Aspire with Osha: art, nature, humanity

The Transformative Force of Art in Society: A Conversation with Ken Grossinger

• Osha Hayden /Ken Grossinger • Season 8 • Episode 56

Share episode

Join our journey through the captivating world of art and its profound influence on societal transformation with Ken Grossinger, a strategist and documentary producer with a wealth of experience. This episode promises to reveal the often underestimated power of art to incite and sustain meaningful change. We reminisce about the civil rights movement and the United Farm Workers, where anthems and theatrical performances weren't just acts of expression but were essential to the courage and unity of those fighting for justice. Ken provides insights into how these artistic endeavors have left an indelible mark on our society.

Our conversation takes an exciting turn into the realm of cinema, where we unpack the extraordinary impact of films like "The China Syndrome" and "Nine to Five" and "Chasing Ice" on public awareness and activism. These cultural landmarks demonstrate the unique ability of movies to inform and mobilize, creating ripples of change that extend far beyond the silver screen. We also discuss the evolution of environmental activism's artistic expression. From silent landscapes to resonant songs in the campaign against Alaska's Pebble Mine, we see how art has become an integral voice in the chorus for environmental preservation.

The episode rounds off with a look at the transformative role of museums and foundations in community activism and social justice. Museums are stepping out of the shadows to become beacons of progress, taking an active stance on pressing issues by engaging with the stories and struggles of the communities they represent. 
Through the lens of initiatives like the Art for Justice Fund and the JPB Foundation's integrated funding approach, we uncover how strategic collaborations between artists, philanthropists, and activists are crafting a new narrative for social change, proving that the brush, the lens, and the pen are mightier than ever before.

For more info: https://www.artworksbook.com

If you enjoyed this show, please leave a positive review and share with your friends. Thank you! Osha

Osha Hayden:

How can we magnify our efforts to create a better world? This, I think, is a question many of us have been asking. So on today's show, you'll learn about the power of art in the service of humanity and how artists and organizers working together can become a powerful force for change. This is Aspire with Osha, art, nature, humanity and I'm your host, Osha Hayden. My guest, Ken Grossinger, has been a leading strategist in movements for social and economic justice for 35 years in community organizations and unions and as director of Impact Philanthropy in Democracy Partners. He co-executive produced the award-winning Netflix documentaries the Social Dilemma about social media and the Bleeding Edge on medical implants. Welcome to the show, Ken Grossinger.

Ken Grossinger:

Thanks, Osha. Thank you for having me.

Osha Hayden:

So how do you believe that collaborations between organizers and artists can help widen the reach and success of social movements?

Ken Grossinger:

There are two points to be made about that question. The first is just that art is not just a reflection of or a reaction to social conditions, but it's a contributor to social change and one of its values. In making that contribution has to do with addressing the narratives that underlie political fights, so that we know, through organizing, through lobbying, through advocacy campaigns, through social movements, sometimes it's possible to win legislative and policy victories. But what happens is that when power changes hands, those victories get rolled back and so there's nothing long-lasting. It's the pendulum swinging from the left to the right. What art has the capacity to do is to penetrate popular culture, those of us that have done organizing all our lives.

Ken Grossinger:

We know how to appeal to the rational side of the brain, what Bill McKibben says, the side of the brain that likes charts and graphs and things like that, but we don't know how to emotionally prime the pump for social change, and art has the capacity to do that. So I think it plays a significant role in advancing our agenda by having some long-term sustainability.

Osha Hayden:

It's very powerful when you see it in person, but what you're saying is, you can really extend the impact and make it last much longer.

Ken Grossinger:

Yeah.

Osha Hayden:

So you've been a community and labor organizer for 35 years, but what prompted you to write a book that focuses as much on art and culture as it does on organizing now, at this time?

Ken Grossinger:

Yeah, so I very much come from outside of the art world, having done this work for 30, 35 years.

