Arts for Social Change- A reading with Beverly Naidus

Beverly Naidus is an artist, activist, educator, and writer and has had her work exhibited internationally in venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Armand Hammer Museum at UCLA. She recently completed her third book, Arts for Social Change, and came to the store this past Wednesday to share her work with us.

It was an inspirational night and it was an honor to have been able to host her here at Food For Thought Books.

Welcoming Beverly was easy, after all, she was down to earth, socially-conscious, and joyfully invested in doing her share to create a more just and utopic society. She told stories from her heart that called on ancestors and history to affirm the need for art as a tool for social change and healing. Through her storytelling we saw Beverly’s commitment to art for social change as her life-long practice and the high value she places on socially conscious eco-art practices. Having struggled with environmental illnesses in her lifetime, her personal experience serves as a powerful yet vulnerable place from which to educate.

Beverly presented a power point presentation with slides from her book and discussed practices that she’s found critical to the arts for social change movement. Along with slides of her own work Beverly presented artists such as Ana Mendieta, Esther Hernandez, Common Threads Artists, Beth Ferguson, Fred Wilson and images taken from her class’ work. Beverly’s extensive knowledge was intriguing and her storytelling was easy to follow yet reflective and containing depth. The work she does as an educator is creative and joy-filled healing work, yet it challenges her students to be analytic and think critically of oppressive systems and institutions.

During her presentation Beverly cited art practices she’s encouraged her students to explore as they create their own work. One such practice “Culture Jamming”- taking images that we are familiar with in a consumer based society and re-writing or inserting a subversive alternative image- has served as a platform for response from her students to mainstream consumer messages and products. For example, her students creatively used this method to respond to issues such as body image and bottled water.

She discussed her current position at University of Washington, Tacoma, co-creating a program on Arts in Community, with a focus on arts for social change within the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program. Working primarily with non-traditional students she explores the topics that are most interesting to her. Her courses include Eco-Art, Labor Globalization & Art, and Body Image & Art. As she spoke her passion, excitement and the importance of these topics shone through.

“We really need to be doing a lot of education if we want our species to survive… It’s important to look at what is bad but it is also really important for us to vision what we want this world to look like”, she stated with regards to her goal in teaching art for social change. She has found value in her teaching practice as a platform from which she can support her students as they find the stories within them and are inspired to change the world through art. It is apparent that working from a place of hopefulness and joy is critical to Naidus in all of her work and, as a result, her students seem to be thriving in their exploration of art and social justice.

In her closing she read this quote from her book:

I have had a sense of mission in writing this book, a sense that many activists own, what we are running out of time, and, in this time that we have, we have to convert hundred of thousands of other artists to this calling. This has to be a diverse movement of artists if it is going to work and it will have to be sneaky, smart and effective. Artists will have to make work that helps to make their own stories emerge. With each unfolding on a person’s story, a life becomes less alienated; a person becomes more connected to the whole. We have to be persistent and patient, open-hearted and ruthless in our risk-taking. We no longer have the luxury of waiting generations. Our window of opportunity is only open a small crack, and we need to stretch it as far open as possible. And remember that we don’t need to do this work with painful intensity that will scare aware potential joiners. We need to do it with a joyful sway of our hips, with the pleasure of knowing that we have given our all.

Even if you missed the event, I encourage you to come by the store, pick up her book and explore her life work. Check out her website: Arts for Social Change for more resources including links to some of the artists featured in the book and her course syllabus.

- - - - -

Interested in reading the book? Order it via our website!

Community Donations on Hold for the Summer

For years now, the Food For Thought Books Collective has had an expressed commitment to supporting community efforts through monetary and in-kind donations. Over the course of the past year, our donations program supported many community efforts that work to expand access to social services and promote social justice including the Youth Action Coalition, Sunderland Public Library & PTO, the Prison Birth Project, Prison Book Project, the South Amherst Conservation Association, the Justice for Jason Legal Defense Fund, and Grace House.

