Throughout history, the most significant movements for positive change have nearly always been accompanied by powerful artistic expressions that shed light on injustices and offer visions of a more equitable society. We are currently facing unprecedented challenges as our climate unravels and reactionary authoritarian movements gain in momentum. In the following panel discussion, held at the 2024 Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, California, leading activist/artists discuss whether navigating these seemingly perpetual existential crises necessitate new strategies from the “engaged” creative community.

This panel discussion was moderated by Arturo Méndez-Reyes, a cultural producer, curator, visual artist, musician, and community organizer advancing cultural equity in San Francisco. It features Devon Bella, co-founder of Art + Climate Action, a Bay Area collective committed to fostering a sustainable and environmentally-conscious arts community; David Solnit, renowned direct action organizer, author, puppeteer, and co-founder of Art and Revolution; Orion Camero, former Brower Youth Award winner and Spiritual Ecology Fellow; and Favianna Rodriguez, world-renowned interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California.

Note: This is an edited and shortened version of the session’s transcript.

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FAVIANNA RODRIGUEZ: Hi everybody. I’m thrilled to be here. Welcome to the homelands of the Ohlone. I am an artist and a cultural strategist, and I was born and raised in Oakland in a very polluted community, and I grew up during the era of the height of the “war on drugs,” so I witnessed and experienced all kinds of violence, including from the state, and also, of course, the invisible violence that is pollution. I also experienced the birth of hip hop, so early on I learned that art and culture can show us the light, can show us what’s possible. It inspires us. It shapes our imaginations. Culture is a very important part of any kind of social change. 

Growing up I could see how the narratives around who was perceived as criminal shaped the war on drugs. I learned very early on that people who shape culture also shape policies, so that we need to shape our own culture. If we want to win on anything—on reproductive justice, climate justice—we need our stories and our art.

I grew up in the ‘80s, a time when Reagan had dismantled the National Endowment for the Arts. The rightwing and the forces of colonialism and white supremacy have long tried to crush our artistic practice. It has made it so that most of what we have seen in the world—films, TV, visual art, musical performance, everything, the entire cultural sector—has been dominated by white men with a particular worldview. And my work is around changing worldviews through art. It’s not just about one issue. It’s about an entire worldview shift, because the climate crisis is a product of colonialism, and colonialism is about the exploitation of all of life. Art and culture can change our imagination. We need to change entirely the way we relate. 

What has facilitated the extractive economy is a set of stories that has allowed the exploitation of all life—human life, animal life, ocean life, forest life—for the consolidation of wealth and power. We need to change the core story, and that is the work that artists can do. Engaged art is a necessity, one we urgently need because our reality is so overwhelming and so harsh for so many people that we need the power of the imagination to make us feel that real positive change is possible. It gives us courage. It moves our emotions. 

Data doesn’t move people. There’s a lot of data on the climate crisis. That doesn’t move people. Art and culture can move people. When we don’t see any genuine representation of groups that have been shunned, such as Black trans people or Immigrants, it facilitates their dehumanization. When we create culture and stories about all that is alive, and we value the biodiversity of humans and of all life, there will be a worldview shift. 

That’s what I believe the work of art is. It’s what I do as an individual artist, and I also have created an organization, the Center for Cultural Power, to build the field of artists working to end systems of oppression. Because we’re not just artists; we need to be organizers and activists to confront these huge systems. We have to undo the stories that have gotten us here, and we have to create the new stories. And so that’s the work that I do. I look at how we can support artists, especially those from the most impacted communities, around being able to actually win on policies, but I also know that policies take a long time to catch up to cultural change. Our behaviors and values and the way we see each other can be shaped faster, and then politics will catch up…

DAVID SOLNIT: I grew up in the Bay Area and in Portland, Oregon. When I was in high school, the government told men turning 18 that we had to register for military draft, and we were pretty sure at the time there was going to be a war for oil, so that introduced me to activism. My life has been sort of going back and forth between reactive battles to try and stop our government’s wars around the world, and proactive efforts to try and create an ecological, just world for everybody. And that’s sort of where I’m stuck.

