Episode 193
193: Eric Gottesman Asks: Whose Questions Get Asked -Whose Story is Told?
What happens an artist realizes that they can never
be the only one with questions?
From that reckoning, artist Eric Gottesman spent the next twenty-five years rethinking what an artist with a camera, or a big idea is actually for. In this conversation with Bill Cleveland, Gottesman traces his path from documentary photographer to collaborative image-maker in Addis Ababa's AIDS-affected communities, and eventually to co-founding For Freedoms, the artist-led initiative that has turned billboards, town halls, and even a Super PAC into tools for civic discourse.
This is a conversation about authorship, collectivity, and the culture of inquiry at the heart of both artmaking and a thriving democracy.
In this episode we explore:
- How asking the right question often matters more than delivering the right answer.
- Why Eric Gottesman says he has never made art alone. And why he thinks that's true for everyone.
- A “composite nation:” Drawing on Frederick Douglass, Gottesman is now developing projects that imagine an American identity built from multiplicity and complexity rather than a single official story.
Notable Mentions
People
Eric Gottesman — Artist, educator, writer, and organizer whose collaborative work addresses nationalism, migration, structural violence, history, and civic life. He is a co-founder of For Freedoms.
Wendy Ewald — Photographer and one of Gottesman’s mentors. Her decades of co-authored photography projects challenge conventional divisions between photographer, subject, observer, and author.
Hank Willis Thomas — Conceptual artist and For Freedoms co-founder whose work examines identity, history, media, popular culture, and representation.
Claudia L. Peña — Executive director of For Freedoms, UCLA law lecturer, and practitioner of transformative and restorative justice. She appears with Gottesman and Thomas in the episode’s Skoll World Forum excerpt.
Baalu Girma — Influential Ethiopian journalist and novelist who disappeared after publishing Oromay, his critique of the Derg regime and its military campaign in Eritrea.
Emily Shur — Photographer who worked with Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, and Wyatt Gallery to create contemporary photographic versions of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms.
Wyatt Gallery — Photographer, For Freedoms co-founder, and producer of the contemporary Four Freedoms project.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph — Spoken-word artist, writer, librettist, and cultural strategist who developed the six questions at the heart of America, the Beautiful.
aja monet — Poet, recording artist, storyteller, and organizer appearing in the October 3, 2026, America(!) the Beautiful(?) performance, which is part of For Freedom’s America, the Beautiful project.
Derek Goldman — Director, playwright, educator, and co-founder of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. Gottesman and Cleveland cite his emphasis on care in cultural work.
Ariel Fristoe — Founder and artistic director of Out of Hand Theater, whose work brings theater, social justice, and civic engagement together.
Organizations, Institutions, and Places
For Freedoms — Artist-led civic organization founded in 2016. It uses public art, billboards, exhibitions, town halls, and artist commissions to encourage listening, inquiry, belonging, and civic participation.
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University — The center at Duke University where Gottesman began his work in Ethiopia in partnership with Save the Children.
Save the Children — International humanitarian organization that sent Gottesman to photograph the effects of drought in Ethiopia shortly after his graduation from Duke.
The Charles F. Kettering Foundation — The Charles F. Kettering Foundation, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, operating foundation with a mission to advance inclusive democracies worldwide by fostering citizen engagement, promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism.
Democracy and the Arts — The Kettering Foundation’s focus area for integrating the power of the arts into democratic life locally, nationally, and globally.
Corcoran School of the Arts & Design — George Washington University school where Gottesman serves as the W.W. Corcoran Visiting Professor in Community Engagement and where For Freedoms has been in residence.
Future Currents — Organization that helps movement leaders prepare for uncertain conditions and collaboratively imagine more inclusive, just, and democratic futures.
U.S. Agency for International Development — Federal agency to which evidence of the Ethiopian drought was submitted to help prompt an international aid response. The episode conversation takes note of the agency’s dismantling and changed status.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — The city in which Gottesman began collaborating with people living with HIV and with children whose parents had died of AIDS.
Somali Region, Ethiopia — The drought-affected eastern region where Gottesman first confronted the power imbalances and ethical contradictions of humanitarian photography.
Sheshatshiu, Labrador, Canada — Innu community where Gottesman later collaborated with Wendy Ewald and young residents on a cross-generational photographic and community-curated project.
Projects, Artworks, and Events
For Freedoms at the 2024 Skoll World Forum — The episode includes an excerpt from this presentation by Eric Gottesman, Hank Willis Thomas, and Claudia Peña about art, interdependence, democracy, and social change. The forum took place in Oxford (not London as stated in the podcast).
