(gentle music) - Increasingly authoritarian governments have every reason to be afraid of artists.

Artists are not dazzled by spectacle and power.

So, are they afraid of artists?

Yeah, they should be.

My painting practice has always been a confounding one.

The process has always required that I arrive at this blank canvas knowing absolutely nothing.

- Welcome to "One on One."

I'm Ian Donnis.

Jordan Seaberry is an artist, activist, and community organizer, whose paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries.

His past roles include directing public policy for the Nonviolence Institute, and serving as a community leader fellow at Roger Williams University School of Law.

So how does Seaberry's activism find expression in his artwork?

And what role can creativity play in advocating for government reform?

(gentle music) Jordan Seaberry, welcome to "One on One."

- Thanks for having me.

Happy to have you at the house.

- Great to be here.

Let's start with a fundamental question.

Why did you want to become an artist?

- Being an artist is the thing I've done my whole life.

My preschool teachers were worried 'cause all I wanted to do was sculpt Play-Doh and draw pictures.

It has always been the lens through which I see the world.

All of my other activities, political organizing included, all stemmed from art.

It's always been the central way that I understand the world and the people around me.

- You grew up on the south side of Chicago, and came here to go to school at the Rhode Island School of Design.

You dropped out of RISD, got involved in activism, and community organizing, and then went back to RISD to complete your education there.

How did that process affect your development as an artist?

- RISD was my dream school when I was a young guy.

When I was in high school, going to RISD was all I wanted to do.

I was really focused in high school on building my portfolio and having everything I needed to be in a secure spot to get in.

And about as soon as I got there, I realized I was pretty miserable.

I really struggled in undergrad at college.

I struggled to fit in and feel like I could make friends, and like I was a part of the community.

And at the same time, I had this huge political awakening.

I started thinking more and more about capitalism and racism and sexism, all of these things that as a kid, I had been sort of shielded from in a lot of ways.

Once I got to College Hill, of all places, it came crashing in.

So I increasingly couldn't see a role that art had in my life anymore.

So not only did I drop out of RISD, I stopped painting altogether.

I didn't make any art for the years that I was away.

I was only solely focused on political organizing, grassroots organizing, and eventually policy organizing, systems level change.

But once I went back to RISD, I loved it.

I was ecstatic to be there.

It felt so much more precious, so much more sweet, because I had this community that I built for myself that I loved.

I had this work that I was proud of.

And so then going back to RISD, and really zeroing in on these artistic questions that previously had felt superfluous to me, or silly, I had matured enough now to understand how integral they were to me.

- You've described taking on oppression as a fundamentally visual action.

How can paintings strike a blow against entrenched systems in a way that a policy brief, for example, cannot?

- Artists have always been involved in political movements.

The problem is political organizers often involve artists right at the tail end.

I was guilty of this myself when I was organizing.

I would have students from RISD come, wanting to get involved.

I was doing prisoners rights organizing at the time.

And they would be really excited to participate in creative ways.

And you'd think that I, having been an art school dropout at the time, would be primed to have some creative ways to plug artists into my work.

And even I struggled.

We always go to essentially beautification projects.

So artists can make posters, artists can make cooler picket signs or T-shirts, but we really, as organizers, we really struggle to think about how artists can be involved at the strategy table from the beginning.

What makes artists so special is they have spent their whole lives figuring out how to communicate with people, how to take the world in, and be able to translate it back out to folks.

That is such a rare, special gift, to be able to look at a blank canvas and not be scared of it, but to see opportunity and possibility.

That's what organizers are craving.

But way too often we involve artists only at the tail end.

So yes, I think artists can and should be involved in fighting oppression in all forms, but organizers, we have to start preparing social movements to pull artists in from the jump.

- We've heard from what you've said, Jordan, how art and organizing are intertwined in your identity and your work.

When you work on an organizing or activism campaign, how does that find expression later in your art?

- I try to do them simultaneously.

So increasingly, I see my political work as a part of my artistic practice.

In the past, it had been pretty separated.

For many years I worked, for example, at the Nonviolence Institute, and I had an art studio, and they really didn't feel like they were threads in a tapestry.

Now I serve as a co-director of an organization called the US Department of Arts and Culture.

- Not affiliated with the federal government.

- I am not an employee of Donald Trump.

That is true.

I think of us more as a performance piece.

So the government never made a Department of Arts and Culture.

And so until they do, we are performing what we would want that agency to do.

How would we want it to define artists?

How would we want it to engage with grassroots cultural organizers?