In high school, I loved making art and wanted to be an artist. I got to work with a lot of amazing people, but I also entered activism, and it made me think about the role of art. If I’m going to be successful and have a gallery show and somebody buy my pieces and hangs them over their couch, is that going to stop nuclear war or the arming of death squads in El Salvador, etc.? So, instead of trying to be an artist, I chose to spend most of my adult life as a carpenter doing construction to support myself and using that to feed my full-time organizing, direct-action habit. But, after 15 years or so, I realized that our demonstrations and the way we communicated weren’t inspiring us, let alone others, and that we actually needed artists, performers and musicians, so I started to recruit some of them to start to rethink how we communicate as movements. After years of recruiting puppeteers and artists and musicians, I realized that I wanted to do that part too. 

I’ve come to believe that, as Favianna was saying, we need new stories. Our battles for the kind of world we want to live in are battles between stories, and the sharpest storytelling tools we have are the arts. If we don’t use art, we will lose the battle, and a lot of people will die unnecessarily, and our communities will suffer.

I’ve spent the last 13 years working primarily on climate justice struggles, trying to support communities both here in refinery corridors and around the world. Some of it is reactive, just trying to stop fossil fuel projects and pipelines, but a lot of it is actually getting all the movements to work together to weave a positive vision of how the world could be. 

And then after October 7, I shifted to trying to throw down to stop the war on the civilian population in Gaza, realizing that, as climate activists, we can’t get what we need to be done to protect our communities and our ecology if most of our resources are going towards war and militarism. We live in an empire and the resources we need to protect our communities and the planet are being spent on 700 military bases in 130 other people’s countries. So as climate activists, we have to figure out how to undo the empire, and what a blessing that were if the empire is a bulldozer, we have the luxury of being in the control cab where the steering wheel and the keys are. We’re actually in a really wonderful and privileged place to shut down the empire and free up those resources. 

People around the world know what to do. People in our communities know what to do. If we can get our government’s knee off our own communities and the world’s neck, we will be able to live in a far more just world and save our climate. 

DEVON BELLA: I’m here on behalf of Art & Climate Action, which is a nonprofit artist-run, artist-led initiative. And before I begin, I just want to thank everyone for joining us this afternoon and to thank my fellow panelists. I’m just in awe of the work you all are doing on the ground as artists, as community members. It’s really a privilege to be here with you and to be in community with you.

I’m a curator and an arts organizer, and much of my career has been shaped by working with, collaborating with, and learning from artists, particularly artists who have been historically underrepresented in Western art. I’ve learned a lot from them and their practices, and it’s helped me take a deep, critical look at the infrastructure and institutions of the art world and how they control which artists get presented to large audiences. 

We’re a collective of arts professionals—arts workers, art handlers, art advisors—and we got together during the peak of wildfires here in California under orange smokey skies, and it no longer seemed rational to sit indoors and do nothing. A fellow arts producer sent out a call asking what the art sector could do to have a positive impact. During the pandemic we had been having conversations over Zoom, and that evolved into Art & Climate Action. We had started to really think about the art world’s infrastructure—our institutions, our museums, our galleries—and their environmental impact, their climate impact. What could we do to clean up our own house?

We started knocking on doors, reaching out to our connections in institutions and spending a lot of time in listening sessions, learning from one another and from other initiatives like ours across the U.S. and the world, some in countries far ahead of us. We consulted climate scientists and engineers because we were very knowledgeable in art history and artistic practices but didn’t know the first thing about our carbon footprint.

Once we got a more solid grounding in the science, we started to bring this information to museums, institutions and arts organizations to help them better understand their carbon footprints and the steps they could take to start improving in this area, including getting detailed energy audits. We also started to offer workshops online for artists to show them how to take practical steps in their everyday practice, including as regards the materials they were using. 

Some of the biggest shocks for me when I first started this work was discovering that: museums were just as energy intensive as hospitals and skyscrapers, if not more so; nearly all art materials are petroleum-based and extremely toxic; the emissions generated by the global art market from the incredible amount of transporting art all over the world is far from negligible. Fortunately, there are now starting to be more and more artist-led initiatives looking at those systems, interrogating them, questioning them, and exposing how they operate.

