Artist as Educator: Sofia Gallisa

I'm a firm believer in the concept of the artist/activist, or else I don't think I would be making art; I wouldn't have been able to justify it to me or my parents, I wouldn't be able to confront the world, and to be honest, I would be bored and unaffected by art. The problem is, I've always had trouble speaking openly about this because I feel like in some way it threatens or belittles others work, when it's not my intention. I've never expected that my reason for making art be the same as everyone else's, so it's hard to tell people interested in more "passive" art making that if I don't feel my work can say something about the world or change something about the world, then I would quit making it.

Anyways, along this line of thought I figured I should include this quote I found a while back, which again, I find it difficult to share with others that may have their own ideas and perceptions about things like Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. I was raised in a very politicized, leftist family and my feelings about such subjects are as full of rhetoric as they are with feelings and passions (hence the Chile/Allende issue I told you about before). Thus, I usually don't discuss them because I feel threatened in a way by what others think about them, and if I were prompted to defend them, it would somehow bring up all the ideological differences I have with a lot of my close friends. So I rather not discuss them. It's not easy being a leftist now days, or at least not in New York or NYU: "liberal" ideas only go so far.

I'm gonna shut up now, this email is a lot longer than it needs to be. I just wanted to share a Fidel quote about art that relates to what we've been talking about from a political perspective. There's a lot of other writings by him about art that I find interesting, but this is a condensed statement and at least it's a beginning:

"We, a revolutionary people, value cultural and artistic creations in proportion to what they offer mankind, in proportion to their contribution to the revindication of man, the liberation of man, the happiness of man... our evaluation is political. There can be no aesthetic value in opposition to man. Aesthetic value cannot exist in opposition to justice, in opposition to the welfare or in opposition to the happiness of man."
-- Fidel Castro