Episode 38
Episode 38: Beverly Naidus - Rewilding Our Muses
BIO
Beverly Naidus's art life has straddled the socially engaged margins of the art world, artful activism collaborations, and community-based art projects. Her audience participatory installations, artists books, photo-text and multimedia projects have dealt with the anxieties of being unemployed, nightmares about nuclear war, ways to transform body hate, using consumerism to numb ourselves from the extractive insanity of our capitalist economy, how grief and gratitude weave together in the climate emergency, the epigenetic trauma of living under white oppression and the joyful resilience of the marginalized. She often collaborates to develop creative strategies that might heal trauma, to plant seeds of activism, and imagine different outcomes. Early on, she discovered that her vulnerable story telling could generate stories from others, sometimes catalyzing positive actions. She has shared her work in city streets, alternative spaces, public parks, university galleries, community centers, and major museums. Her work has been written about in many books and journals and has developed an international following. After vibrant chapters in the New York and Los Angeles art worlds, including fruitful periods in other parts of North America, she has made a home in the Pacific Northwest since 2003.
Naidus received her BA from Carleton College, and an MFA with a full teaching fellowship from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. She taught art as a subversive activity at NYC museums, the Institute for Social Ecology, California State University, Long Beach where she had tenure, Goddard College, Hampshire College and Carleton College. From 2003 until 2020, she was the only tenured artist on the UW Tacoma faculty where she shaped an innovative, interdisciplinary studio arts curriculum in art for social change and healing. She is the author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame (a book that helped to shift studio arts curriculum in many places). She has written & published many essays on eco-art and social practice as well as a few works of speculative fiction, and she is currently writing, Rewilding Our Muses: Creative Strategies for Navigating the “End of the World” and is looking for a publisher. While co-directing the non-profit, SEEDS (Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School) with her husband, Dr. Bob Spivey, they are leading workshops online with a focus on art that deals with climate and racial justice and have formed an international collective. They are currently facilitating an in-person “story hive project” with neighbors and are planning more “pandemic processing and dreaming into the future we want” art workshops to happen in coming months. Her solo show, “The Dead Ocean Scrolls and other Possible Futures” will be on exhibit at the Tacoma Community College Gallery in November 2021.
For more information visit her website: www.beverlynaidus.net, Instagram: #utopias4all Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/92685388277 or Beverly Naidus https://www.facebook.com/utopias4all
Notable Mentions
COCA: Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle: CoCA serves the Pacific Northwest as a catalyst and forum for the advancement, development, and understanding of Contemporary Art.
ONCA gallery in Brighton, England: O N C A is a Brighton based arts charity that bridges social and environmental justice issues with creativity.
EXTREME MAKEOVER: Reimagining the Port of Tacoma Free of Fossil Fuels 2018 to the present.: This community-based art project reimagines the Port of Tacoma, an industrial port built on tribal land in violation of the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854. The soil and water been contaminated by years of dumping and now hosts several designated superfund sites. In recent years, the community has been fighting the installation of new and dangerous fossil fuel projects in the Port and Extreme Makeover arose out of that resistance.
Joanna Macy, author & teacher, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her thirteen books, which include three volumes of poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke with translation and commentary.Thich Nhat Hanh: Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is a global spiritual leader, poet, and peace activist, renowned for his powerful teachings and bestselling writings on mindfulness and peace. A gentle, humble monk, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called him “an Apostle of peace and nonviolence” when nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Exiled from his native Vietnam for almost four decades, Thich Nhat Hanh has been a pioneer bringing Buddhism and mindfulness to the West, and establishing an engaged Buddhist community for the 21st Century.
adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Grievers (the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and Emergent Strategy podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.
Cuban missile crisis: The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962 (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre), the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, tr. Karibsky krizis, IPA: [kɐˈrʲipskʲɪj ˈkrʲizʲɪs]), or the Missile Scare, was a 1-month, 4 day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba. Despite the short time frame, the Cuban Missile Crisis remains a defining moment in U.S. national security and nuclear war preparation. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.[3]
Blue Mountain Center “ offers a unique refuge to artists, activists, organizers and cultural workers who produce transformative work for their times. We trust residents and conference attendees to choose the rhythm they need to counter the pressures of the world, whether through collaboration or solitude, work or rest, in a nurturing environment where they can connect to themselves, local and global movements, the land and story of the Adirondacks, and the growing BMC community?”
Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015) was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist.[4] She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s.[5] In the 1960s she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction.[6] By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American Movement. See Also: The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Born in Pasadena in 1947, she was raised by her mother and her grandmother. She was the author of several award-winning novels including PARABLE OF THE SOWER (1993), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and PARABLE OF THE TALENTS (1995) winner of the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novel published that year. She was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future.
Octavia's Parables: Beginning with The Parable of the Sower, our hosts Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown are examining each of Octavia E Butler’s published works, chapter by chapter. Our podcast summarizes the storyline, places it in a strategic context for those intending to change the world, and provides questions to help bring Butler's ideas to life.
ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes (also known as ZAD NDDL) is the most well-known 'Zone to Defend' in France. Located in the Loire-Atlantique department near to Nantes, it is a very large, mostly agricultural terrain of 1,650 hectares (4,080 acres) which became nationally famous in the early 2010s and has resisted several concerted attempts by the French state to evict it.[1]
For decades there was local resistance to plans to build a new airport in the rural commune of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In the 2000s much of the land was squatted as farmers were evicted. The new occupants set up autonomous self-sufficient structures such as a communal bakery and animal husbandry. Attempts to evict the squatters saw largescale counter-mobilisations in 2012 and 2018. French president Emmanuel Macron announced in January 2018 that the plans for the airport would be shelved and the already existing airport at Nantes would be redeveloped instead. Many of the remaining projects at the ZAD then engaged in a process of legalisation.
Jay Jordan and Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during Copenhagen's UN climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, building an illegal lighthouse on the site of an airport control tower, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station and refusing to be censored by London's Tate Modern museum, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination has been walking on the tightrope between art and activism since 2004.
“We bring together cultural workers and activists to co-design and carry out creative forms of direct-action which attempt to be as joyful as they are politically effective. We train people in entangling resistance and creativity and building resilient horizontal forms of organising. We call our work experiments, because we believe courage and creativity are fed when one claims the right to fail and we believe the role of art in this era of the Capitalocene is not to show the world to people but to transform it together.”
Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues. On Democracy Now!, you’ll hear a diversity of voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes provocative perspective on global events.
Emergent Strategy Podcast: Is the official podcast of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute - each episode we dive deeply into the life, practice and experimentation of a person or group who we see as living embodiments of emergent strategy. Emergent Strategy is about how we get in right relationship with change - what are the simple interactions that can shift and shape complex systems and patterns? Hosts are Sage Crump, Mia Herndon and adrienne maree brown.
Deep Adaptation: This Facebook page is part of the larger Deep Adaptation Forum (https://www.deepadaptation.info/), an international virtual community which includes multiple other platforms and offerings. This is where we share information on our inner and outer deep adaptation to unfoldinsocietal breakdown due to climate change. We share on:
- The emotional, psychological and spiritual aspects of facing societal collapse;
- Practical ways to support wellbeing ahead of/during collapse, at household, community, national, or international scale. We welcome collective action in a spirit of compassion.
- We don’t share news on the state of the environment or climate here, nor on examples of social breakdown; in time, our feeds will be full of such news. We’re here to support deep adaptation to the situation, not to chronicle it.
The Following are mentioned in our description of Change the Story / Change the World's second...
Transcript
Overwhelmed. Can't even look at the news. Monsters in power with fingers on buttons. When will the nightmare be over? One paycheck away from the street, sea levels, rising the soil, the water, the air, all trashed. Hurricanes one after another. Overwhelmed. Ice caps are already melting. Everything is extracted. Everywhere rape. We should just go extinct. Radioactive oceans. Drowning in plastic. No one can save us.
Moving forward through a forest of pain, the narrative shifts into a more hopeful voice. The next sign says “welcome. You are good. You didn't have to earn it”. The next says, “imagine yourself as ancestors”. And then there is an instruction. “What precious thing would you like the future generations to know about that may or may not exist 150 years from now?”