Ken Grossinger:

When I learned how to think about my craft, art and culture were never a part of what I learned, and so when I practiced it, it's not what I did. And when I began to teach younger organizers how to think about their work, it's not what I taught. And then I married an artist and I realized how big a boat I missed. And I learned something. I learned that it wasn't just organizers that didn't think strategically about the use of art and culture in their work, but it was artists themselves that often didn't see their work in the service of social movements, but rather thinking about their work as individual forms of political expression. And so I think that marriage is so important that I wanted to write a book that draws on some of the best examples that we know. Most of the book focuses on the last 20 years, but it does start with the civil rights movement, because in some ways, the civil rights movement really laid the blueprint for collaboration between organizers and artists today.

Osha Hayden:

Yeah, it was, because music was really a key element of the civil rights movement, correct?

Ken Grossinger:

Yeah, can I read a small couple of quotes from the book about that?

Osha Hayden:

For sure.

Ken Grossinger:

So James Foreman, the fourth person that he hired when he ran SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was a woman named Bernice Johnson Reagan, who at that time helped to start the Freedom Singers but is now known as the founder of Sweet Honey and the Rock. So James understood what music had to offer. James understood what music had to offer. And in talking about the civil rights movement, somebody else, a reverend named Wyatt T Walker, who at that time was the head of the faith-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference, talked about the power of We Shall Overcome, and that's the quote I'd like to read. And he says One cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the Southland. I've heard it sung in great mass meetings, with a thousand voices singing as one. I've heard a half a dozen singing it behind the bars of the Hines County Prison in Mississippi. I've heard old women singing it on the way to work in Albany, georgia. I've heard the students singing it as they were being dragged away to jail. It generates power that is indescribable and commenting not just on We Shall Overcome but music in general.

Ken Grossinger:

During the civil rights movement, a writer named Bruce Hartford said the following "For us, freedom songs were the psychic threads that bound the movement into a tapestry of purpose, solidarity, hope and courage. The songs spread our message. The songs bonded us together. The songs elevated our courage. The songs shielded us from hate. The songs forged our discipline. The songs protected us from danger.

Osha Hayden:

That is really powerful, and I mean, no one listening to the show today has not heard and experienced the power of that song, We Shall Overcome. Let's switch to the United Farm Workers. The co-founder, Dolores Huerta, said that the primary aims of their El Teatro Campesino were to keep up the spirits of the workers who were already on strike and to try to reach the people who were the growers who would bring in the strike breakers. So you consider that among the first important joint labor and cultural initiatives of the 20th century. So how did it work? How was it so powerful?

Ken Grossinger:

What made it so powerful is that it wasn't professional actors. These were skits and they were performed by workers in the field picking the grapes. And it draws upon another tradition, one other really important cultural and labor initiative In 1939, there was a union called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union at the time, and they created a play to shift how the public thinks about working families, and it was called Pins and Needles. It became the most popular play on Broadway for its time, and it was not performers or professional actors or actresses, it was the workers in the centers where they were producing different types of textiles. And so this adds just sort of a whole other dimension and it makes it a lot easier for people to relate, because these are people that are actually doing the work that they're talking about. They're not just performing.

Osha Hayden:

Yes, so there were two really important movies of the late 1970s, the China Syndrome about nuclear energy, and Nine to Five, about gender discrimination. So can you talk about the power of film when it's linked to organizing and the differences between how those two films were leveraged?

Ken Grossinger:

Great question.

Ken Grossinger:

One film, the China Syndrome, was focused on lifting consciousness about nuclear power, and the other film was focused on supporting organizing for equity for office women workers, organizing for equity for office women workers. So the China syndrome, you may remember, is a Jack Lemmon, Richard Dreyfuss, Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas portray reporters who go into a nuclear power station on the verge of a nuclear meltdown, and ostensibly the film focuses on whether it's possible to have a nuclear power plant that was safe and profitable at the same time. Ten days after that film came out, three Mile Island happened, the largest release of radioactive material this country ever experienced. It was five on a seven-point Richter scale in terms of its seriousness, and so box office sales were now nine times the production costs of the film, and it gave organizers a handle, a way to think about this. Ted Turner said it turned him against nuclear power, but it was not directly tied to the anti-nuclear movement, and so it was an important film. It raised important questions, but it was not directly tied to the anti-nuclear movement, and so it was an important film. It raised important questions, but it stopped. I compare and contrast that to the film 9 to 5. So 9 to 5, you remember, everyone remembers the song that Dolly Parton wrote 9 to 5. That's also with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda.

