opening up their StarLink WiFi for people to contact their families, or offering an unending stream of food, water, and booze to strangers that became new friends. (Even though very few people actually needed anything since most of us took the radical self-reliance part seriously.)

Had the woman simply asked for anything, she would have gotten more than she needed from a giving community. But she didn’t. Instead, like thousands of others, she and her friends fled or tried to, turning a fine, even fun, situation into a risky one. After folks who waited out the mud finally exited when it was safe to do so—generally no more than a day later than they were planning to leave anyway—they passed a Prius half submerged in the mud. Its driver had ignored all the warnings to just chill out and have fun with what life was presenting us with, and the result was a ruined $30,000 vehicle.

As it’s been reported, the people who fled were generally among the most well-off. I’m looking at you Chris Rock who apparently thought the event was going to descend into cannibalism after one day of rain. Many of those who stayed were the Burners of relatively modest means who make up a big chunk of the event’s attendees, people who spend some or all of their disposable income for the year on a week or two’s escape from the “default world.” And my experience has been that people with disabilities are the very picture of radical self-reliance on the Playa. But a minority of primarily able-bodied well-off folks did panic and the world picked up on that panic, magnifying it.

The second thing that struck me was how much the people who run Burning Man stuck to its view of a good society, especially the fostering of radical self-reliance of the denizens of the Playa. All of the information that we were given over the radio for the better part of a day was to “shelter in place and conserve food and water.” We were eventually directed to find more information on a website that most people couldn’t access.

I do think that the folks who run the event could have put out a less sensationalistic announcement that would have cut down on the panic. “Shelter in place” makes sense as your verbiage if there is an active shooter on the loose or if a tornado is on the way. Less so for what to do during a rainstorm that creates some thick mud. They could have reassured people and told them to reach out to their neighbors if they needed anything.

But the people who run Burning Man are very, even willfully, bad at different elements of event management, including entrance and egress to the Playa and communication during the event. Perhaps this is an intentional call for people to practice those principles of self-reliance and community effort on their own, without their “government” giving them any more additional specific instructions on how to do so when the mud hits the fan?

It got me thinking: What is the obligation of a government to its citizens when the terms of the social contract, so to speak, are so clearly laid out but not followed by many?

In terms of the event itself, I believe Burning Man could do at least a little more to ensure that it has prepared attendees. If you fled the Playa this year, you probably should not have been there in the first place. This may seem to be a violation “Radical Inclusion,” the first principle of the event, and people argue for the importance of acculturation of those who are not long-time Burners into the ethic of the place. Asking people to attend an online seminar or ensuring that they have enough water when they enter the event, however, would not be a major violation of this principle. I do a lot with the Scouts, and the event can probably help folks traveling to this inhospitable wasteland to be at least as prepared as the 11-year-olds that we send to sleepaway camp.

But here’s the rub: societies generally cannot and really should not choose only self-reliant people committed to community effort as their citizens.

This leaves us with the challenge of what to do given the extreme humanness of humans. Libertarianism, like communism, is an interesting theory that is problematic in practice. You can have all of the principles you want, but some people make idiotic decisions and these decisions can have tremendous negative consequences for themselves and those around them. And even though this rainstorm did not actually qualify as a disaster, we clearly need governments that are capable of responding to true crises in a more organized and effective fashion.

Pondering all of these things, I stuck it out to see the climactic “Man burn,” which happened two days late, on Monday. It was a tremendous moment of catharsis for those of us who stayed to see this 70-foot-tall art installation go up in flames after a massive fireworks display. Only the following morning, muddy and tired, did I make my way out of a desert of possibility and back to a world of practicality. In this world, governments generally attempt to take care of us rather than holding us to a standard of self-reliance that most people are not even trying to achieve.

But I hold on to the dream of Burning Man’s governing principles.

You may have heard that Burning Man was a disaster but I “got the Burn that I needed.” The compassion and community spirit modeled by those who stayed behind will remain an inspiration to me. As for those who fled, I will stay curious about how societies can work to help people achieve more self-reliance and avoid panic, in crises both real and imagined. And I will keep working on rebuilding trust in a society that believes that even the minor challenge of a couple of days of mud will quickly lead to people turning on—and potentially eating!—each other.