Then we move into an open art making space where we're invited to create an artifact that symbolizes that precious thing. The camera zooms in on the studio, packed with people making icons, talismans, and collages in response to the invitation.
In the next scene, we see a white lettered message on a deep red wall.
It says “we almost didn't make it, but you did not give up. And we are alive in your future. What choices you make and what actions you take may make it possible to not only exist, but thrive.” The next image is a montage of created artifacts and an instruction that asks us to insert into the artifact, a commitment to an action that you will take that might promote the ability of future generations to thrive.
Fade to black roll credits.
BC: If you think about it, 10,000 years ago in prehistory, the pre-art artists had a lot of jobs. You know, keeping track of the spirit world, maintaining the ritual, fire, healing the sick, holding history, rituals, and celebrations, preparing those young ones for adulthood, doing all those rights of passage, and all those activities related to the fertility of the fields and the families, and maybe most importantly helping the community come to terms with the really hard edges of life on earth. Of the fearful mysteries of life and death, and the often inexplicable and destructive aspects of human nature itself. Of course, that was a long time ago. But that doesn't mean it's not still needed, especially these days. Our guest artists, educator, community healer, and provocateur, Beverly Naidus not only knows this she's been functioning in that essential role for most of her life.
Not surprisingly, she has a lot of good stories to tell. So, have a seat and have a listen. This is Change the Story, Change the World. My name is. Bill Cleveland
Part 1: Feeling Magic
[: [: [: [:It started in a very personal way and moved into the collective quite quickly. And, I discovered that when I told a story well, and it was vulnerable and compelling, that people felt moved to share their story as well. And eventually I had to create devices and forms for that to happen, because I wanted people to feel invited in. Snd games emerged, and subversive forms of different kinds, pretend forms, things that look like one thing and we're another.
There’s a lot of trickster in my work, and because I want to bring in audiences who don't think that art is for them. I've done this with students, as well as the general public. I want people to feel welcome, and curious, and recognize that, we share something in common.
[: [:[00:07:32] BC: If someone were to say, oh, you're an artist or you're involved in the arts. what is your practice? what, what history with art forms do you have.
[:In college I was forced to major in something, so I became a visual artist and as I became a feminist, I was a visual artist telling the stories of what it means to grow up in a female body.
In graduate school, I found ways to connect visual art with my writing, and my performing, by doing audience participatory installations. And as I continued doing that kind of work, I realized that I was always going to be shifting forms. Because it depended on the context. It depended on the audience. Who was the family I wanted to create in this particular space? I grew up, at a time when I was lucky, because there was a cohort of the counterculture, and we were all trying to subvert and a lot of different ways.
I also. have a family history of a father who was blacklisted for being an anti-fascist and a scientist, and this was a family secret. I didn't find out until I was 32 what his real story was. It was only because I was getting recognition in the art world, and they were describing me as a political artist in articles in the New York Times, and my mother was freaking out and had no idea. I thought she should be dancing in the street. I said, “wow, this is an article that includes commentary about Goya and Picasso, and I have a paragraph in it?” Her response was, “you'll never get a job, you’ll be on lists. And I was like, “what are you talking about?” And, ironically, of course, two years later I was hired by Cal State Long Beach, and I asked them why they hired me, and they said “we wanted a New York artist, and you've been written about in the New York Times.”
So I called my mom and I said, mom, I got a job, and it's because of that article that you were so worried about, and she said, what are you talking about? She had no memory of what she had said, but in any case, I think. it's a very interesting thing. People here in the Northwest are always asking me, “what kind of artist are you?”, and I have to say, I'm the kind of artist who lets my content determine the form. [The type] who lets my content determine the context, and it's always changing and it confuses people sometimes, and then I talk about artists books and photo text, and what it means to work in community, and then maybe if I talk about the actual content, that I've made work about nuclear war and my nightmares about it, I've made work about being unemployed, I’ve made work about my alienation and in consumer culture, I've made work about body hates about recovering from an environmental illness, and I've made work about helping Tacoma reimagine our very toxic port of Tacoma, and think about ways to heal it and ways to honor the Puyallup Tribe whose land has been violated thousands of times.