Our commitment to supporting social justice organizations that are making a positive impact in our community extends beyond our donations program. This past year, we began organizing events that Celebrate Resistance through music, poetry, and visual art, while raising hundreds of dollars for organizations such as Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and the Palestine Israeli Education Project. We are also building sustainable collaborative relationships with several social justice organizations in our community such as the Prison Birth Project, Fertile Ground Schools, and the Women of Color Leadership Network—offering them space for meetings and events, and promoting their work in our window, event calendar and website.

The recent recession, however, has not left us unaffected. Like many, we are finding it necessary to tighten our belt a notch or two in the hopes of offsetting the last several months of slow and declining sales. As a result, we have decided to put a hold on all our donations until the end of August, while we assess the state of our finances, evaluate the most effective way to support our community, and begin developing a plan for sustaining Food For Thought Books well into the future.

We appreciate your patience and understanding in this situation. We are confident that we will make it through this rough patch and look forward to working with our community to building a just and sustainable economy that ensures prosperity for all.

Prison Birth Project Benefit

There will be a benefit fundraiser later this month to help support one of our favorite local groups: The Prison Birth Project. Check it out:

Secret Cafe: June 27th 2009 - 6:00pm
Come enjoy a delicious dinner prepared and served by members of The Prison Birth Project. Located in a cozy backyard with outside seating, candles, music and drinks!
Seating at 6pm and 8pm.

What better way to spend a summer night? Hope to see you there!

For tickets & more information: The Prison Birth Project - Secret Cafe

Food For Thought Books Reunion Today

We're having a reunion today at the store of all the folks who have worked here at Food For Thought over the past 33 years. See the recent post Erika made just below for more info.

We'll be closed for regular business hours but will be open at 7:30pm tonight for a party open to all. There'll be good food, good conversation & good music. Please come! We'd love to see you there.

Summer hours at Food For Thought Books

We'll be switching to a reduced schedule for the summer (June to mid-August). Hours will be 11:00am to 6:00pm, daily.

Food for Thought Books Collective Reunion

Food for Thought Books is having a reunion on Saturday, June 6, 2009! For the first time (that we know of), the Food for Thought Books collective is hosting a gathering of past and present collective members to share stories, document our important and unique history, and look ahead to the future.

Following our day of reunion activities, with the help of the other cooperatives and collectives of the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives (VAWC), we’re hosting a public reception here at the store at 7:30 PM. If you’re part of another cooperative business, you’ve been coming to Food for Thought since the early days, or if you just want to come say hello to your favorite radical book-monger from back in the day, please stop by. There will be brief presentations, light refreshments, and time to just hang out. We’d love it if you, our community of support, would help us celebrate 33 years of mutual aid, cooperation, and workplace democracy.

Eduardo Galeano's Newest Book

Here, shamelessly (and with authorization) copied from our friend's at Shelf Awareness (a great e-newsletter for people in the publishing and bookselling world) is a great piece about Galeano's new book, Mirrors: An Almost Universal History. Enjoy!

Here's the next chapter of the story that started last month during the Summit of the Americas, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez handed President Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent--and thereby made the Eduardo Galeano book a bestseller here.

All the publicity, which was kind of a breakout for Galeano, a Uruguayan who is well known around the world but not in the U.S., has opened up new possibilities for Galeano's next book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, translated by Mark Fried, which Nation Books, part of the Perseus Books Group, is publishing later this month.

The house has doubled its first printing to 20,000, and the pub date has been moved up to May 25. And because of the Chavez-Obama boost, Galeano's tour has changed. As John Sherer, publisher at Basic Books and Nation Books, put it, "Let's just say that it's been a little bit easier for publicity to book some of the mainstream media."

Even before President Chavez helped the sales effort, Nation Books had made Mirrors its lead book and had planned to bring Galeano to the U.S. for a tour. Sherer noted that "early reads from reps had been very strong, and the call reports from the field suggested that Mirrors might just be the book to finally make Galeano the household name he deserves to be. It was by far the book cited the most in their call reports."

Interestingly Galeano said he doesn't want to discuss Open Veins of Latin America on the tour because, among other reasons, he's "extremely proud of Mirrors and wants it to be the book American readers discover him through," Sherer added.