I know we wouldn't want that agency to define artists only as people who show paintings in galleries, or perform in the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

We would want it to include cultural organizers, cultural workers, indigenous practitioners, food justice folks, mutual aid practitioners, birth workers, all of the folks who actually contribute to building the cultural tapestry that we live in.

And so through that work, I get to partner and organize with cultural organizers and workers all across the country, as well as social movements.

That increasingly feels like a central part of my artistic practice.

It's not just images anymore.

- Public support for the arts emerged as a very controversial issue in the late '80s due to federal grants for controversial artists like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Conservatives argued that was the taxpayers essentially picking winners and losers.

How do you respond to that argument?

- Conservative governments and right-wing governments, and increasingly authoritarian governments have every reason to be afraid of artists.

Because artists are unafraid to tell the truth.

Artists are not dazzled by spectacle and power.

We are trained through our whole lives to cut through lies, to see what is actually truly inside someone or something.

That's a really scary proposition for someone who wants to project power or authority or false masculinity or all of the things that build the identity of an authoritarian, run totally counter to what artists are trained to do.

So are they afraid of artists?

Yeah, they should be.

- When you have an idea for a painting, what's the process?

How do you move forward from converting an idea into a painting or a series of paintings?

- Sometimes I go to a friend's painting studio and I'll look in their sketchbook, and I'll see a sketch for a painting.

I'll look on the wall and I'll see, okay, they had this sketch, they executed the painting, it's beautiful.

I wish I could do that.

My painting practice has always been a confounding one.

The process has always required that I arrive at this blank canvas knowing absolutely nothing.

The painting always tells me what it's trying to do, what it's trying to say, what it's trying to unearth.

So my paintings are really slow, really deliberative.

I often start with just one huge field of paint and slowly find figures, find spaces, find ideas, but I've never made a painting that at the beginning, I knew what it would look like by the end.

It's always a surprise.

It's always changing.

And that often means that I'm painting things sometimes painstakingly.

And then the next morning I realize I have to cover that.

I have to sand the whole thing off, cover it with Prussian blue, paint something completely over it.

It's really distressing to my wife.

She tries not to tell me when she likes something in the painting, because she knows I'll probably paint over it the next day.

But it's a sense of call and response.

I am trying to unearth what the painting can be, rather than impose my ideas that I've arrived there with.

I want the process to be asking me questions more than presenting answers.

I hope the viewer feels that way, too.

I'm hoping folks look at the work and don't get answers, but walk away with questions that they can chew on.

- Jordan, one of your series of paintings is about the flight of refugees.

A subtext for that is how one of your grandfathers fled Mississippi due to the Ku Klux Klan.

You've written about how unearthing that history was challenging.

Tell me about that grandfather, and how you put that story together.

- So my father's father, James, was born and raised on a very small plot of land outside of a town called Shuqualak, Mississippi.

Very rural, deep in the woods, beautiful pine, swampy, covered in cottonmouth snakes.

And in his town, there was a lynching.

And he and his family were chased out shortly thereafter.

So he, like millions of Black families at the time, went straight up the Mississippi River to Chicago, which is where I was born.

So a lot of my work is thinking about not just the circumstances of violence, but also the circumstances in which these strange sort of historical happenings, sometimes coincidences, can shape so much of who we are.

Chicago is an integral part of my identity, how I see myself.

And I only landed there because my father, my grandfather, fled his own home.

So I have always tried to figure out that relationship, my relationship to Mississippi through my paintings.

When I was out of RISD for a few years, one of the projects I started was actually going down to Shuqualak, Mississippi, to find where he was from.

He passed when I was a teenager.

He had never been back down there.

No one from my family could tell me exactly where that land was.

And so first time I went down there, couldn't find it.

Second time I spent about three days in the county courthouse going through the old dusty deed books, seeing who sold what parcel of land in 1898.

Eventually I was able to figure out where this piece of land was.

I went there without a plan and I pitched a tent, and a propane stove, and I said, "I'm going to spend a couple months here, and see what happens."

What happened was I met just about everybody around, which it's a very small town.

It's not that hard to do, but word spread pretty quickly about who this strange northern kid was, who had pitched a tent and parked himself on the land.

But I was able to build some really beautiful relationships with these folks, build some actual kinship, even though I had never set foot there before, felt like I was a part of that place.

And a lot of paintings and painting projects have stemmed from that relationship to the land.

I've been back down there to keep those relationships warm, did a photography project down there, a bunch of paintings, of course, and yeah, a lot of different artistic projects exploring my relationship to it.