Contemporary Four Freedoms — For Freedoms’ expansive reimagining of Rockwell’s four paintings. More than 100 participants created 82 images representing a broader range of American identities; its Freedom of Worship appeared on the cover of TIME.
Question Bridge: Black Males — Collaborative project initiated by Chris Johnson and later developed with Hank Willis Thomas, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Kamal Sinclair. Recorded questions and answers facilitate dialogue among Black men across geographic, political, class, and generational differences.
America, the Beautiful — Nationwide civic-art initiative created by For Freedoms for the United States’ 250th anniversary. Its six questions invite communities to examine freedom, national identity, the American promise, and who is included in the country’s future.
They Used to Walk Here, not Anymore — For Freedoms presentation of the collaborative, cross-generational Innu photography work involving Zak Hajjaoui, Wendy Ewald, and Eric Gottesman.
Gottesman’s forthcoming Corcoran exhibition — A solo exhibition concerning Baalu Girma and the legacy of Oromay is mentioned as forthcoming in October.
Publications, Speeches, and Foundational References
Oromay by Baalu Girma — Banned 1983 novel about repression, propaganda, and war under Ethiopia’s Derg regime. Girma disappeared in 1984 and is widely believed to have been abducted because of the book.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech — Roosevelt’s 1941 address identified freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear as fundamental freedoms for people everywhere.
Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms — Four paintings inspired by Roosevelt’s speech and published by The Saturday Evening Post in 1943. Their narrow representation of American life inspired the For Freedoms reinterpretations.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission — The 2010 Supreme Court case that expanded protections for independent political expenditures. For Freedoms initially adopted the form of a super PAC partly to question the resulting relationship between money and political speech.
Frederick Douglass’s “Our Composite Nationality” — Douglass’s vision of a pluralistic nation informs Gottesman’s use of the phrase “composite nation” to describe an American identity capable of incorporating multiplicity and complexity.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell — The Skoll presentation invokes Orwell’s warning about controlling the past, present, and future. Retained without a link because no sufficiently direct, universally accessible edition was confirmed.
“The Creative Process” by James Baldwin — Source of the presentation’s observation that the artist’s struggle for integrity reflects the universal human struggle to become fully human.
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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.
Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.
Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.
Transcript
Eric Gottesman
[:From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art Is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders.
My name is Bill Cleveland.
This episode is part of a special Art in Action series produced in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation's Democracy and the Arts program. In these episodes, we'll be speaking with artists, cultural organizers, and arts leaders who are navigating and challenging current efforts to limit free creative expression and free speech.
Together, we'll explore what freedom of expression means in practice, not as an abstract right, but as a lived responsibility at the heart of democratic life.
n in Nashua, New Hampshire in:But he took a different path. As a young man at Duke University, he studied history, literature, and political science, and when he graduated in 1998, he went to work in the office of Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. A real go-getter, headed, it seemed, toward law or government. Certainly not a camera. But then in 1999, that all changed. Duke's Center for Documentary Studies had a partnership with the international aid organization Save the Children, and they sent Eric to Ethiopia as a photographer. He went, by his own description, naive, curious, and largely unprepared for what he'd found.
And what he did find didn't just give him a body of work. It gave him a set of questions about power, authorship, and who a camera really serves. Questions that have shaped everything he's made since, from years of collaborative photography in Addis Ababa to the founding nearly two decades later of the civic art project For Freedoms.
So that's exactly where our conversation begins, with a young photographer, a drought in the Somali region of Ethiopia, and the moment everything he thought he knew about picture-making started to come apart.
Part One: Curiosity and a Camera
[:I know that you went to Ethiopia as you've described, a sort of naive person with a lot of curiosity and an interest in making a difference as a budding photographer. But the project itself turned out to be something way more than just a documentary project of young people in the AIDS crisis. Could you talk about how and why it changed so much for you?
[:The doctors would measure everybody's vital statistics and health indicators, and my job was to take photographs of the most starving people that I could find to put into reports that would then go to what was then USAID, which no longer exists, and that would trigger an international response to allocate dollars to this very desperate situation of these people. As I was standing over some of the most desperate people in the country, on Earth really, I realized that whole process that I was involved in worked — and that it was super messed up.