And a really great movement has emerged of artists who are thinking about alternative, regenerative materials and uplifting practices to try to design waste and harmful materials out from our practices. There’s an initiative in the Netherlands called the Future Materials Bank in which individual artists experiment and tinker and create new materials and recipes, and they put them into an open-source archive, where everything is there for sharing and you can even contact each artist if you need advice on how to use one of these products or processes.

ORION CAMERO: It’s so great to see everyone here and be in the community of such powerful human beings in this ensemble story. I am an arts organizer and cultural strategist. I was born alongside the San Joaquin River in Stockton, California, east of here, and I came into the Climate Justice movement through struggles in my region over water privatization. I went to hearings of the local Water Board, and I could see that major decisions were being made without future generations in mind. I was one of the youngest people in these rooms, and I was wondering what I could do to have an impact and make a difference.

So, I decided to make art about these really boring but intense battles around water, and that sort of led me into the climate justice movement as I began to see the connections between social, ecological, and economic injustice. In downtown Stockton we have a dried-up riverbed, and a number of folks in our unhoused community are in it, struggling to survive. We have the same culture of disposability for our ecosystems and for human beings, and it’s something we need to interrogate together. 

Art can be a universal language where all shapes of the human imagination meet. It’s one of the closest things in the world to magic. I would venture to say it is really magic. It creates the capacity to create empathy across identities. It soothes our nervous systems. It allows us to weather the difficulties of life’s challenges and to be able to have a story that mirrors our experience. And it permits us to feel things together and to give us the hope that we’re going to be able to make it through together. Arts and culture have continuously been a medicine for our emotional and spiritual illnesses across the centuries of human existence. 

I feel that creativity at its core is about divergent thinking, thinking outside of the status quo, beyond the lines and norms we’ve been given. It can give us the ability to serve as bridges and catalysts between sectors, between people, between identities, so we can gather the collective ingredients we need to build the mosaic of collective liberation that we need right now. 

I feel called to that intersectional work, and a lot of my pieces showcase the different but interrelated issues that I’ve tried to tackle during my decade-plus of organizing. One of my pieces, Learning Liberation, highlights mass incarceration, but through an ecological and youth-centered frame, and it uses a wide range of imagery to inspire the possibility of an exponential liberation cycle. Much of my work is created to contribute to specific campaigns, whether trying to expose the corruption behind the big corporations’ push to privatize water resources in our state or in support of the California Youth vs Big Oil campaign, and I’ve organized around the U.N. climate negotiations for a long time, and we worked with Greta Thunberg on an action to center Indigenous and frontline struggles at the most recent COP meetings. I really believe we can use art to shift our culture’s direction and begin to build a world we want to live in.

ARTURO MENDEZ-REYES: I’m a cultural producer who’s been living in San Francisco for the last eight years. I’m originally from Mexico, where I started my activism with a big student movement in 2012 that gave me the opportunity to travel around the country talking to people who were doing politics in their colleges, so I learned a lot about different forms of organizing, and that led me to collaborate with the Zapatistas who really showed me that it’s important to break the overused models that have been presented as alternatives. 

I started an organization called Arts.Co.Lab, where I train artists to apply for grants and funds, because none of these big visions can happen without some money. To date we have trained 170 artists and secured around $1 million for their individual projects, which is not nothing. This has allowed me to see that art-making should be a human right. Art-making gives us the opportunity to contextualize ourselves, to look around and see what’s happening, what our society looks like, what our reality is, and then to speak back with our art, to address our reality through our work. 

With that idea in mind, I created a “zine” called Urban Prophets Illustrated, Art Will Set You Free. Its concept is that we, the artists, are the urban prophets. We dedicate our lives to witness society, and then we speak back in the form of art, and those are our prophecies, and in them, we see, and say what is broken and rotten to the core, and we point to where we can go when we come together to work for a dignified future. 

For the most part people are disengaged from the political process and really from reality. Our phones and all of this technology that we’re surrounded by are giving us a very easy way to turn away from reality. And the only way to really support people to engage is by opening spaces where they can reclaim their sense of dignity. 