I have to get into the actual substance and steer away from the form for people to recognize what it is.
[: [:Part 2: Crayons and Neighbors
[:So, who are your students and how are they responding to all this?
[:I had a very unique opportunity because they said when they hired me, you can teach whatever you want, and I'm in an interdisciplinary program. And so I said to them, okay, you teach, about cultural identity and race and I've made art about that. So I'm going to do a course on that, and I'm going to do a course on body image because I've made art about that. And you teach courses on. So here's my bridge work between their curriculum and what I've actually made art about myself.
I knew that the students who were coming, many of them are first-generation students, the first ones in their family to go to college. A lot of immigrants and children of immigrants, people from military families, many who come from fundamentalist backgrounds, or very right wing background. So it was a really, for me, it was being on the front line. I loved it. I loved working there in that way. And, they would come into class and they'd say, I'm not an artist, and I'd say, okay so let's talk about what that means. What does it mean for you to say that about yourself? And do you remember what you were like when you were four, and somebody gave you a box of crayons. Did you say I'm not an artist? No. I'm giving you a box of crayons, except it's not literally a box of crayons. I want to bring your inner four year old into the room and trust that he, she, or they knows what to do. And, I'm going to show you some work that deals with the topic.
We're going to talk about the topic. There's an environmental crisis right now. There's a climate emergency. Let's find out how you are taking that in. How are you processing that? Do you have a color for it? Do you have a texture for it? Does it live in a space? and so it was a great teaching experience now that I am no longer in academia, I've been liberated, I am teaching online. Like most everyone. I'm working with people all over the world, and I'm mostly mentoring right now, artists who want to work in community during COVID times, artists who are working with social issues and helping them figure out strategies for bringing their work into community, and it's been really exciting. We're doing it through our nonprofit, which is called SEEDS, and SEEDS is an acronym for social ecology education and demonstration school.
My partner in crime is my husband, Dr. Bob Spivey, who has his PhD in social ecology. has co-taught with me activist art in community, and, we co-facilitate these zooms every two weeks with people there. Everyone can come, and we have people zooming in from the Philippines, and from China, and from England, and all over North America, and I'm really enjoying that. Plus I got invited to do a workshop for 500 therapists who wanted to learn how to use art to process climate and that was amazing.
So I'm not actually marketing or seeking out work right now. I'm just looking to see what's landing, and sometimes I have to say no, because I get stretched so far and I have to take care of myself.
I've been learning a lot from the nap ministry and other places I find on social media. You know, pausing because we get caught up in the urgency of what's going on right now. And we get panicked, and thankfully I had good teachers like Joanna Macy, and Thich Nhat Hanh, and more currently Adrian Marie Brown, who are reminding me to slow down, breathe, pay attention to what's going on in your body right now, and, take that work of just sitting in present moment to your practice in a very unhurried way, because it's not going to be resourceful if you are like panicking around things.
[: [:I talked to many of our neighbors. We share a lot of food from our garden, with our neighbors, and I said “would you be willing to host meetings in your front yard when the weather gets better so that we can design a story hive for the neighborhood?” And they said, “a story hive?”, and I said, “yeah, on Vashon Island, I created a story hive 10 years ago.” It still exists as part of an eco art project. It contains the stories of gardeners and farmers on the island and inspired them to plant seeds in the time of climate crisis. And it still exists. I went there yesterday and people are taking care of it. I haven't been on the island for 10 years and it's amazing to me. I was in shock and so grateful. So, you know, there's a whole new crop of vegetables growing and all these new things happening there. So it made me really happy.
So I told them about this story hive and they said, “why hive?” And I said, it's the honey of the community, we need to harvest it. And so the questions I'd like to ask our community, our neighbors, are what skills have they developed during the pandemic? What challenges are there are they still facing? And what is their dream for the world we're going to co-create now, as things are collapsing? And I wish you could have been in our meeting last night, we were making cob together, we had music on, and there were little kids and adults, all stumping in the clay and mud and sand and straw to make cob bricks, which were going to build our little story high about it. And it was delightful.
I don't get grants these days. I don't even bother applying because in the Northwest they don't know what to do with me. I always get rejected. But I just said, okay, I'm just going to initiate projects. I have the time to do it.