- A couple of years ago you spent the winter in Guatemala, came back to the US.

Donald Trump was back in the White House.

You responded with an online comic called "WTF Can Artists Do During a Fascist Takeover?"

Trump is still president.

How do you see the role for artists in responding in a time when certain freedoms and liberties and norms are under threat?

- I think it's easy for artists to feel that our practices don't have a tangible impact, because it can feel indirect.

We're maybe changing minds and spreading ideas.

But what I really want artists to understand is that authoritarianism ends through collective action, through collective non-cooperation.

That can absolutely involve artists.

The thing we have to do is join up with other people.

I am a painter.

I would happily spend seven days a week alone in my studio, just in my little cave, painting by myself, but that is not how this stuff ends.

Everything matters as long as you do it in a group, as long as you do it with people power.

Artists, I think we often forget that we're not just artists.

We are people too, and people power is what topples regimes.

So I want artists to realize that yes, we spend a lot of time in our studio, but we also go to coffee shops, we work with galleries, we work with museums and curators.

All of those relationships are opportunities for folks to build power, to spread those ideas through conversation and relationship, to build collective power together.

And I think it's perfectly fine if artists want to spend a chunk of time alone in the studio painting, that's what I do.

But then you also have to get out and work in a group.

Again, everything matters as long as it's together.

- Speaking of groups, they're still about a third of Americans who are firmly behind President Trump.

There are many people who are staunchly opposed to him.

How do you see the outlook for the future?

- I've seen too many miracles on the ground to be pessimistic.

I remember when COVID first hit, and folks thought it would be like one of those dystopian, apocalyptic films, where it's every neighbor for themselves.

And as much of a crisis as it was, what we really saw on the ground was people coming together and taking care of one another, protecting one another, mutual aid networks sprouted up in every corner of the country.

That tells me that, yeah, people have a lot of different political beliefs and different relationships to power and money and class and all of that, but at the end of the day, I fundamentally believe that people are pretty good, and people want to help one another.

So I am not blind to the fact that authoritarianism is rising, not just here, but around the world.

But I also know the recipe to fight it is people power and we have that.

We absolutely have that, and can fight this.

- On a related note, we see rising support for democratic socialism among some voters in America.

That's at play in the Providence mayoral election where David Morales, a Democratic Socialist, is in a competitive race with the incumbent Providence Mayor Brett Smiley.

But the issue for democratic socialists seem to be that when they win, they just take out other Democrats.

They're not expanding the map and defeating Republicans.

If that's what's happening, is this a winning strategy for progressives to gain ground nationally?

- Ultimately, yeah.

The folks who flock to the manosphere and conservative spaces, they're preyed on because they feel dispossessed by the system, they feel lonely.

And here is a community that gobbles them right up, online, right-wing groups just gobble those individual, those atomized folks up.

What we're seeing now is that people are understanding that that's not the only option.

The only option isn't to turn against your neighbors and get your heart filled with hate.

There also is an option where we build actual socialist communities, which isn't the scary thing people ever want to say that it is.

It means it's mutual aid.

It's taking care of each other.

It's the idea that people should have access to healthcare regardless of their income, that people should have access to housing and food regardless of their income, that government programs like SNAP shouldn't make people feel humiliated to participate in them, shouldn't make them feel totally frustrated just trying to fill out the forms and make the meetings.

That the government actually should be in a position to support people and love people.

That's what that promise gives to me.

That's what I see happening.

And so yeah, there's definitely a shift happening.

And is there some recalibration that has to happen within the Democratic Party?

I would really hope so.

I want those folks to move to the left and understand that democratic socialists aren't just some fluke any more than MAGA is.

That these are folks with real needs, real concerns, who are figuring out a way to articulate them and transform it into power.

I mean, that's what art's for.

- Nonetheless, there is some debate about so-called woke 1.0, even AOC said something recently like it was kind of weird.

There are even Democrats who think that there were elements of the first wave of woke that were over the top, and not just an effort to highlight attention on racism or other social ills.

So how do progressives make progress without alienating centrist voters?

- Oh, really simply, we get off the Internet.

The thing that I see making democratic socialism appealing to people isn't Twitter, or short-form interviews on someone's phone.

It's that these are folks who are actually getting out in the neighborhoods and talking to people.

When you look at Mamdani's victory, it's not because he had a TikTok.

It's because he put in the groundwork to actually connect with people, understand their needs, understand where they were coming from.

- But TikTok did help to really spread word of him and make him really sticky as a candidate.

- Yeah, he's a really smart, agile communicator.

