In new program, Patrisse Cullors will help artists find “the language of protest”

“When I became politicized at 16 years old,” Patrisse Cullors recalled during an interview with the Women’s Media Center, “I was also a part of a dance company — and that dance company was, largely, white folks, mostly wealthy, middle-class white folks. I was the only student that was really on a scholarship, and the dancing I was doing was, you know, dancing to Backstreet Boys. It was not political at all. And as I became politicized, I started to realize what my body meant inside of that dance studio, and what my life meant as part of this place that was mostly full of young white girls who had not experienced a lot in the world.”

Cullors eventually left the dance company and became an intrepid and persistent activist leader and organizer. She co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement, which has now become a rallying cry for racial justice organizing around the world. She chaired the Reform LA Jails campaign, which recently stopped a $35 billion jail expansion plan in Los Angeles county and put a criminal justice reform measure on the 2020 ballot. She founded Dignity and Power Now, an abolitionist organization fighting for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities. She published a best-selling memoir: When They Call You a Terrorist. She won the Sydney Peace Prize.

But she never stopped moving. “I kept making art, and my art started to transform, and it started to take a different shape,” she said. “I wasn’t dancing to the Backstreet Boys — I was dancing to Erykah Badu, and I was really transforming my understanding of what dance could be in a political framework.”

That transformation connects directly to Cullors’ most recent disruption: designing and directing the Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA program for Prescott College in Arizona. “So many artists, in particular, are organizers at heart,” Cullors said, “and are doing work in their communities, and are not getting the kind of training that an organizer would usually get to know how to translate their art into social practice.” (Evidently, many of them are also hungry for that training. The MFA program has seen record interest since enrollment opened, according to Prescott’s admissions office.)

The 10 to 20 students who will come on this month as the first cohort will work over two years with Cullors and other artists-cum-organizers to develop their creative and political practices in tandem, drawing inspiration from Black radical traditions and social justice messages from around the world. Core classes will include “Art as Social and Environmental Practice,” a primer on the theories and concepts related to leveraging art as social and environmental practice; “The Rise of Performance Art in the Fine Arts World,” which examines the practice’s history from 1960 onward; and “Studio Practice,” in which students will apply what they’ve learned and build a portfolio.

Students in the program will have the option of doing an LA-based residency at the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, an art studio and gallery space co-founded by five of the seven faculty members who met in their own MFA studies — Cullors; photographer Star Montana; research-based artist Alexandre Dorriz; painter Jake Freilich; and printmaker, sculptor, and performance artist Noé Olivas. Studying and creating together at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design provided them with the opportunity to grow together and to purposefully explore how they could support each other in producing disruptive work. “Through that, our relationship grew, and a lot of care happened,” Olivas remembered. “And that’s what we’re trying to do in this cohort, is just see the importance of artists and abolitionists coming together, and what it means when we come together and have a conversation.”

That kind of care, Cullors noted, is something art can uniquely offer in movement work. “One of the first things that I realized as I became deeper and deeper politically active is that nobody around me was invested in taking care of themselves — and, in fact, many of the elders in my life, especially Black elders, were sick, chronically ill,” she told WMC. “And this is not a lot of judgment on them. I don’t think it’s fair for us to judge organizers who work themselves to the bone — in fact, many of us feel like it’s the only way to work, and it’s the only way we’re going to get things done. There’s a bombardment of attacks on us on a daily basis, so why wouldn’t we fight back, right? That is a human reaction, to protect yourself, and protecting yourself looks like fighting. But what we don’t always remember is that protecting ourselves is also having a time of hibernating, and taking care of yourself, and having to go back and lick your wounds. We don’t do that enough.”

The themes of exhaustion and self- and collective-care were at the heart of Cullors’ own master’s thesis, which she completed in 2019 through the Roski School. Her thesis show, “Respite, Reprieve, and Healing: An Evening of Cleansing,” incorporated live music, performance and improvisation, and even sculpture, and saw Cullors, in a claw-foot tub, washing her own hair with the help of 13 other Black artists, as well as sitting in a circle with them, the members of the group passing honey water to each other. The audience participated, too — joining the performers in whispering, “It’s dangerous times, we must be connected, we have to stay connected.”

Being tired, and doing work that exhausts her, is also one of the reasons Cullors never abandoned her own creative practices. “I knew that when I went and took a dance class, it was something that rejuvenated me, that gave me life, that made me feel different from what political organizing did,” Cullors said, noting how that insight has affected her work mentoring young leaders. ”I was really interested in helping support them and their own resilience-based practices like art-making, or art-doing, or art-being.”

The continued opportunity for Cullors and her colleagues to continue working, creating, and caring with and for one another has been, in many ways, one of the most powerful parts of building the program for the activist. “It is very magical,” she told me.

Their latest collaboration is also an opportunity to disrupt not just standard models of art and activism, but the very nature of academia. “I’m interested in intervening,” Cullors declared. “I want to make interventions. I’m interested in gaps. I want to fill the gaps. This program is an intervention in the larger

conversation in the art world that … what we’ve seen in the last several years is an art world that’s contending with its patrons, was contending with, you know, mostly a billionaire, millionaire class. We’ve commodified the art world and have not been accountable to the people. I’m interested in this as an intervention. As artists you’re always trying to challenge and shift things, and I’m interested in creating space for people who are already doing it. I think our program is going to attract people who are actually already living this practice, and really want to get a degree to hone in on it for two years.”

Those interventions emerge from the very design of the program, and from the orientation and collective intentions shared by the faculty. Courses are offered online, expanding access and allowing for participation from nontraditional students, like mothers and working-class artists holding down jobs. Whereas most MFA programs put artists in boxes by medium or form, the Social and Environmental Arts Practice program is intentionally interdisciplinary. And students aren’t told to create or instructed to study art that appeals to that millionaire class — they’re focused wholly on producing work, instead, that will impact their communities.

“All of us — as a cohort, the individuals that will be teaching this program — all of us are combating some sort of hegemonic force,” noted Dorriz, who will be teaching a course called “An Introduction to Critical Museology” that explores the role museums play in shaping the art world and larger political discourse. “We imagine a lot of the students in this program are going to be looking for solutions and activism, how to make something so potent that it is not just disregarded or ignored.”

It’s something Dorriz himself is also excited to learn. “What is the language of protest?” he asked, adding that he is still seeking the answer in his own work. “I think that is the biggest thing: finding that language of protest. And I think a lot of the students are going to have different ways of expressing it, a different vocabulary. Each person is going to be equipped with different skill sets that will be really beautiful to work with and massage out and tease through and work together.”

“Art is a tool for all these things, you know?” Olivas added. “And it’s really interesting to see how you use this tool within activism. It’s something that I’m still learning, and I’m excited to learn from others. Even though they’re students, I see them at the same level as I am. I think it’s just having that conversation, and how we can utilize this tool to navigate or redirect the history. That’s part of what we’re doing: always thinking about making history and how to change the textbooks.”