There was something about images that did trigger a whole set of systems to address an urgent need, and yet images circulated within those systems in such a way that it allowed for the creation of that urgent need in the first place. And so, there were all these power relationships that I didn't at the time understand, but I just knew something was wrong about how, those images, were being used and being made and there was just something wrong and exploitative about that.
in that moment in Ethiopia in:[00:06:42] Bill Cleveland: Could you talk a little bit about the transition from the behind-the-camera authority of the photographer to the collaborator? The story-revealing collaborator — that's a pretty amazing shift in the moment that you were in as a newcomer, as a stranger, and not even as a veteran photographer. But, and maybe that was part of the deal, is that you were more interested in getting the, the right story revealed in the right way than, than just fulfilling your mission, your assignment.
[:And much later I found out that questions are the basis of all artmaking. And so for me, that shift from being behind the lens to being in community with people who were helping me make pictures was not that big a shift actually, because I was never interested in imposing a vision. I was more interested in asking those questions, and the camera became an excuse to do that.
And then the other thing that your question makes me think of is there was this kind of strange distance that often, through this kind of code of journalistic ethics, demanded that the photographer remain separate from the subject. But I'm being generous when I say it comes from journalistic ethics. I think that's sometimes that's the case. I think other times it was the case that photography has been used as an instrument of colonial violence. And so I think there's a certain amount of deprogramming, unlearning, and relearning that has to happen to think about what the possibilities are if the tools of power, which include the camera, are used to undermine the structures of power.
And so, for me, that's a through line that runs not only through my work in Ethiopia or with photography, but up to the current day through my work with For Freedoms and thinking about how to take some of these instruments of power and use them creatively to shift how power is structured.
[:[00:09:57] Eric Gottesman: Yeah, I think it's impossible to make something alone. And I think it's really interesting from an artistic standpoint to imagine what the world might be like if we started thinking about it in that way. We often think of authorship as a valuing of the individual. And it is true that there is value to the individual voice and to the necessary and urgent, expression of ideas that go against communal norms. But I think there's been this false dichotomy between, “Oh yeah, either it's an individual genius that goes into a studio and emerges with a masterpiece or it's some kind of community process.” Right?
And I think art history over the last couple decades has come to understand that although there's still a cult of individuality reinforced by the art market, reinforced by how artists are lionized and made into icons. But in reality I can't even conceive of what it would mean for an individual person to make something entirely alone. First of all, we'd never see it because the observation of it itself is an act of community. Second of all, there would be no materials because all materials are co-created, if not by the earth by other people. And third, all these ideas that we put out are formed, through discourse, through conversation, through learning from each other, through learning from each other's failures.
So I think it's actually — like me moving from behind the camera to in front of the camera —was less of a big shift, I think, in my own personal life because I was never that . . .. I didn't spend that much time behind the camera, honestly. However, collectively, globally, I think making that shift from imagining our achievements as communal and collective rather than individual is the single most important challenge that, we as a species are facing.
[:[00:12:52] Eric Gottesman: It's a good question. I think what we're seeing right now here in the United States is this kind of ultra optimization culture of individual genius or individual achievement or greatness. I don't know. Like, where does that valorization of the individual come from? I think it ultimately comes from this moment, a kind of global capitalism that has crept in,
[:There's no doubt that it's easier to garner the attention of, "the audience" when Odysseus is at the center of the story, right? but, what I'm hearing you say is, number one, that's often not the real story. And number two, if we have the patience and the trust, the collective story will often be much more meaningful and powerful. Does that ring true?
[:I mean, for instance, like this project that I've been working on recently in Ethiopia is based on a novel written by Baalu Girma, was a novelist, writer in Ethiopia. It was published in 1983. He was killed for having written it because it was a critique of the communist regime at the time in Ethiopia. So it was very important that his individual voice was foregrounded, right, in that moment. And the way that we tell the story about what that meant and the legacy of his novel, through many different artistic voices that I've been collaborating with over the last 15 years, that is also important.
[So it's not that the subject always has to be only the collective, but rather that the collective has the power to co-create a set of stories, even about an individual or about the collective, that can add up to more than what we already know.
::And so, you get singularity, supporting collectivity, and you get collectivity begetting singularity. They're intrinsically connected at all times. I feel like what you're saying is, yes and yes. Great story. Here's a hero. This is terrific. Wonderful. Where'd this hero come from?
Ha. Oh, that's another chapter in the same story. And, if a story has impact, if it's just his story or her story, then I suppose you could say you might learn something from him or her, or you might be entertained. But if you also go, "Oh, yeah, I know this story. This story is a part of my story," then you're off to the races.
[:They undergird the principles that led to the laws that govern us. But the things that we talk about are individual rights or, really, it's, “What's that in service of?” Like what was the innovation that democracy was providing to the world? It was a way of, resolving difference, in common and with self-correction. Like we are going to fail at this, so we're going to build in elections so that we can keep doing it differently. I guess I'm drawing this connection to asking questions because I think there is a sense of iterative building over time that is part of what I imagine my work to be and is connected to the work of building democracy that people have done for a long time.