Ken Grossinger:

And Jane, after the Vietnam War, started working on women's equity issues and she called up a woman named Karen Nussbaum who started an organization also called Nine to Five. Nine to Five, the organization, proceeded to film Nine to Five, and Jane said to Karen I want to learn what women office workers are thinking. And so Karen takes Jane around to different affiliates in the country, and Karen is based at that time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and they have a big mass meeting in Ohio. Two or three hundred women come to, and at the end of the night Jane has this throwaway line, which was does anybody ever have any revenge fantasies about their boss? And the place lit up and one woman stood up and said "eah, I want to grind his bones into coffee beans and serve it to the other managers in the company.

Ken Grossinger:

And so right then and there, Jane understood that this shouldn't be a film that can be tagged as quote, a feminist film, unquote. But it needed to be a comedy and it can penetrate popular culture in that way. And what she did is work with Karen and Karen's staff. They organized a 20 city tour with the film. That film led to doubling the number of chapters in 9 to 5, the organization, and Jane said she could always hold in her heart that her movie was married to a movement, and so that's really the difference between an impact campaign 9 to 5, and a film that's meant to put out issues and lift up consciousness but not go beyond, and so both things are quite important. But if you're focused on social change, you've got to be focused on organizing, and if you're focused on organizing, you've got to think about impact production.

Osha Hayden:

Gotta love Jane Fonda. She got it in one, right? The early environmental movement didn't know much about art. It just hadn't come on their screen, right? I mean, what was going on with that?

Ken Grossinger:

Essentially, the early portion of the environmental movement was driven by scientists and, as I was saying earlier, scientists know how to appeal to the right side of the brain, to the side that deals with graphs and charts and data, and so they weren't thinking about what was emotionally resonant for people.

Ken Grossinger:

Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, lifted up this issue and he said where are the goddamn operas? Where are the goddamn theaters? Where are the paintings? Where are the songs? Where is the art in our movement? And that slowly, not because McKibben lifted it up, but it slowly began to take hold and now what we're seeing is an amalgam of this, and it's become very, very important for the future of our work on climate change.

Osha Hayden:

So let's go back to the beginning of the century. The Canadian multinational corporation sought to dig the world's largest open pit mine near the salmon spawning headwaters of Alaska's Bristol Bay. Activists resisting the project quickly realized that what the campaign needed was a soundtrack. So how did a theme song and an album come to make a difference?

Ken Grossinger:

So you've really read this book and understand it. These are great questions, so let me set the stage. We're talking about a section of Alaska called Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay is a 65% indigenous community in the area, and the extractive mining industries were attempting to build the largest open pit gold and copper mine in the country and the second largest in the world. That pitted them against the fishing industry. So these are the two most powerful industries in Alaska fishermen that fished for sustenance, for sport, and who fished commercially.

Ken Grossinger:

Turns out, many of the fishermen, not surprisingly, are also musicians, and they came to this realization that they lack a theme song, an anthem if you will. And they called a guy named Sy Kahn, who has spent his life working in the civil rights and labor movement, doing organizing and taking his artistic skillset and applying it there. He's written plays, he's written books and he's produced 20 plus CDs of his music. And so Sy goes up to Bristol Bay and the mine that they want to create is called the Pebble Mine. And so the fishermen begin to take him around town, and one of the first stops is a third grade class, which was known as Rebels to the Pebble class, which was known as Rebels to the Pebble and Sy said, however you talk to third graders, I will be your musical messenger if you will give me the message. And from that encounter he wrote a song called Abundance. And what was really important was not just it's a great song, was not just the song itself, but what he did with it and others that he wrote subsequently, which is that he took these songs into community homes, small gatherings of 10, 15, or 20 people, and he would perform these songs for them and he would say did you like this song? Do you think it carried the right message? Do you want me to take out a line? Do you want me to jettison the song altogether?

