[00:00:02] Speaker A: Kmud podcast presents.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Good evening and welcome to the show. This is global stuff. My name is Jimmy Derschlag. I've been doing this show for a long time, usually the fourth Friday of the month, and in the process try to address issues that have global import of some kind, or at least broader impact, but that affect all of us, even very locally in our daily lives. And in that process, I get to talk with a lot of interesting people doing important work and either through their publications or their activism and their organizing. And my guest for the show this week has done a little bit of all of that strategizing, doing some activist work. He's an author, he's a producer. His name is Ken Grossinger, and we're going to be talking about his recent book came out a little less than a year ago, in July 2023 on new press called how organizers and artists are creating a better world together. The name of the book is artworks. Subtitle how organizers and artists are creating a better world together, which, of course, we're all trying to do in our own way, I would hope. And certainly this book outlines a great collaboration between people who are working on important issues and artists who are bringing their works to support that. So welcome to the show, Ken. So glad you could make the time to do this.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Jimmy. I'm delighted to be with you and.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Really enjoyed reading the book. Thank you. Looking forward to diving into it. But, and I also want to give a brief shout out to Peter Bermudas from the new press, who brings so many, they do such great work there, publish a lot of important works, including yours, and bring people like you to my attention. So I appreciate what he's doing as well and what new press is doing.
But let's go to your background. I know you've been a strategist in movements for social and economic justice for a long time, 35 years. And in unions and community organizations. You're the director of Impact philanthropy in democracy partners, and we'll be talking about impact philanthropy. I know that's part of the book as well. But what brought you to both where you are now in the process to get there and to being interested in the whole subject and writing the book?
[00:03:05] Speaker A: So the question for me is always, how do we win?
And what we're doing now is not achieving the victories on the scale that need to be achieved for progressive reform.
I came at this from outside of the art world, even though the book focuses mostly on the interaction or, if you will, the impact of collaboration between artists and organizers. When I started to learn my craft 30, 35 years ago as a community organizer working on voting rights.
Art and culture were never taught. And so when I practiced it in the service Employers International Union and at the AFL CIO, I never practiced it. And when I started teaching younger organizers how to think about their work, I never taught it.
And then I married an artist, and I realized just how big a boat I missed. And that it wasn't just organizers that didn't think strategically about the use of art and culture in their work, but it was artists themselves, which often didn't think about their work in the service of social movements. So the book looks at the impact of collaboration between artists and organizers through the lens of the civil rights and the Black Lives Matter movement, through environmental and immigrant justice. And I also look at two institutions, philanthropy and museums, and the extent to which they support or restrained social progress.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: And in your, as you say, you look at it at a variety of different movements and also different artistic expressions that have grown to support those movements, both the visual arts, film, music, performing arts.
You talk about, you open up the book with talking about the civil rights movement, the black matter movements, and going into songs, which we'll be talking about more in film.
But hasn't art, in a sense, artists have always been. There's always been art, music, visual art that has addressed social issues in some manner. You mentioned Picasso's Guernica, which has always had an impact on me ever since I saw it.
I think it was in the museum of Modern Art where it was hanging, but it's also traveled to the art institute once where I saw it there in Chicago. So that's a very famous picture about the attack in Spain, in Guernica.
But hasn't that always been the case? So what is different that you found in the book any of the major trends that you found that links the art to the specific organizing efforts that are going on?
[00:06:25] Speaker A: So you're right that art has always been a part of every social movement and many community organizing campaigns.
And there were times, such as in the civil rights movement, where they were fully integrated.
The civil rights organizations in some ways led the predicate for work that's going on today.
What isn't happening is the scale, and that's what the book tries to address. It takes the same position that you just took, Jimmy, that art has always been with us, and it looks at the collaborations between artists and organizers, and it does that to lift up the point that art is not just a reflection of or a reaction to social conditions, but a contributor to social change. And so during the civil rights movement, we can see that in one story.
It's a story about a photographer named Danny Lyon.
Let me take the audience back to the early 1960s.