An example of that is an altarpiece I made, one inspired by the Olmec cosmovision, an altar to fire, to the direction of the south, that’s on display here at the conference, and that’s designed to help us reconnect with our ancestors and empower future generations. When we engage in ritual, we’re creating a rip in time and space and connecting to others who have practiced these same rituals for thousands of years. This is a space where people have been embedding their love, their energy, and we can come and contribute to and receive some of that energy. It’s really important to tap into that part of people. We have to re-awaken our bodies and our spiritual senses.

When we’re just reciting talking points and citing data, it becomes a battle of warring egos. You have to admit that you’re wrong and that I’m right, but art can move people spiritually and engage their emotions and awaken their deeper values.

I would like to ask our panelists what their thoughts are about how to engage people who are overworked, trying to survive, suffering, alienated? Can art do anything to reach such folks and encourage them to take action? 

FAVIANNA: I think we need to make room for the people who are most impacted by these systems of oppression to share their stories. We saw how MeToo created a space for survivors to share their stories, and that in turn helped start a whole shift, and I think that creating spaces is something that art can do so well. It can get people to talk about what they’re experiencing and then make something to share that reality with the wider world. 

Art can’t just be about the “no;” it also has to be about the “yes.” We know what we are against, but then what does yes look like? How do we move towards that vision of a better world? In some of the workshops I do, I provide art images and words, and I encourage people to create a picture of what their yes looks like in terms of an issue that really matters to them. Providing spaces for people to actually make things is so fun and empowering, and when you do it in groups and you create a space for storytelling, it’s very healing. 

ORION: Most human beings love music, movies, and ways to engage and cultural artifacts that reflect back people’s stories. Anybody who has performed at an open mic and had something vulnerable they wanted to say and felt really nervous but then felt so good when they shared it understands that impulse. We all have that impulse. There’s so much in our lives that we want to give witness to. As cultural workers our role is to invite that portal and that opening for people and whole communities to have that experience, and then to connect those experiences to broader systems that we’re impacted by together, and then through noticing those systems together, being able to build the infrastructure, the relational networks that can enable us to be able to take action to solve those issues.

I work for a group called Narrative Initiative, and we talk a lot about the differences between stories and narratives. Stories are individual experiences. Narratives are collections of stories that all together tell a bigger collective story and make us see the world in a particular way. We work to try to unmask harmful narratives that impact all of us. Imperialism, colonialism and capitalism are all built on powerful but destructive narratives. We need to help people understand that the fact that you can’t pay rent or put food on the table is part of a system of oppression. Your story connects to a bigger narrative. How do we witness those narratives and then do everything that we can to uplift and prop up the helpful narratives—the revolutionary and imagination-based narratives that show us the possibility of a better world? It’s not about storytelling anymore; it’s about story shaping to help create the conditions for change.

DEVON: We have to identify the barriers to participation, the obstacles in the way of someone being able to tell their story. And one future-forward solution is to have more artists involved in all levels of decision making. Art should not just be sectioned off in its own sector.  It’s so important to have that lever in the system, because artists can be not only great problem solvers but creative thinkers, and they’re also often deeply connected to the communities they’re coming from. They can provide much-needed interconnectivity, which is often the missing ingredient in terms of moving forward. 

DAVID: I think of making art with our hands or a song as like a prayer, and as I get older, I see less and less difference between when I’m at a faith-based ceremony or service, or a demonstration, or a performance. In all those places we’re all trying to shift consciousness. And just like we don’t want to create a professionalization of people who engage in decision making, there’s certainly a role for people who do art as their full-time thing and build up their skills, but actually, everybody can sing and perform and make art, and they should. And the most powerful art is often very simple, made by ordinary people expressing themselves. 

I work with a lot of big movement organizations, and some of them have 50 or 100 staff, and I ask them: “Do you have anyone that does arts or cultural work?” And they say no, so I ask if any of their organizers can lead an art build or lead a song or put together a theater skit? And the answer is almost always no, so we also have to really transform what our social movements look like. I wonder if artists and performers had been leading our organizations and movements against the big oil industry that hired PR firms and advertising agencies to confuse people about climate, maybe we’d be 10 or 20 years ahead of where we are.