Ken Grossinger:

And that process created an environment of trust between the indigenous community that were hosting these meetings and Sy and some of the fishermen.

Ken Grossinger:

And eventually the fishermen said to Sy, we've got Alaska covered, what we need your help with is in the lower 48s. And so Sy created an organization called Musicians United to Protect Bristol Bay and used his song to raise money for the Pebble Mine fight. And it illustrated that musicians are not just performers. They have mailing lists, they have social media contacts, they have the capacity to raise money, particularly celebrity musicians. And so thinking about the music is one thing, but thinking about the musician is slightly different, and it's why it's an example of how the collaboration between artists and organizers are so important. We get fixated all the time, I do too about the power of art and how important it is, but it isn't just the art, it's the person driving the art, and in this case, Sy was driving it with the organizers. That campaign has now been going on 20 years and they've gotten nowhere. The Biden administration nixed permits, and so they've not yet started digging the mine, but it's an open question depending on what happens in November 2024, about whether or not that will hold.

Osha Hayden:

Mm-hmm. And it's important because the effects of the gold mining are really toxic, toxic, waste.

Ken Grossinger:

It was to be built 150 miles from where there was an earthquake at the turn of the century that killed people, that caused 28 tsunamis that devastated the land, and there was no toxic waste in there. Had there been toxic waste at the time in an earthen dam, that entire community not only would have been wiped out, but the food sources, the fish, the water sources, the streams and the ocean, the bay, they all would have been contaminated, and so, rationally speaking, this just makes no sense, but it's what the extractive industries were up to.

Osha Hayden:

Well, I hope it holds. I hope it holds and they are not able to. So, Bristol Bay, people, if you hear Bristol Bay coming up, you know who to contact. First let's take a break and then we'll come back in a moment and we're going to talk about Black Lives Matter. So stay tuned and we'll be back in just a few moments. So, in case you're just joining us, this is Aspire, with Osha, Art, Nature, Humanity, and I'm your host, Osha Hayden. I'm here with Ken Grossinger and we are talking about the power of art to create positive change in the world. So let's talk about Black Lives Matter, because that movement has gone beyond the conventional art-centered organizing of the 20th century, creating what you characterize as the largest multicultural movement in five decades. How have they added to what came before?

Ken Grossinger:

Much of what Black Lives Matter did was built upon the artwork of the civil rights movement, but there were some new elements to it that played key roles. One of them was social media. Social media didn't exist in the 60s, and we know that through social media, people listened to songs about Black Lives Matter tens of millions of times. They had tens of millions of listeners, and it was not just national, it was international, so it amplified, if you will a sense in the way that music can nurture people. It also critically targeted public monuments. We all know that public monuments make good local targets because they're in the community, and all know that public monuments make good local targets because they're in the community, and we know that public monuments are basically white Confederate generals looking down from 16 feet high on people passing by. So an artist named Kehinde Wiley subverted that image. He made his own monument and he pulled down the white supremacist sitting on the horse and put up a black horseman in braids and sneakers. And so he not only mocked it, but now, if you're a little child and you're walking past looking up at a 16-foot monument, instead of looking up at a white supremacist, you're looking up at a different kind of hero, an earnest hero, and so it was through the targeting of public monuments and it was through social media that Black Lives Matter was able to add things to the work that had gone on before. There was still much in common, you know.

Ken Grossinger:

Murals were a big part of Black Lives Matter, as they were in the 60s. Thousands of George Floyd murals were created not just in the United States but in Europe and Palestine and Syria, throughout the world, and these murals became centers. They became centers for grieving, they became centers for holding each other and they became centers for activating and calling to account people that were responsible, the police in particular, for the assault on Black lives, and so it both built upon and contributed to the work, and that's sort of the narrative arc between the two.