SNCC, the student nonviolent coordinating committee, which much of your audience will know at that time, was leading the southern civil rights movement in some ways with some of the other civil rights organizations. And James Foreman, who was running SNCC at the time, realized that if he was going to expose the brutality of white supremacy in the south, he needed incontestable visual evidence of it. And so this photographer named Danny Lyon, who at the time was 20 years old, he was one of many white volunteers that went south to work in the civil rights movement.
Foreman says to Danny Lyon, there are 33 girls out there that were swept up, teenage girls that were swept up at a movie theater for protesting racial segregation, and no one has heard from them. They were gone for 45 days. Their families didn't know where they were. And he said to Danny, you need to find these girls and photograph them so that the world can see what was going on. And so, along with two civil rights workers, in fact, does find these girls in the Leesburg stockade in Georgia. And these two civil rights workers distract the guard, and he begins to take photographs of these girls through shard, broken shard windows and bars and brings the photographs back to Foreman. Foreman immediately sends them out to the media, and a senator named Harrison from Pennsylvania picks it up and enters it into the congressional record. And that flagged the issue for Robert F. Kennedy junior, who at that time was the attorney general of the United States. And those girls were swiftly released. So it was the idea, again, that art was not just a reflection of or a reaction to social conditions, but a contributor to social change. And so that type of work happened throughout the civil rights movement. But over the years, we see less and less and less of those collaborations. And so the book really tries to lift up where those collaborations have worked, when they've worked, and why they do.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: And as you mentioned, SNCC was ahead of its time in that. In that they would have a photographer, the photographer you mentioned, Danny Lyons, and they had, you know, press people. They had a theater group then were very much ahead of their time. I mean, you think of something as simple as we shall overcome the anthem, early anthem that was, everyone would sing at those gatherings and how powerful that was just to have a huge group of people all singing that together.
And I think that's been maybe, as you say, the civil rights, the equal justice movement has been ahead of its time all along in having those kind of anthems and having those kind of songs for people to share and becoming it, echoing throughout the country and communities.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: And I open the book with two quotes that are exactly to your point, and if it's okay, I'd like to read them.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: The first is by a guy named Wyatt T. Walker, who is a director of the faith based civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And he was talking about the power of we shall overcome. And he said, one cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the Southland. I have heard it sung in great mass meetings with a thousand voices singing as one. I've heard a half dozen sing it softly behind the bars of the Hines county prison in Mississippi. I've heard old women singing it on the way to work in Albany, Georgia. I've heard the students singing it as they were being dragged away to jail. It generates power that is indescribable.
And Bruce Hartford, who is a writer who is writing about song and the civil rights movement, makes the same point, but in terms of music throughout. And he says, for us, freedom songs were the psychic threads that bound the movement into a tapestry of purpose, solidarity, hope, and courage.
The songs spread our message. The songs bonded us together. The songs elevated our courage. The songs shielded us from hate. The songs forged our discipline. The songs protected us from danger. And it was the songs that kept us sane.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah, very powerful quotes. And one of the things that strikes me so strongly about the book itself is that you primarily use examples of what people are doing, stories, personal stories, like you told about Danny Lyons. And it's so often that you read these books that have very important points to make, and. But they become sometimes intellectual conversations, and I think, or often it's kind of despairing because of all the forces that you're fighting against or fighting to overcome. The ones you talk about in this book, such as equal rights and the environment and just the various problems that we face. And you're just full of examples of people working. And I think it's so important that you focus on individual stories and focus on positive ways. It's very uplifting in most ways, because you talk about the challenges, of course, and I'm sure we'll be talking about that more, but also the successes, the collaborations, people seeing the need to work together.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, we learn in a lot of different ways, and one of the ways that we learn most easily is through metaphor. We can make analytical arguments and intellectual arguments along the lines of what you just described. Or we can share a simple story about Danny Lyon taking pictures of these girls that were locked up in the Georgia stockade, and nothing more needs to be said. So I thought it was important to lift up these stories because there's been already so much analysis about art and.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Role of art soon.