[:Part Two: For Freedoms
So I'd like to segue to For Freedoms which I think, and at least in terms of the trajectory that I'm aware of, seems like a pretty interesting leap, where the artwork isn't necessarily an object. Sometimes it's a billboard, sometimes it's a — I don't know — a town hall, a conversation, a network, even a political action committee. So when you began to move in that direction, did your definition of what an artist is start to shift or change?
[:That's what qualified them as art. but the form of them might have been a workshop or the form of them might have been ephemeral in some way. It might have been a discussion. it may also be a set of photographs or an installation or something like that. So it could fit within traditional artistic forms or not. My friend Hank Willis Thomas and I were having a conversation in 2014, and he was working in a very different way, but also navigating, the relationship between community and art and politics and so we thought about doing something together. What we ended up doing was creating, basically, what we thought of as a sort of performance project, which was For Freedoms.
First, it started as a super PAC because we were trying to point to the fact that, just a couple years after Citizens United, this insane equivalency of speech and money. We were pointing to that by occupying that space of a super PAC, but later we evolved into other forms. We had to wind down the super PAC for various reasons. But yes, it was a different kind of project for me because the goal of it was to create civic discourse.
That was in common with my other projects. But with my other projects, they were rooted in community in one place, For Freedoms was very broad. it was broadcasting. We were using the nation as a parameter for the work. We were working in all 50 states. We were using mass media. We were putting billboards, which would be temporary over the course of a month with artists' work on it, where we'd give them the prompt to ask a question to the public. And so we were trying to put artistic discourse and critical thinking into public space, into public conversation. That's very different than working within a very small community to engage all the people in that community. But the similarity is that we were trying to take this process, this creative process, and really use it to spark larger questions in a broader way.
[:[00:23:11] Eric Gottesman: As someone said earlier this week, democracy is a story, and we've been working with artists to reimagine that story, to promote a vision of interdependence. One which values the ways we are connected, not the ways that we are disconnected. There are things of value that lie beyond democracy, and that's what we are trying to model.
[:[00:24:24] Eric Gottesman: How do we bridge binaries?
[:[00:24:29] Eric Gottesman: What's the value of that?
[:[00:24:33] Eric Gottesman: And what happens when we realize that I am you and you are me?
[:[00:24:51] Claudia Peña: Who taught you to love?
[:[00:24:56] Eric Gottesman: Can we imagine a world where love overrules?
[:[00:25:43] Claudia Peña: Indeed. Thanks.
[:We've done town hall meetings led by artists. we've done hundreds of those, usually around, one of the topics related to the Four Freedoms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. We also did, like I said, billboards where we put artists' voices into public space. We've done exhibitions. We've done artist commissions and public art projects. We've done major convenings, but always with the idea that there was a way that art and artists could build greater and deeper civic engagement, but also with the recognition that already there exists an artistic and cultural infrastructure throughout the United States, which includes institutions, individuals, communities. And already within that creative infrastructure, there was a huge amount of creative activity happening. And so if we could harness that, it would actually enable us to ask bigger questions, that we could then, ideally, shift how people respond to those questions.
Bill Cleveland: So can you give a specific example of one of these projects that had a question that mattered to a community? What I'm interested in is the civic synergy, because you're trying to build some currents and ripples that spread and are sustained.
re made by Norman Rockwell in:[00:28:12] Bill Cleveland: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[:And so we ended up making about 80 of these images, and they were all different versions of them, very faithful to the formal way that they were made originally, and I credit that to the photographer Emily Shure, who worked really diligently on that, and Wyatt Gallery, as well as Hank Willis Thomas.
But I think what happened by putting a different kind of representation into that very recognizable form of Americana, it opened up a lot of questions, some of which people were trying to ask already but weren't getting traction on. We had one person at a relatively large civic, civil society foundation say, "You know, I've funded hundreds of research papers on, multiracial democracy, but of that one image that you guys made of freedom of worship (which ended up on the cover of Time Magazine) he said, "That makes all the arguments that I've been trying to make through all this research, and advocacy."
So I think the question really was about, “What is representation? How do we better represent all of us in a democracy?” But it opened up all these other questions and other ways that people were able to come to the table, literally and and bring their questions with them.