Osha Hayden:

And Ai Weiwei, who did the Alcatraz exhibit, which was amazing, and they did have at the Kehinde Wiley exhibit, a room where you could go and you could write in response to what you just experienced with the art, and they did have pamphlets and things that gave you organizations that you could connect to if you wanted to take it further. But I'm wondering how you could apply some of the things that you're talking about to these art exhibits to make them even more lasting.

Ken Grossinger:

Museums are either going to become community action targets or community building institutions. We all know the targeting that's going on right now. Probably the most famous is the targeting that Nan Golden had done. Nan Golden is a photographer who got addicted during the opioid crisis to OxyContin after surgery and she was furious and began to do some research about who was driving the opioid crisis. And the world came to know that it was the Sackler family, and she did what she knew how to do, which was to organize celebrity artists to demand internationally that the Sackler name be pulled down from institutions, cultural institutions around the world. Even in the Tate London Museum, so pervasive were the art-washing efforts of the Sackler family that there was an escalator that had a plaque called the Sackler Escalator. So it was not just the galleries, it was not just the names of the museums, it was not just the donor walls as you walk into a museum. It was pervasive. And so it's an example of the way that museums will become community action targets if they're not responsive to the times. But, getting more to your point, I just wanted to contextualize it.

Ken Grossinger:

There's a lot that museums are now doing that make them community building institutions and sustain organizing, and I'd like to share two examples. The first is from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is in Montgomery, Alabama, and it's essentially 806 cotton steel beams that are hanging, and at the bottom of each beam is a large rectangular block that evokes a coffin, and the names of people who had been lynched are inscribed in that box, and the city and county in which the lynching took place is inscribed, so that if you're from Richmond, Virginia, and you happen to pass one of those hanging steel beams, you can bring back to Richmond a life-size replica and demand that a marker be put down in Richmond to acknowledge the lynching and to use it to fuel social justice. So Brian Stevenson, the founder, understood that museums have to be as much about today and tomorrow as they are about yesterday, and so it was a direct link to community activism. There is a similar kind of example that I want to share in a totally different context, and this is an example that grew out of Louisville, kentucky. So Louisville, of course, is where Breonna Taylor was killed, and Ta-Nehisi Coates calls up the artist, portraiture artist, Amy Sherald, who did the portrait of Michelle Obama that's in the National Portrait Gallery, and says to Amy can we commission you to do a portrait of Breonna Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair magazine? And Amy Sherald says yes, and I'd like it shown in Louisville, kentucky.

Ken Grossinger:

And so the director of the Speed Museum, which is the largest and oldest cultural institution in Kentucky, asked himself a guy named Stephen Riley, what it meant to be a museum director in the times of Black Lives Matter, at a time when the fight was right at your doorstep and what he did was to empty out three or four of his galleries within three or four months of the killing.

Ken Grossinger:

Now, those of your listeners who follow museums know that it's usually a three to five year exhibition runway to put up. So to pull down in such a short period of time is quite stunning. But Stephen Reilly went way beyond that. He then created two advisory boards, and this is so different than how museums function today. He created a national advisory board made up of artists who had family members killed or maimed by the police, and he created a local community advisory board made up of mental health workers, community advocates, economic development folks, and he tasked both advisory boards, along with Tamika Palmer, who's Brianna Taylor's mother, to come up with the content for the show. They did, in fact, hire a curator, but it's the idea of, rather than using, an independent curator that has the power to decide what it is they think the community wants to see. This was an exhibition informed by the community, and Sadiqa Reynolds, who was the CEO of the Louisville Urban League, said at the time this is the first time that my people felt comfortable coming into the museum.

Ken Grossinger:

And fundamentally changed the relationship between her community in Louisville and the museum which is now used for community meetings almost on a daily basis.