So you bring up, we were talking about singing and songs, and songs are such an important part. In fact, you list a lot of great singers and songs in the book. I put playlist together this, when I post the show up as our podcast, which I usually do, that's available through the different platforms. I will make a link that'll work in the description of the show to a bunch of the different songs that people can link to. But one of the very successful efforts that you talk about early in the book, in the chapter singing for our lives, the second chapter is about the Bristol Bay activism, and talk a little bit north dynasty minerals and their efforts to open a mind that would have destroyed a lot of the environment in that area.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Sure. And I would just say for your audience, when you do that link, Jimmy, there's actually a playlist of songs that I describe in the book that can be found on my website. There's a link directly there, so it'd be great if you can connect to that.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I'll use. That'll be great. I won't have to use the one I put together. I'm sure yours is more complete.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Well, I'd like to hear yours, to be honest.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: But they're probably the same.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: So the story about Bristol Bay is meant to talk about another part of music and performance.
We know about the power of music and the power of song and the celebrity that often lifts it up by well known musicians. But there's another really important factor that we often don't think about relative to organizing. And that is not just the song, but the artist performing the song. And so I tell a story about an artist named Sai Kahn.
And the story, the backdrop of the story, is that it takes place in Alaska, in a place, as you say, called Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay was a section of Alaska that was 65% indigenous. And the national, the NDM, one of the extractive mining industries up in Alaska, wanted to build. And this has been a fight that's been going on for 20 years. They still haven't built it. They wanted to build the largest open pit copper and gold mine in the world.
And those of you who know about mining and the extractive industries know that a lot of toxic waste comes out of the mine as you're digging it. And so there's always got to be storage facilities for it. And in order for the mining industries to make this mine, they would have had to build a 70 foot earthen dam that's seven stories, and it would have been filled with toxic weights, 10.2 billion. It. I think that's the measurement.
150 miles away from where they wanted to drill was an earthquake fault that came about at the turn of the century.
It registered, I think it was the second highest recorded earthquake in history since they started recording the size of earthquakes. And when the earthquake happened at the turn of the century, dozens of people were killed. 28 tsunamis resulted. The land was wiped out. And so imagine having this 70 foot earthen damage, and there is this earthquake fault, and all of a sudden, it begins to rock. That community would just get wiped out. And so the other big industry in Alaska, other than the extractive mining industries, is the fishing industry.
People that fish commercially, people that fish for sustenance, people that fish for sport. And a number of those fishermen happen to be musicians.
And they realized ten years into the fight that they never had a theme song, an anthem around which to organize people.
And so they call up Sy Khan in North Carolina, who's a former union organizer and civil rights worker. He's produced 20 cds, and he's a playwright and an author. And they implore him to come up to Bristol Bay and to deal with the pebble, what they were calling the pebble mine. And so Sai flies up to Bristol Bay, and they set up a series of meetings for him. The very first meeting was in an elementary school, third graders, a third grade class known as rebels to the pebble.
And in whatever way you talk to third graders, Sai said, I'll be your musical messenger if you will give me the message. And from that discussion with these kids, he wrote a beautiful song called abundance.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: All right, get ready.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Which. What's that?
[00:20:14] Speaker B: No, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: And several other songs spun off of abundance. And then the fishermen started to convene. House meetings. Bristol Bay is a very small place. It was house meetings of 15, 2025 people. And Sy would bring his songs to these homes and play them for folks that were there, and he would say to them, does this song convey the message that you want to convey? Does this line get it? Do you want me to throw out this line? Do you want me to nix this song? In other words, he engaged the community fully in house meeting after house meeting around the music. And so trust began to develop between Psi and the musicians who were fishermen and the community. So much so that the folks in Alaska said to si, si, we've got this covered. We need you to go down to the lower 48, organize other musical performers, raise some money for us, and raise awareness. And so the idea is that Sy created musicians united to protect Bristol Bay. And so it was his work as a musician, in conjunction with the organizers, that really lifted this fight. And it's now been going on, went on another ten years, and it's been going on. And, you know, there's legislation and executive orders back and forth, depending upon who the president of the United States is right now. It's on hold.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Let me, if you don't mind, let's play a little bit of the song that was kind of the lead song that was around. Not the whole thing, but a little bit of abundance from that album, the Bristol Bay album by Sycan.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: That'd be great.
[00:22:10] Speaker C: When you hear no words of subsistence, you think of someone poor with an outstretched hand.
To us, it means abundance, living off the richness of the land.