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How do you mobilize art against war? Can artwork be co-opted by warmongers? And what, if anything, can we hope for in creating and consuming art about war?

These were some of the many questions that guided last night’s Zócalo/The Music Center conversation, “How Is Art A Weapon in War?,” presented at Jerry Moss Plaza in downtown Los Angeles.

Maneuvering their personal and people’s histories and critiques of inhumane violence, the panelists helped us understand a major takeaway: Art at the intersection of war can help us understand the enigma that is our humanity—the worst, and the better.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and USC professor Viet Thanh Nguyen moderated the event. He began the conversation by asking each panelist to speak about their relationship to art and war, to allow for their individual practices to give way to the bigger questions at hand.

Michael Novak, artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, spoke about The Green Table, Kurt Jooss’ interwar ballet, which will have a run later this week at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The ballet, he said, depicts a group of men gathered around a green table who decide to go to war, and what to do in its aftermath. While it doesn’t give a resolution, it presents “the futility of war as a never-ending cycle.” In that way, he said, it’s timeless.

Nguyen agreed: “We’re still in a situation with mostly men around tables deciding what happens next.”

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

He turned to Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Gelare Khoshgozaran. Because she was born “in the middle” of the Iran-Iraq War, war shaped her worldview and artistic practices, down to her very notion of temporality. “It made me aware of time,” Khoshgozaran said. “The experience of time under the conditions of violence … and how banal—how normalized—it can get. You can’t just press pause because there’s a war.” In this way, peacetime never came for Khoshgozaran—war became not an event that has a beginning and end, but something with effects that resonate forever.

Khalil Kinsey, COO and chief curator for the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection, also spoke about the ceaselessness of war, the American Civil War—all that preceded it and succeeds it—and racial violence.

It is through his work at the Kinsey Collection that Khalil sees art’s power to engage in war. In a time when books are being banned and entire school systems are erasing important histories (all elements of a war on knowledge, Kinsey noted), providing historical truth and countering misinformation is its own form of resistance. “My curation is rooted into tapping into a consciousness,” he said.

The final panelist, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, was sentenced to prison because of her art. In 2012, she and other members of the feminist art collective were imprisoned for performing an anti-Putin song. “Did you anticipate that political repression and prison would be a consequence of your work?” Nguyen asked her.

Activists in Russia know they face consequences such as being poisoned, imprisoned, or murdered, said Tolokonnikova. “Our regime is based on the rule of thugs; they don’t have any grace or honor.” But she believes that protest is the only way to change the course of history. “Even if Putin dies tomorrow, if there is not strong enough resistance, it’s going to start over with another asshole.” This work, she continued, “is not fun—it sucks—but it’s what you should do.”

What about some examples of artworks that have resisted war? Nguyen asked.

Tolokonnikova cited the famed antiwar painting “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso. “He was just one guy, but widely influential.” She also pulled from her own history. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Tolokonnikova helped raise over $7 million to support Ukraine by creating an NFT of the Ukrainian flag. “I just think it’s our best bet to work on the symbolic level and change people’s minds,” she said. “You can create a momentum. Even the people with tanks are going to move to your side.”

Nguyen turned to audience questions before the panel wrapped. One person wanted to know aside from art expression, what methods of lifestyle practices helped them cope with the injustices they can’t unsee? The panelists all answered in pragmatic, quotidian terms.

“I hug my dog a lot,” Khoshgozaran said. For Kinsey, it was “the golden rule”—treating people the way he wants to be treated. Novak got off social media. And Tolokonnikova said she takes Omega-3 pills with her morning coffee.

Throughout the night, the conversation oscillated between hope and cynicism. Can art really move the needle? “I do believe in the micro affecting the macro, a ripple turns into a wave,” Kinsey said. After all, he continued, the options are laid out in front of us: roll over and lay down or create. “What choice do we have?”

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