March celebrates the accomplishments, struggles, frustrations and triumphs of women that has created and been creative in pushing forward nations. Women in general and African American women particularly have shown the clever, precise and witty brilliance in identifying, and solving issues our opposite gender continues to feel is problematic.
Today I speak of the African American Woman in Art and Politics. Faith Ringold, Augusta Savage, Varnetta Honeywood, Sonia Sanchez, Edmonia Lewis and Cynthia St. James--artists, activists, political discourse. How have we as women secured a place in history that allows for our words, pictures and souls to be exposed to the world and then relentlessly massage, and shape world politics and public opinion? Tenacity, persistence, belief, God and Goddess. I am a woman of color. In my five decades of living I have helped many others and today I wonder if I should have left them to their own devices. In my desire to help, the missteps of my actions, politically, may have cost a community the benefit of betterment through good representation. I am not arrogant enough to feel that solely because of me people lost out but I do accept my responsibility in creating an atmosphere of selection that was not optimal to have the correct representation. Activism is easy in the idealistic concaves of soul searching and youth. Branching out from those beginnings women make major choices-- wife, mother, entrepreneurer, educator, career-- which overlays how we channel our activism.
The marvelous aspect of the aforementioned women in my view is clearly represented through the various mediums they utilized to share their dissatisfaction, frustration and anger over the treatment as women of color.
In art I had a belief that the art was more important than anything else, race, gender, or economic strata. Faith Ringold has spent her career knocking these walls down to have an inclusive representation for women and colorful women--African Americans.
She has utilized her passion to forge a path through the barriers and challenges to raise our symbolic bra burning to have women included in the mystical, refined and spiritually and male dominated world of art. Art is an equalizer across all walls in my humble opinion. Whether you like or dislike what you see, hear or feel. It makes you do something, feel something. The green, grey mist of a dawn's pallette against the rising sun on canvass relates to your humanity rather than your political polarization.
Unfortunately, as I always share with my leadership development students, politics is a driving force throughout our lives manifested in weird and known ways. The Art of Politics or the Politics of Art either forces you to review and revise thought processes continually. Our art must develop and our politics must expand.
As we celebrate Women in History take the time to see and appreciate art. Make your vote count by being aware that there is a genuine fight we must wage to ensure that we continue to have the CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to vote. We may all have to channel Harriet Tubman, Mary Ellen Pleasant, Rosa Parks, Sojourner of Truth to fight to ensure that our children, their children and great grandma can vote in 2012.
Women are Winners, we are 51% of the electorate and cannot allow anyone to put an aspirin between our legs, a chastity belt on our hips our write us out of history!