We've been here 10,000 years along this river shore, if there's any justice.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Jimmy, was that a live version? I hadn't heard that version of it before.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: No, it's just the one I found on looking at online. So I don't know how it refers, but it's really pretty song.
So, yeah, that's just a little example of that. And the organizing that being done by musicians and working with the community, I think that's such an important trend.
It's so important to every part of your book that I mentioned collaboration already. You mentioned it, that the community is brought into these efforts, but also that they get an awareness of what art can do.
You talk about Earth Day when it started, talk about that. How there wasn't really a concept of working with artists.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. You know, Bill McKibben wrote this very famous essay asking where the hell were the arts? And the history of that was that the environmental movement was really science based movement. And so what a scientist know how to do.
They're very good with charts. They're very good with graphs and pies and analysis, but they don't penetrate popular culture in the same way that opera does, or folk music does, or theater does, or poetry does. And so the chapter looks at the role of art, first through Bristol Bay and then through Earth Day and others. To make that very point, I want.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: To remind the listeners, this is global stuff. My name is Jimmy Durschlag, my guest for this show, Ken Grossinger, who's been a leading strategist in movements for social economic justice for over 35 years, and unions, community organizations. And we're talking about his book artworks, how organizers and artists are creating a better world together. And I think that's important, that distinction. It's because people who are active in working and creating, working to create a better world right now, they're not theorizing about it. They're acting and doing that right now.
We appreciate you making the time to be with us, Ken, a great read. I recommend to people I saw that. I know you can find it through the new press website, but it's also on Amazon and other locations. And the text is illustrated with photography. We mentioned Danny Lyon's picture of the detained teenagers, and that's in there, but also a bunch of plates of the different examples that he gives in the book of art. I mean, what would. You can't talk about art without having images, I guess. So.
You really have put together a great compilation there. One of the other things you talk about, I'm a great movie buff.
And movies, you know, so often, I mean, Hollywood gets criticized so often by the right for being this liberal bias. And yet I think a lot of times it's because they actually will take on issues and bring them to a popular audience and reach a very large audience and make an impact. You mentioned two movies, especially from a while back, both of them involving Jane Fonda in one way or another, that both had huge box office seen by millions and millions of people, and yet really had an impact on social movements. Talk about that a little bit.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Yeah. So I compare and contrast two films that Jane Fonda produced, and I did that because I wanted to lift up the idea of impact organizing. And the first film that I want to discuss now is China syndrome. So your audience will remember that's Jack Lemon, Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda. Peter Dreyfus and Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda play reporters that go to a nuclear generating station on the verge of a nuclear meltdown.
And ostensibly, the film takes a look at the question about whether it's really possible to run a nuclear generating station safely and still be profitable. Ten days after that film comes out, there's an actual partial meltdown on Three Mile islands. It was a five on a seven point richness tale. It was the largest radioactive release in the history of the United States. So now, box office receipts, as you said, were nine times what the production costs were. Ted Turner said it was that film that turned him against nuclear power. But what that film wasn't was tied to a movement. And so it was very important in terms of lifting up the issue, but it really had no legs beyond a relatively short shelf life. So I compare that to another Fonda film called nine to five.
Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, of course, and Jane Fonda. After the Vietnam war was over, Jane wanted to put her energy into women's equity issues, and she called up an organizer whose name is Karen Nussbound, who started an organization called nine to five. So the organization predated the movie. There's an organization called nine to five and a movie called nine to five. And Karen took Jane around the country to meet with women to learn about the issues that they were dealing with in the office.
And the culmination of those discussions was a big meeting at nighttime in Cincinnati, in Ohio, with several hundred people there. And at the end of the night, Jane had this throwaway line which was basically, do any of you ever have revenge fantasies about your bosses?
And the place lit up, and one woman stood up and said, yeah, I want to grind his bones into coffee beans and feed them to the other bosses right then and there. Jane knew that the film would not be as effective if it was made as a drama, because it could be tagged a feminist film, but would be more effective if it was made as a comedy. And what she did after the film came out was toured with Karen and Ellen Cassidy, one of the other founders of nine to five, the organization, and the other cast members of the film. And through that tour, they doubled the number of nine to five chapters. And Jane said she could always hold in her heart that her movie was married to a movement. So the distinction here is one movie, the China syndrome, which lifts up ideas, maybe changes public consciousness, and another movie which does the same but goes one step further. And it's tied to an organizing operation like nine to five. And the effect is just tremendous.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: You also mention in the next chapter about immigration and cultural strategies for migrant, immigrant, and refugee justice.