[:Often when our debates get translated into the us-them, dichotomous push-pull dramas, you mentioned people get forced into a non-understanding mode of being in the world. And I think the opposite happens when, like you said, an image or a song hits you and it's like, “Boom, yeah, I get this. I'm in this. I'm a part of this.” People are emotionally and intellectually stimulated before they get to that place in their brain that wants to separate everything into that right wrong left, right way of thinking. So, I think what you are doing is thrilling, but I'm afraid that we don't have enough exposure to this kind of work for people to heal the crazy, wounds that we're creating for each other in this time.
Part Three: The Composite Nation
[:[00:33:10] Eric Gottesman: Yeah. So my studio right now is right across the street from the White House. For Freedoms and I are in residence at the Corcoran College of Arts and Design at GW, which is right — literally right — across 17th Street from the west entrance of the White House. And so it is very psychically present, when there are executive orders, attacking some of these, some of these cultural practices and artists and museums. But we are also in partnership through that residency, working with federal museums. And so I also get to see how, all this stuff that we're talking about is so administratively complex and it's also culturally really complex. In some cases, I feel like it is important that everybody feels represented by these institutions. And, also, I find that the kind of tit-for-tat propaganda of, “Well, if you have this, you can't have this unless we have that.” is missing the point in terms of how art actually operates.
I totally am sympathetic to the idea that people don't feel like they have a place in these institutions and that art is considered elitist. I think that is a very fair critique. I don't think the solution is then ban art or make art more reflective of a different set of political values, right?
[:[00:35:41] Eric Gottesman: Yes, exactly. And also, how is it legible? How do you make it accessible to understand? This is now the artist's challenge, I think. How do you make it accessible to understand stories that may buck what you already know in a way that doesn't alienate somebody and brings them in? And that is a very, very hard pedagogical and aesthetic challenge because I think we're wired to recoil from things that feel alien and different and hard.
[:[00:37:01] Eric Gottesman: It takes a lot of care to make people feel comfortable in that uncertainty, and I don't think our culture and country have been very good at caring for people that have been kind of left out. And so, probably a bigger thing is that the tools that we use to communicate with one another are now engineered for a lack of care and for, hyper-individualization, right? But that aside, I think people have really felt alienated and harmed and not cared for. So if something new is brought to somebody that feels, like, hurt, it's that much harder to be curious about it or embrace it. So, part of the work, I think, for us who are making culture is, creating the conditions of care that allow people to sit with their own questions
[:So Eric, what are you excited about right now in your work?
[:One of those projects, for example, that we're working on with Hank Willis Thomas is a revision of a project that he worked on a while ago with a, a group of artists called Question Bridge. We're working on using questions as a way to engage Americans with each other across differences across the country and so that is a project I'm, super excited about. It is very hard, very complex. Actually it's very simple, but it's very hard still. So that's a conundrum. But that's something I'm really excited about. I'm also excited about a, a project that we've been working on with a group of movement organizers called Future Currents and the artist, Mark Bamuthi Joseph, who was most recently at the Kennedy Center. He has developed six questions, that were a reflection on the 250th anniversary of America. and we've been turning that into a series of programs called America, the Beautiful.
And the questions are questions like, "When in your American life have you felt most free?" Or “If money were light, how much would America have to spend? and “For whom America, the Beautiful?" These are the kinds of questions that are open-ended, but really big questions that force us into thinking about our relationship to one another.
So, we have a performance coming up on October 3rd in Los Angeles that's going to be with the artist Saja Monet and Bamuthi and the hip-hop Artist X and DJ Makai and some other artists that we're working with out there, and that's going to be at the Fourth Theater, so I'm really excited about that as well.
[:[00:40:41] Eric Gottesman: We've always done projects in relationship to political elections but not directly related to them. We've never been advocating for one side or another. We are very anti-partisan in the sense that we don't believe in partisanship. We believe these divisions are artificial.
But that said, people get motivated around these moments and these questions that we're asking are questions that help rethink how people are relating to these moments. And so, yes, the timing of October 3rd is important. And just one more thing to mention. I am going be having a solo show of my work on this Ethiopian author in October in at the Corcoran.
[:[00:41:36] Eric Gottesman: Thank you. Thank you so much, Bill.
[:Art Is Change is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. We'd like to thank the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for partnering with us for this Art in Action series. Please know that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They're not the views and opinions of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The foundation's partnership with us for this podcast is not an endorsement of its content. If you're interested in learning more about the foundation and its Democracy and the Arts program, please visit kettering.org or go to the link in our show notes, which also includes links to the many people, places, events, and publications mentioned in this episode.
Thanks also to the Art Is Change team. Our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart, and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of Luke 235. So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.