Osha Hayden:

Oh, you know, the Kehinde Wiley exhibit that was here at the DeYoung also was pulled together pretty quickly from what I understand, much more quickly than usual and so praise to the director there for doing that. But I don't know if they went to the extent you're talking about at the Speed Museum in terms of working with the community to develop it.

Ken Grossinger:

It's really critical for museums to do that. It can't be museums trying to engage the community around what they want to get the communities that they want into the museum. There needs to be an authentic partnership between the two, and another example that the book describes is the Queens Museum of Art in New York, and what's relevant about that to this discussion is that the Queens Museum was situated in the 65% Latino community, and the director of the Queens Museum at that time, a guy named Tom Finkelperl, who went on to become the New York City Commissioner of the Arts, realized that while he had lots of attendants at his shows, none of them was from the community, and so what he did which is unheard of at the time was to hire a community organizer. So he actually created a line item in his budget for a community organizer, and he hired a community organizer because he knew that what the organizers could do is what they have done in the past, which is they can knock on doors and they can ask people what it is that they want from a museum in their community. And so, in addition to the door knocking and the community meetings, finkelperl began to hold focus groups at the Queens Museum to really get at this question in more depth.

Ken Grossinger:

Turns out, what people wanted was a safe place where their children can go. That was fused with art, and so, with the help of the city, with some of the budget from the Queens Museum and other sources of funding, they created a plaza called the Corona Plaza that, to this day, is infused with mariachi bands, with all types of knitting, quilting, all different forms of art, and it's really contributed a lot. So this idea of an authentic partnership is just that. It's not like well, we need to figure out how to get them here. It's like we need to be in conversation with them about what they want.

Osha Hayden:

And this is really in pretty stark contrast to the way some museums and foundations work. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? In terms of the donors and the board members can have interests. They're often very wealthy and they may have interests that conflict with having socially relevant exhibits at the museum.

Ken Grossinger:

So cultural philanthropy has a very troubled past. We know that it was white philanthropists investing in elite art institutions that were showing white male artists, and so, when you look at this question, there's a whole set of issues related to race, class, gender and identity embedded in the history of cultural philanthropy that we need to pull ourselves out of. There's one great story in the book about an organization called the Art for Justice Fund, which describes one way to pull ourselves out. The Art for Justice Fund was started by a philanthropist named Agnes Gunn. Her friends called her Aggie. Aggie was the chair of the Museum of Modern Art, was an arts benefactor, and she had read Bryan Stevenson's book Just Mercy and had seen the film.

Ken Grossinger:

And then she went to see Ava DuVernay's film 13th, which traces the Atlantic slave trade right up through mass incarceration, and connects the dots. After seeing that film. She calls up Darren Walker, who is the president of the Ford Foundation, and says Darren, we need to do something to end mass incarceration. And Darren then convenes a meeting of other foundation executives to talk about what they might do. Aggie comes up with an idea she owns one of Roy Lichtenstein's paintings and she calls up Roy's wife, dorothy, who's still with us and says to Dorothy how would you feel if I sold Roy's painting that's above my fireplace, man, because I want to raise money to end mass incarceration? Aggie sold that for $160 million, and $100 million of that $160 million went into an entity that she called the Art for Justice Fund and, like Steve and Riley at the Speed Museum in Louisville, kentucky, what they did was to engage people who were incarcerated and the families of people who were incarcerated. So not only did they get 50% of all the grants that the Art for Justice Fund was making, but they were helping to inform the decisions about who else, because who else than someone that's close to the problem and is on the ground has a better understanding of what's necessary, and so it's those types of partnerships that will enable philanthropy to break out of the silos that they're in, and they're in very deep silos in some cases. You know, the larger foundations have policy departments on one side and they have art and culture departments on another, and that can become very problematic.

Ken Grossinger:

So if you're an artist, a conceptual artist named Mel Chin, Mel goes down to Louisiana after Katrina and wants to do something to remediate, lead in the soil that Katrina uncovered and quickly realized, after convening meetings of scientists and public health advocates, that he was never going to raise enough money to remediate lead in the soil and I'll get to the point in a second.