You talk about a lot of the art connected to that. And immigration, of course, is such a hot button topic these days.
And, you know, I think part of a misconception by a lot of the public, or vilification, depending on how you look at it. But there's been a pretty good collaboration, it seems like, between musicians, artists, cartoonists. And one of the images that what you talk about is the monarch butterfly, of course, which is in a lot of people's consciousness, but a great image that's been kind of used and put in the art of the immigrant rights movement.
[00:31:45] Speaker A: And I also talked, Jimmy, about a particular organization that was very involved in using the monarch butterfly on a bus called the Undocu bus.
And it's an organization called the National Day Labor's organizing network, started by a musician, a guy named Pablo Alvarado. And Enlan is one of the few modern, relatively few modern day organizations that fully embrace art and culture. And so I wanted to understand why Paabo did that. And I'd like to read another quote from the book that gets to his point.
He says, what happens is, when you are a worker and your wages are stolen, you're mistreated. When you're an immigrant and you don't have papers, just the fact of not having documents puts you in a vulnerable position, not just in front of society, but within yourself, you don't feel that you fit. You feel that you are a burden. You feel that you are an outsider all the time. So in order to organize and to make sure that people defend themselves when they are subjected to oppression, to difficult situations, you have to elevate the self esteem. You have to build a cultural identity that people feel that they belong to. Because when you have that, when you have a strong cultural root, cultural background and identity, it's very difficult for an employer to come and rob you of your wages. To us, using arts and culture is a matter of building that kind of power. You cannot build real power unless people have an incredible sense of self regard, self love. That is why we incorporate art.
[00:33:33] Speaker D: K Mud is a community radio station in the Redwood region of northern California. Donate support people powered
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[00:33:47] Speaker B: I want to remind the listeners again, this is global stuff. My guest for this show, Ken Grossinger, we're talking about his book, artworks, how organizers and artists are creating a better world together. This is a call in show. If you have a question or brief comment for Ken, the number here, 707-923-3911 the excellent Michael McCaskill here to take your calls on the job, as always.
And in that same chapter, it was interesting to me that they actually are incorporating.
You have to involve social media and new technologies, new art technologies. And I think that makes it more exciting for artists as well, especially those working in new media, where you talked about culture strike, enlisting artists and these giant portraits of workers where people could use those QR codes that you can photograph with your phone or a camera and go to actually listening to their voices with that. So maybe you could talk about these other kind of incorporating these newer technologies into the that arts are incorporating now as well, to enhance the impact of the organizers and their activities.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: I think you described well what's going on. I think what's underlying it is the notion of narrative change. And this is a place that artists excel in.
We know as activists, that sometimes we can win policy and legislative reforms through organizing, through campaigning, through lobbying, through political operations.
But we also know that when we have these victories, when power changes hands, those victories often get rolled back. And I think it's because we never address the narratives underlying the progress. And so what we wind up doing is changing hands in Washington, DC, or in the state capitol, or in the local government, but never changing the hearts, never changing the attitudes and the values and the way people feel about things. And so there's a whole series of new kind of art forms, and old art forms, actually, that are building what we call narrative power, that is taking control of our own stories, our own history. And the book cites a couple of different examples of that, one of which is the Kehinde Wiley monument in front of the Richmond, Virginia, Museum of Art.
So this is a monument that's 16ft tall. And we know that public monuments were targets during the Black Lives Matter movement, mostly for two reasons. One is, of course, because of what they symbolized, and the other is because they provided black lives matter activists with a local target.