So far, Galeano's tour includes an appearance at BEA as well as readings at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., the Ethical Culture Society in New York, the Free Library in Philadelphia, Town Hall in Seattle, the Los Angeles Public Library, Berkeley's Arts and Lettters and the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, where he will be interviewed by Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt.

Nation Books calls Mirrors "a sometimes bawdy, sometimes irreverent, sometimes heart-breaking unofficial history of the world seen--and mirrored to us--through the eyes and voices of history's unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano asks, 'Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind?'

"Taking in 5,000 years of history, recalling the lives of artists and writers, gods and visionaries from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York and Mumbai, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes that resurrect the lives of the 'thinkers and the feelers, the curious, condemned for asking, rebels and losers and lovely lunatics who were and are the salt of the earth,' Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity." (Shelf Awareness, April 18, 2009)

---
Interested? You can order a copy of "Mirrors" through our main website. Click here.

Erika's fond farewell…

Five years ago I became part of the unparalleled Food for Thought Books Collective right after I graduated from UMass – what an amazing opportunity! Since then I’ve had countless rich conversations with folks in the community and within my collective; I’ve had the privilege of hosting incredible authors, activists, and artists; and I’ve collaborated with many brilliant, creative comrades. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of unpacking hundreds of boxes of exciting new books, experiencing each time the power of the written word to move me to feel, to remember, and to act… and I’ve gotten to share all of this with people every day. How have I been so lucky?!

And yet…it’s come time for me to move on. Bittersweet indeed.

In the fall I’ll start the History MA program at UMass, back to my old stomping ground! I really see this move as just another step in my larger life project: to make space for silenced voices, to look to past and present examples of radical resistance for maps of the future, so that we might all experience justice, joy, and exuberant, expansive love. I’d like to try to be a truly engaged activist-scholar, inspired by the many folks I’ve met while working at Food for Thought who are doing just that. I hope you’ll all hold me to it!

Food for Thought Books is a unique and important place, I’m so grateful to all of you for keeping it alive all these years. I hope that, with some effort, it will be here decades from now, still dynamically engaged with the world.

I’d like to invite you all to stop by the store to say hello/farewell on Tuesday, May 26, my last day, from 4-5:30. We’ll have some cake and I’ll try not to cry the whole time. Hope I’ll see you there.

Sleep Dealer

This past weekend I went to go see Sleep Dealer up the street at Amherst Cinema. It is an incredible film: compelling, disturbing, passionate & visionary. I would like to encourage everyone to go see it.

Nojojo over at The Angry Black Woman says it better than I can so go check out her summary & review of the movie.

Interview with local author John Crowley

There's an interesting interview in the new issue of the Believer with local author John Crowley, one of my favorite storytellers.

How am I putting this together? Is this an actual thing I’m putting together, or am I fooling myself? Is it totally lost and am I creating a new thing out of what I found, or am I actually finding a way back to a lost world? I think that’s what we do in our daily lives, a lot of the time, even when we try to construct our own past. Many novels have been written about people who have an illusory picture, not of the distant past, but of their own past, their own lives, their own marriages, their own childhoods. It may be that to write a historical version of that story stands somewhere between the modern-novel idea of discovering or reconstructing a lost past or a lost system of values and some ancient versions of it, as in the Grail quests and Gilgamesh. It’s probably central to the nature of fiction altogether, to try to enter into lost worlds, or enter into “the lost” in some way.

read the full interview

Happy Mother's Day!

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress,
not of Caesar, but of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

- Julia Howe, Mother's Day Proclamation, 1870

Happy May Day!

Today we will be closed at Food For Thought Books in honor of May Day.

We encourage all of you to call in sick, take the day off & enjoy a good picnic out in the new spring sun with family & friends. If you work for a living, this is your day. You deserve it!

If you're in Northampton please join us at the Rally for Immigrant Rights happening in front of the courthouse at noon. Hope to see you there.

For more information on the history & significance of May Day, check out Peter Linebaugh's great essay The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day.

More resources & links can also be found here. Happy May Day!