Ken Grossinger:

And so what Mel did was create an art show.

Ken Grossinger:

And so what Mel did was create an art show and he created something called fundreds, which were customized $100 bills made by children, and he hired a Brinks armored truck, decked it out and, with a 6,000-mile loop around the country, made stops in cities around America to pick up these funders that his staff that he had hired were helping to organize not only students but PTAs and other civic organizations, and the idea was to bring it back to the capital to demand funding to deal with lead remediation.

Ken Grossinger:

Now here's the point, if you're a Mel Chin, do you go to the foundation's advocacy and policy department for funding or do you go to their art and culture department? And so that causes a schism in the field between artists and organizers, because foundations are not set up in a way that they're able to look at the whole, that they can embrace the two together. They keep them siloed and they keep their funding siloed. So one of the things that we need to do is what JPB Foundation did was they began to fund artists working in the environmental community, and when I asked them why this woman, Dana Borland, said it's because the organizers are telling us we can't do our jobs without them, and so they now have an integrated program.

Osha Hayden:

Well, let's go to a short break and we'll be back in just a moment with more Ken Grossinger and the power of art. Stay tuned, we'll be right back. In case you're just joining us, this is Aspire, with Osha, Art, nature, humanity, and I'm your host, Osha Hayden. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm here with Ken Grossinger today and we are talking about the power of art to create lasting social and cultural change and to create movements. So let's talk a little bit about filmmaking, because there have been some very powerful films that have come out. One of them I'm thinking of is Chasing Ice, by filmmaker Jeff Orlovsky and his team, and they did that to help shape the public opinion about climate change, and I think they did it in the home district of a climate denying congressman. So how effective was it?

Ken Grossinger:

So the climate denying congressman his name is Representative Tiberi, it was in Ohio and Jeff Orlovski, by the way, is the same filmmaker who made the Social Dilemma. He made several environmental films , one is Chasing Ice, which you referenced, the other is Chasing Coral, and he just did a short called Chasing Time, which I haven't seen yet but I'm sure is going to be as great as the other two. And so Jeff wanted to test the proposition. That film could have impact. He wanted empirical data to support it, and so Jeff hired a poster, a national polster named Mark Millman, to do a before and after study. And what Jeff did is he held 90 screenings that collectively brought together 9,000 people from Tiberia's district. He also distributed 5,500 DVDs of the film. In the before and after study, Millman found that on a range of questions such as is climate change man-made? Does climate change exist? He found the 15 to 25% jump in the number of people that said yes, and said that it was a great concern, and so it really did have a very strong impact.

Osha Hayden:

So let's talk about the new thinking and funding sources of philanthropy. You've talked a little bit about this, but let's go a little bit more into depth about where we can take it from here, the funding and philanthropy and donors, and how do we get past the fact that some of them maybe have vested interest in fossil fuels, for example. What do you see as the critical things that we need to do in the future?

Ken Grossinger:

What I think we need to do is build upon our successes, and so if we look to the philanthropic sources that are funding good work, it's very different than being critical of foundations that are not doing it, because foundations have a lot of money and so they have a lot of power and they can decide which organizations get the money and which organizations don't.

Ken Grossinger:

So if you want to move a foundation, or even an individual philanthropist, the way to move them is not by saying you're doing this wrong, this is really not working, but you move them by example, and I think that's what we've got to do. And so we've got to point to organizations like the Art for Justice Fund, like the Pop Culture Collaborative. There's a foundation. It's not a foundation, it's a fund in the Bay Area connected to the Center for Cultural Power. It's a $23 million fund, and what the staff to the Center for Cultural Power it's a $23 million fund and what the staff of the Center for Cultural Power did was to convene a community advisory body, but it wasn't really advisory, it was a decision-making body. So the staff of the Center for Cultural Power didn't decide who was getting the money, but it was people in the community.

