What Can Artists Do? Strive for Utopia

As each day passes, America feels more and more like it’s on a path to dystopia: the Supreme Court advancing a fascist theocracy with only disdain for the rights of people on the other side. And this same court ruling against protecting its citizens from climate change and gun violence. As each day passes, it seems we’re seeing logic, empathy, and truth become forgotten notions in the midst of banned books and the work of real journalists discredited as fake news. 

We’ve all experienced how life with COVID has created further divisions — large and small, petty and catastrophic — and further breakdowns of social norms. So many more arguments, fistfights, car accidents, murders. Through it all, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Housing costs soared. Inflation blew up as we watched in real time. Meanwhile, our government remains paralized in partisan gridlock. 

Times are certainly tough. But this isn’t new for humans — or even people here in this country. American utopian socialist Albert Brisbane wrote this 179 years ago: “The reform we contemplate will improve and elevate the condition of all, without taking from any. It can moreover be tried on a small scale, and will only spread, when practice has shown its superiority over the present system. Unlike political reforms, which, to effect the smallest change of policy, agitate and often convulse a whole country, and array one half of the People against the other half, it will not extend beyond these narrow limits unless its advantages — as practically demonstrated — excite a strong and general approbation in its favor.” 

Yet here we are in a country full of so much beauty and love, with a strong majority of Americans in favor of preserving the crucial progress we’ve made in ensuring civil liberties for all of our citizens. Yet here we are in a country with so many artists who are not only making excellent and important work but are also making things happen in their communities. They’re utilizing their skills — as poets and musicians, dancers and sculptors, actors and cooks — to build community, to bring people together. 

As compassionate citizens, artists are using the tools and skills we have to do what Brisbane wrote about in 1843 — to try practical demonstrations of a better world at a small scale, to strive for utopia. The key word is “strive.” It’s a very different kind of trying. It’s attempting with passion, with vigor, with fight. We know that utopia — where everything is good for everybody — isn’t possible. But, in striving, we’re doing positive things. We, as artists working to support our communities, are moving the needle the other way.

In the Indianapolis neighborhood and on the block where artists in our group live and work, we at the artist collective turned artist-led nonprofit, Big Car Collaborative (where I’m a co-founder), have been buying vacant buildings (three) and houses (16), fixing them up, and preserving these as perpetually affordable housing and studios for artists. We have 23 artists and their family members living in these homes now in the Garfield Park neighborhood just south of downtown. The affordability, for this group of socially engaged artists working in a variety of practices — painters, musicians, writers, urban farmers — comes linked to an exchange with the artists to share their ideas and efforts with each other on the block, with our nearby neighbors, and across the city. 

And we’re in the midst of also renovating a second 46,000-square-foot former factory into affordable studios. We opened another smaller factory building on the block in 2016. Tube Factory is used for exhibitions and neighborhood meetings, night markets and birthday parties. Here, we also share tools and resources — like wood and print shops and gardening tools — both with the artists living on the block and other neighbors and visitors. 

The idea is that, while we as compassionate and involved artists have big challenges to address in the policy realm — including a future where we may be fighting against fascism — we can start by building community and addressing the challenges of division at home, where we live and work every day.

Why artists? We’re good at making something out of next to nothing, turning imagination into reality, problem solving, collaborating, making do. We get obsessed. We don’t give up. We see. We learn. And, often, we listen. We’re not better than other people. As Chicago-based artist Francis Whitehead lists here, we have different skills and perspectives and experiences. And, for this reason, we need to be a big part of working together with others — artists and everyone else alike — to strive for utopia.

Houston artist Rick Lowe explained this to the New York Times in 2006 when talking about his work with Project Row Houses: “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.”

Socially engaged art is the most utopian of art practices. New York-based artist Pablo Helguera describes it this way in his book, Education for Socially Engaged Art: “The work is not symbolic or making a statement. It is doing the thing it wants to see done. It depends on actual — not imaged or hypothetical — social action.”

So what can we do? Start small and close to home. Utopia is a world that people want. What do you want? Ask neighbors what they want. How can these things start to happen? How can you work together to get it done — not just talk about it? 

We can, at once, make our world bigger by expanding who we know and what we do in the smaller world where we live every day. This can be things like community gardens, skill and tool sharing programs, or simply gatherings that bring people together — like a block party. 

“Just as video, painting, and clay are types of forms, people coming together possess forms as well,” Nato Thompson wrote in his 2012 book on socially engaged art projects around the world, Living as Form.

At the same time, as we work close to home to strive for a daily life that’s less dystopian for us and our families and neighbors, we all must stand together to do whatever we can to preserve human rights and our democratic system in America currently facing so many threats. Building social bridges with small utopias at home can only help give us strength to fight this fight. 

Jim Walker is the July Editor for Indiana. He is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Big Car.