And so what we know about public monuments is that they're made of stone and different types of steel. So there's a permanence to them. They're tall, they're 16ft or more taller, and they often have white confederate generals looking down on people as they pass by. And what Kehinde Wiley did in an effort to shift the narrative is pull down the white supremacist that was riding the horse on the monument and instead put up a black equestrian and dreadlocks and sneakers. So he was simultaneously mocking the former public monuments. And also, now, if you're somebody passing by, you're looking at a person being glorified, not as a white supremacist being glorified. And so that in and of itself, is not going to change anything, but one type of art after the next after the next. And there's a cumulative effect. And that's what we mean when we talk about narrative power. There was another great example of this that I discuss in the book by a photographer and muralist named Junior. Junior lives part time in France and part time in New York. And during the height of the Trump administration, I think it was 2017, when he was implementing the family separation policies, and he was calling Mexicans all kinds of vile terms, rapists, thugs, criminals. You remember that?
And what Junior did is he traveled to the US Mexico border and went to a town called Takat. And Takats, a very small town just south of the US Mexico border, and starts meeting with the people in the community. And in one of the homes, there is a baby, a one year old baby in its crib, and the baby's name is Kikito. And Junior says to Kikito's mother, is it okay if I take a photograph of your baby? And she was flattered and said yes. And he then asked her one other question. He said, would you mind if I blew up your baby's face and posted it publicly? And the mother said, sure, she'd be very proud. And so what junior did was blow up baby Kiquito to 70ft tall, propped up by plywood and scaffolding, and installed that looking down over the US Mexico border onto two icE agents.
And so now the image that you have, on the one hand is Trump dehumanizing Mexicans, and on the other hand, somebody like Junior, who's offering a bit of humanity for people to look at.
That installation led to a million views on Instagram overnight, and people started flooding there from around the world. And all of a sudden, there got to be a lot of stories in the press about baby Kikito compared and contrast up against what Trump was doing again, in and of itself. Kiquito was not going to change the way people thought, but one image after the next after the next, that will do it again.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: The phone number here, 707-923-3911 I'm sure many of you are enjoying this conversation and hearing Ken talk about the book and the work of artists and activists collaborating together to create a better world. Talking about his book, artworks. Welcome. Any questions that you might have or comments.
This goes into the kind of going through the different sections of the book, the museum section, which you brought up at the very beginning. But when you talk about, like, the different exhibits that are up, one that I heard about on PBS, I think, many, many months ago when it was first installed, which is so powerful to me, is the national memorial for peace in the legacy. I guess that's.
Was that the one that's near Montgomery, Alabama? Montgomery, Alabama, right. It has 805 six foot beams that are, I don't know what you say, commemorating, just acknowledging the lynchings of African Americans, black people terrorized by lynching and part of the equal justice initiative.
The poem there for the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned and burned, for the tortured, tormented and terrorized, for those abandoned by the rule of law, we will remember with hope, because hopelessness is the enemy of justice, with courage, because peace requires bravery, with persistence, because justice is a constant struggle with faith, because we shall overcome. Very, very powerful monument. When you talk about art and exhibits, but you also talk about, give a great example in that chapter about collaborations with museums. You think so much of museums as these kind of their own entities, their own world, their curators deciding what great art is and their boards of directors having a lot of wealthy people on it. But you use the Queen's Museum of Art as an example of another way for museums to engage the community and work with artists.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: Yeah. So the chapter basically makes the case that museums will become community action targets unless they're responsive to the times. And when they are responsive, they can become community building institutions.
And it also talks about museums not just as cultural centers designed to look at the past, but also as centers that are designed to look at the present and the future.
And so the reference that you made to the National Memorial for Peace and justice, one of the distinguishing features about it, other than the sheer power of standing on the hill and looking down over these hanging tombstones, embedded in those kind of rectangular, steel box like tombstones, are the names of people who have been lynched and the cities and counties in which they came from. And what Brian Stevenson did was to create life size replicas of those hanging tombstones. And so now if you're from Richmond, Virginia, and you see your ancestors name on that quart and steel beam, you can bring one back to Richmond and you can demand a marker recognizing what happened, or you could use it to fuel racial justice fights. And so that's just sort of one way that museums have begun to use their power. And museums do have a lot of power. They are among the most trusted institutions in America. Now, trust these days is a pretty low bar between the Supreme Court and the US president and the Congress, not so difficult to be among the most trusted. But when you go into the American Museum of natural history in New York, you don't question what you see. You look at that and you say, oh, I guess that's how it is. So museums put out messages. And so when messages are of the kind that Brian puts out, they become very powerful. So there are two other museums that I cite in the chapter, which I'll talk about briefly.