Osha Hayden:

So if we lift up examples like that. We have the capacity to demonstrate that this is how it works. How are some of the collaborations that you explore in the book shifting how we organize and think about building and sharing power? Because we're really talking about artists of all kinds musicians, artists, filmmakers, theater, every aspect of art, bringing them into the cultural change movements.

Ken Grossinger:

I think that artists in many ways are already a part of these movements, and the organizers. They also very much embrace art, but things break down along organizational lines because artists and organizers think differently about their work. So, for example, if you're the League of Conservation Voters, you're spending tens of thousands of dollars on poll-tested messaging so that you can communicate with the public in the most effective way as possible. If you embrace artists on your board and on your staff, you're then throwing up the possibility, because artists don't want their creativity stifled. They're artists about sending out a different message, and so we need to reconcile that, just as we need to reconcile the timeline orientation. So organizers want things done yesterday, they want it done today, they want it done tomorrow. Artists feel the same urgency, but on their horizon.

Ken Grossinger:

Hank Willis Thomas, the photographer based in Brooklyn, said on his timeline, change happens in 10, 20, 30, and 40 years. And that's because Hank Willis Thomas is talking about changing the narratives, not just talking about changing the levers of power, but what underlies the leverage of power. And so the way to mitigate those problems is simply to have an upfront understanding between the organizations and the artists about what they could expect from each other, and it takes risk. You have to be willing to risk that an artist is not going to do something which is going to negatively impact your campaign. And artists also have to take the risk of entering into those organizations, believing that they're not going to have their creativity stifled that they're not going to have their creativity stifled.

Osha Hayden:

Yes, I mean, when you think about how people develop trust and develop those alliances so that they can work together to create this kind of change, it's really pretty deep and important work, and we've probably never needed it quite so much as we do now, and I think that my listeners, I'm guessing here, but I think most of my listeners are pretty interested in how they can become more effective in helping to create change and helping to save the environment and protect the earth upon which we live. So what would you say to my listeners?

Ken Grossinger:

Change doesn't happen because one person does it. Change is a collective process. You can be an artist, you can be an organizer on your own, so you can just boycott whomever, or you could create your own individual artwork, and that's fine. But if you want social change, you've got to work in collaboration, and so I think the notion of artists who want to think about and use their work in the service of social movements, approaching organizations that have the same agenda and same outlook, is a very important thing for them to be doing, just as if your listeners are part of an organization like the League of Conservation Voters or others.

Ken Grossinger:

It's important to bring artists into the mix. Artists need to be at the strategy table. That's what makes Harry Belafonte so effective. That's what made Harry Belafonte so effective. He was not just somebody who was an activist that realized that his art could propel the civil rights movement, but he was at the strategy tables. He helped design the March on Washington in 1963. He was really embedded, and so we need to look at both things, both approaches, and when we can do that, we can have some victories.

Osha Hayden:

Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Just one other thing I want to ask you is how do we do this at scale, the collaboration between activists and artists? How do we scale it up to meet the challenges of today?

Ken Grossinger:

Yeah, that's a powerfully important question which will probably take another radio show, because there's no easy answer. Obviously, resources are key to that, and so then the question becomes where do those resources come from? Who's going to fund it? Who's going to fund the League of Conservation Voters to hire artists? Who's going to talk to artists about? So scaling it up is our next step. That's why I wrote the book, because I wanted to scale it up, and my next book may be how to do it.

Osha Hayden:

Excellent. So when we build collaboration between artists and organizers, political activists and philanthropists, we can basically power up our efforts and create dynamic social movements. You've been an inspiration today, Ken Grossinger, thank you so much. And your book again is called Artworks. Do you want to tell people how they can get that?

Ken Grossinger:

Sure, there's a website, of course. The website is artworksbook. com. You can review what's in the book, you can see who commented on the book and if you want to order the book, you can order it right there. Again, it's artworksbook. com, and I just want to say thank you to you, Osha, for your years of service to the community through this radio show and for having me on as well.

Osha Hayden:

Well, thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show today and - to my listeners. Have an inspired week and live your joy. Until next time!