ARTURO: First and foremost, art provides us with tools that go beyond the essential, the visual, the evident, so when artists are called to step up and sit at tables where decisions are being made, they can bring a lot to the discussion because the artistic process often requires us to be honest about our lived experiences and that of our communities.

And another thing art can do in these heavy times is to make space for joy, to help us replenish ourselves to continue this journey, because it’s not easy, so my next question for the panel is: Where do you go to replenish your joy, your rest, your self-care? Is there any spiritual practice you’re engaged with? 

FAVIANNA: I’m a board member of Amazon Watch, and we work with land protectors in the Amazon. And just before I came here, I was with some of the women land defenders from Brazil who are here at the conference, and one thing they say a lot is that we need to reforest our minds. We are deeply connected to our Mother Earth, and colonization severed that connection. Indigenous wisdom teaches us to be stewards and to relate to all that is alive, to tap into our deep connection to the whole web of life. 

As I mentioned, I live in a very polluted community, in the Fruitvale. The 880 freeway has been polluting my community since 1970. I was born in 1978, so my entire life it’s been polluting my neighborhood, and I feel sometimes very powerless because people in my community live eight years less on average than people up above the 580. The 580 doesn’t have the level of emissions that our freeway has because white people organized to not have trucks go through their communities. 

But in the last five years, I’ve learned how to garden. I got some corn seeds from the Zapatistas in Mexico (where, by the way, they just actually, finally, made GMO corn seeds illegal). It’s helped me really lean into knowing that for this time that I’m on the planet, I can connect, I can heal, even surrounded by cement and toxic industries. I can heal my body in connection with healing the land, because the land needs healing too. She needs us to pay attention to her, and putting my hands in the dirt, gardening is a good place to start. And I have rituals where I try to connect to all types of life and redouble my commitment to protecting the planet. 

Another really important thing for me has been to get away from extractivism, which is the norm. We live in an economy based on extraction, and we extract from people too, so I try really hard not to extract from the people who work for me in my art studio. How do I regenerate instead? We need to work like that with each other, to help support each other over the long term, and that’s why I’m really down with the growing CARE movement, folks caring across generations when the state is leaving us to die, as they did in Katrina, in Hurricane Maria. How do we create systems of mutual aid and support that include all the species. That’s part of what that expression of “reforesting our minds” means to me. 

ORION: It’s a hard world we live in. There are so many crises, and they are blocking our view of a liberated world that we know is possible. Some of the ways that I try to connect to joy is to try to integrate instead of dissociating. Some of the hardest parts of ourselves, some of the most difficult struggles we have personally are reflections of a deeply broken and deeply blessed world, and we have to work to mend those broken pieces.

And for me, I experience a lot of grief, but I try to hold space for it and create practices that help me honor that grief instead of running away from it or being scared of it. I think we live in a world where we go through so many emotions at once looking through social media feeds. You’ll be happy one minute that your cousin got a puppy and then you’ll see the bridge in Baltimore collapse, and then you’ll see that one of your friends was diagnosed with cancer. We move through emotions so fast we don’t have time to process and reflect, so I advise us all to try to integrate and not dissociate. 

Another helpful approach is to remember that we’re part of an ensemble story. We all carry pieces of collective liberation, and we need to include ourselves in those collective liberation visions but also to recognize that we just carry a piece of it, and many people carry it with us. If we can anchor ourselves in that mindset, it can help us dismantle the individualist culture that we’ve been conditioned to accept. That can help take weight off your shoulders. 

ARTURO: As we reach the end of our time together, I would like everyone here on the panel to just name one idea that you’re keeping from this space. 

DAVID: For artists, I encourage you to find practices you can do with other people and partner with movement organizations fighting the good fight. For activists, try to figure out how can you integrate the arts into every stage of your organizing.

DEVON: Build relationships, take the time to slow down to really afford yourself the opportunity to get to know the person sitting next to you and who you’re in community with and actively listen to their story.

ORION: Our creative projects are living beings, and so we should tend to them to reflect the worlds that we want to live in.