One is the speed museum. The speed museum is in Louisville, Kentucky and as your audience knows, Louisville is where Breonna Taylor was killed in the height of the Black Lives Matter fight.
And Stephen Riley. Well, let me step back a second and say that Ta Nehisi Coates commissioned Amy Sherrod. Amy Sherrold was the painter who did Michelle Obama's portrait, which is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. So ta Nehisi Coates goes to Amy Sherrold and said, we'd like to commission you to do a portrait of Breonna Taylor for the front page of the Vanity Fair magazine. And Amy Sherrod said, yes, and I'd like it shown in Louisville, Kentucky.
And so the speed museum, the largest and oldest cultural institution in Kentucky then, was run by a guy named Riley. And Riley asked himself what it meant to be a museum in the time of Black Lives Matter, when the fight was right at your doorstep. And what he did was something really quite extraordinary.
Those people that know about museums know that there's usually a three to five year, what they call exhibition Runway. It takes three to five years to get exhibitions in up and on the walls or in the galleries in museums. What Riley did was empty several of those galleries within three to four months. And then he put together two advisory boards. One was a national advisory board made up of artists who had family members killed or maimed by the police. And the other was a local community advisory board made up of mental health workers, legal advocates, community economic development folks, and the so forth. And the two of them would go back and forth about what the exhibit ought to be. So the national advisory board said, well, we ought to have 30 pieces of artwork. The local advisory board said, okay, and all the artists need to be black. So there's those kinds of discussions going on. And it was through these discussions and the in and the role of Tameka Palmer, who is Breonna Taylor's mother. It was through those discussions that they determined the content. They then hired a curator to curate it. Now, what makes that special is that usually museums allow curators kind of the independent power to decide what it was that the community was going to see, what was important to the community. This flipped that narrative on its head. And as a result, Siddiqua Reynolds, who was the head of the CEO of the Urban League in Louisville, said, this was the first time my people ever felt comfortable coming into this museum. So again, it was the notion of museums as a community building institution. I didn't talk about the Queen's Museum of Art. I can, but I'm sort of looking at my clock. I'm thinking we don't have a lot of time left.
[00:48:41] Speaker B: Not a lot of time there. Well, something for people to see in the book, a great discussion of a museum in Queens, working with the community.
There's a couple of things I'd like to get to, although it seems like we never have time to talk about everything again. My guest, Ken Grossinger, author, producer, strategist, and author of the book artworks, how organizers and artists are creating a better world together, and also a producer of two award winning Netflix documentaries, social dilemma and Bleeding Edge. And I did want to bring up the issue of philanthropy and where that's going and its funding for art and art connected to movements. But as a documentarian yourself, I have to bring up this, because documentaries have become a big deal right now, and yet there are challenges. So there's money out there now with Netflix, especially with other streaming services. But are these documentaries now bringing and supporting movements, or what are the challenges? There are challenges in making that work.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: Well, the biggest challenge is the monopoly that the streamers have established over documentary films. So that can become problematic because they can control content.
And so if I'm Netflix and I offer you $10 million to make a film, which typically takes me years and years and years to raise, that's a very seductive carrot. But the question is, what are we giving up for that carrot? And so that level of control is problematic.
And raising the money for these films is also problematic, because it's so difficult to do, and there are so many films out there.
Philanthropy, more generally, has a very troubled past, particularly cultural philanthropy. We know that museums, for instance, that it was white philanthropists investing in elite art institutions that was showing white artists, that got the museums underway. And so that legacy within philanthropy has led to a whole series of issues related to race, sex, identity.
And these are problematic areas.
And so they're slowly, very slowly, kind of a glacial pace. Slowly. There's been slowly a movement afoot to address that troubled past, and there have been strides that are really great. And one of the organizations I talk about in the book is called the Art for Justice Fund. And as I tell the story, it'll become apparent how important it is. And the art for justice fund was started by a philanthropist named Agnes Gund. Her friends called her Aggie. And so Aggie was a chair of the Museum of Modern Art.