I did a whole collaboration with three 50 Tacoma to re-imagine the port of Tacoma. And we had people coming in before COVID doing drawings, what they wanted to see in the port instead of a methane producing LNG refinery, which, has been put into place in this crazy moment. Why aren't they doing it? Because somebody's making money under the table. We have corrupt people in power, and so we still have to do things on the grass roots so that we don't go into despair about it, and, that's my work help people not be in these despair.
Part 3: Despair and Empowerment
[: [:Then I'd moved to doing my work about my nuclear nightmares, and when I created this installation, I had people coming up and telling me how freaked out they were during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I was a very young child then so I didn't have the same kinds of memories.
When I put that installation in the New York Convention Center as part of a feminist art show, people left messages inside the installation under the sheets. And I was like, what? Okay! And, then I went up to blue mountain center to do a retreat in the fall. It was beautiful there. It was really hard for me to rework this piece for a museum. I didn't want to be thinking about nuclear war, but there were several things that happened. I was lying on a boat in the middle of the lake, and these fighter jets strafed the lake while I was lying there peacefully. And I learned that there was a strategic air command base nearby, maybe 30 miles away. And they would straf the lake regularly. So I said, okay, is not far away.
ote to Joanna, because it was:This was unheard of, you know, do that in museums. And, I had a box as part of my installation where people were invited to write down a nightmare about the future, or their positive dream for the future. And then the night of a blizzard in 1984, January, a hundred people showed up at the museum to break open the box and read all of those stories. And we left them up all over the installation. This is how I knew I had to leave the New York art world that it was never going to feed me, and when it was reviewed, the reviewer said, well, it was an almost powerful piece. It was beautifully rendered, but then she had to go and make it audience participatory how sophomore. And I was like, “okay, you're not in my paradigm. Okay. Goodbye.”
[: [:Part 4: Wilding the Muses
[:, I never imagined that this was a possible way to have a life. Do You have any rules of the road that you can help me out with as I begin to explore this, this mysterious world that you've inhabited.
[:It's key that we, develop permeable egos for this new time we're moving into. The idea of me as an individual. Yeah, it’s good that you work on your stuff, but if you're bringing things out in the world, find some people could do it with
[:In many ways, it's so interesting to me that you're basically just articulating an aesthetic of, ‘oh, we're human beings. We couldn't survive if we didn't cooperate our brilliance. Our creativity is. a collective effort, we just have to practice those things, in order to get good at them.
[:It's not the Western European conception of things being linear, and that this is the end times and it's over. We need to be thinking about the circle we're part of. I’m very… the word is not hopeful. I'm just persistent.
[: [: [: [: [:ZAD Spokes person: And this place, which is really this kind of laboratory of social invention, agricultural invention, architectural invention, new ways of educating, new ways of being together, new ways of dealing with dominations, new ways of dealing with you know, mental health issues, really having to think of having to do that all ourselves. That’s a real threat to the state actually. I mean, that's, you know, a much bigger threat to the state than a movement against an airport. And the kind of, one of the slogans of the movement, which says‘against the airport and its world.’ And that's really key, that it's really against the world that the airport represents, which is a world of capitalism, of patriarchy of domination, of economic growth, of the dictates of the markets, et cetera, all that comes with that world.
[: [:Jay Jordan and ISA B who live with Zad, have just written a manifesto book, called “We Are Nature Defending Itself”, and it's about this kind of entangling that we need to do, like mycelium
[:So do you have, books, music, movies, anything that has touched your heart and soul recently that you want to pass on to people?
[:And, there's also another podcast that Adrian's involved in. It's called How to Survive the End of the World, and that's been going on pre-pandemic. It's very good. Octavia's Parables is another podcast she's been involved in.
[:Octavia Butler: Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
[: [: [: [:Please know your listening is the lifeblood of this program. So click on the subscribe button on your podcast player and share us with your fellow travelers. Change the Story, Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. We are forever thankful for the extraordinary soundscapes of Judy Munson, and the fabulous sound effects that we get from threesounds.org.
So until next time stay well and spread the good word!