She was a benefactor to many other museums and patron of the arts. And she reads Bryan Stevenson's book just mercy, and then sees Ava's Duvernay's film 13th, which traces the atlantic slave trade right up through mass incarceration and connects the dots, and she decides she wants to do something to end mass incarceration, that that's not where she had invested her time or her money, and she now wanted to do that. She calls up Darren Walker, who's the head of the Ford foundation, and says, darren, we have to do something to end mass incarceration. Darren convenes a meeting that includes Elizabeth Alexander, the head of the Mellon foundation, other foundation executives, and activists like Bryan Stevenson. And Aggie says, I have an idea.
What if I sold one of my paintings, and we use that to create the art for justice fund? So Aggie was friends with Roy Lichtenstein, and in 1962, I think it was bought, could have been 63, bought a piece by Roy Lichtenstein called the masterpiece. And, of course, Roy is no longer with us, but his wife Dorothy still is. And she calls up Dorothy and says to Dorothy, how would you feel about me selling Roy's painting to raise money to end mass incarceration?
Dorothy loves the idea. And Aggie sells that for $160 million and invest 100 of that 160 into an organization that she called the Art for Justice Fund. And what made that fund so unique is that it wasn't the typical foundation where you'd have a program officer that met with a bunch of potential grantees, then wrote up a proposal to their program director, who then, in turn, submitted it to the CEO, who would in turn, submit it to the board, and they would decide.
What made this so special is that 50% of the grants went immediately and directly to the families of people who were incarcerated. And the other 50% were informed by those same folks because they were closest to the ground, and they understood the problem better than anybody else. And so they were the closest to the solution as well. And so we no longer have a situation where the program officer is calling the shots as if it's their money, but we've got the community calling it shots. And so that's a really important direction for philanthropy to take. And it's incumbent upon us, since most philanthropy does not take that direction, to tell them that's important to do so. When I interviewed Dana Borland, who was a vice president of the JPB foundation in New York, and asked her why she funds art and culture, she said, it's because the organizers, and particularly the environmental justice organizers that she funds, said they can't do their work without art and culture being a part of it. They not only want to touch the mind, they want to touch the heart. And so it's promising. We'll have to see where it goes.
[00:55:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's such an important statement to make because, you know, you can argue with people who are set in their ways and opinions and, you know, come to loggerheads so often and just trying to convince people that they're getting it wrong. But a lot of times art in the visual images or the songs, you know, hit people in a different way and might at least open the door a little bit to thinking about things a little differently. We only have a few minutes left. Don't want to leave off that you have a great afterword there with artists and organizers talking with each other and the challenges of your creative vision, using your creative vision to serve the community, but also having control over that vision as well and not having that co opted. But just again, you talk about the challenges, but I think the book in general has such a positive take on ways that we can be communicating with each other and addressing these really important social issues. Any last things you'd like to say to folks?
[00:56:48] Speaker A: I think that's a good note to leave it on. I won't talk about chapter seven other than to say it's a dialogue between organizers and artists. And it looks at the question that you just raised, which is what facilitates collaboration and what stands in the way to make this change. If folks want to learn more about the book, they can go to my website, which is artworksbook.com. you can learn about the book there, you can read some book reviews. You could even purchase the book there and you could also find the playlist there. So I commend it to everybody.
[00:57:26] Speaker B: Yeah, and I will link to that as well when we put the podcast up.
Global stuff is now available as a podcast through most of the platforms, so hopefully we'll get the word out about that as well.
Thanks again, Ken, for making the time to be with us and really appreciate the work that you're doing there.
[00:57:52] Speaker A: Likewise, Jimmy. I really appreciate your work. The kind of work that you're doing is so important in an age where we're that's dominated by Fox TV and other national outlets like that. To have a community radio station that people can hear the real story from is so important. So thank you for the work you're doing.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: Thank you. And this has been global stuff. Thanks. Michael McCaskill.
[00:58:17] Speaker D: This has been a K Mud podcast. To listen to other shows and more episodes of this show. Find us on all the platforms where you get your podcast and also on our website, kmud.org.