But that wouldn't mean a whole lot if he wasn't able to also connect with people, if he wasn't able to actually build relationships and make folks feel seen, make them feel heard.

There are a lot of candidates with great social media presence who peter out.

- Jordan, I've got to ask you about Rhode Island.

I love the state.

I get a strong sense that you love the state.

You've made it your adopted home.

It seems like a place due to its small size, where it should really be possible to make change and make progress on key issues.

But we see how for many years, the state has struggled to improve underperforming public schools, to create new engines of job growth, et cetera.

What do you think is holding Rhode Island back from doing better?

- The size of Rhode Island is a real gift, in some ways.

It allows folks to become hyper connected.

It allows folks to build projects to scale, things that reverberate far beyond the borders of the state that North Carolina sees, oh, Rhode Island worked on this law.

Arizona sees, oh, we worked on that law.

We're able to pass things that would take 10 times as long, even just in Boston, let alone Chicago, or New York or Houston.

And so we're able to be a bit of a laboratory, and really experiment and try things.

But I think also our size then can make that feel a little dangerous to folks, because we can get a little provincial, we can get a little entrenched in sort of conservative approaches to how things do or don't change.

So, that said, do I love Rhode Island?

I do love Rhode Island.

Do I want us to be able to usher in some new, more dynamic ways of doing politics?

I do.

But I also see a lot of organizations sprouting up in the last handful of years that are really pushing that.

Groups like Reclaim, Working Families Party, they're really changing the political landscape in a pretty meaningful way.

So once again, I feel optimistic.

- You've worked on a lot of criminal justice reform issues, probation reform, promoting nonviolence, unshackling pregnant prisoners, et cetera.

What are your takeaways on what it takes to be effective as an activist and organizer?

- One thing that I learned a few years back, I was really lucky to get a Master's at Rhode Island, Roger Williams University School of Law.

And the thing that I learned most there isn't just how the law works, it's how much community organizers need to be thinking differently about policy change.

When I was an organizer, and I know organizers still feel this way, when we want to change a law, change the reality for folks on the ground, we always think of senators and representatives.

We always go straight to the legislative body.

Maybe we work with a mayor, maybe we work with a governor, but overwhelmingly, we're talking about legislation.

And what I've learned and what I've seen conservative movements do so effectively is build victories in the judiciary, to cultivate the kind of patience and deliberation that it takes to actually win long-term, lasting change.

Unfortunately, I've worked on bills that I felt really proud of, and I've seen them slowly erode over the years.

I've seen opposition, death by a thousand cuts, and I've really come to believe that leftists and grassroots organizers need to be thinking about the judiciary much more seriously.

We've seen right-wing groups not only have the patience, but also take losses, accept defeat, over and over again, keeping their eye on the prize, knowing that their goal isn't this short term victory.

They're trying to overturn Roe v. Wade.

They're trying to overturn the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and they are really good at not getting distracted by small defeats, but really focusing on the goal.

I want us to do that too.

I want to see grassroots organizers do that effectively.

- Providence used to have a lot of cheap, affordable mill spaces for artists.

I think your time in the state has coincided with the worsening of Rhode Island's housing crisis, and a bigger squeeze on artists.

Yourself used to have a studio in Atlantic Mills, and there's been some concern about the future there.

How do you see what this means for the future of Providence and Rhode Island as a creative hub?

- The housing crisis has hit artists really severely.

And that's because most artists are working class people.

Most artists are working on the side.

They've got a job in the service industry or manufacturing, and they're doing everything they can, cobbling things together to be able to keep their practice alive.

These are very often folks who are on the periphery, who need things like affordable housing to keep them afloat.

Unfortunately, we think way too often about artists as a sort of special class, a special group who deserves or needs special treatment.

Artists, we need to see ourselves as in solidarity with working folks, and everybody else who's facing housing instability.

All too often I see artists participating in gentrification unwittingly, converting mill space, for example, into artist studios, and then that's one step away from luxury developments and condos.

And so I want artists to really be more critical about our role in gentrification.

And the way that we do that is that we build more solidarity.

We see ourselves more aligned and connected with the folks who are running a small furniture shop in the mill building, or some small dog boarding, or manufacturing group in the mill.

I want artists to feel like we are not just artists.

We are people, and we need to build connections with the folks around us too.

- What do you see as the next frontier for activism and organizing in Rhode Island?

- The next frontier?

I think housing has got to be number one.

And there are a lot of creative things happening.

Obviously there is the rent stabilization conversation, but at the same time there are things like the public housing developer that are gaining some legs.

I really want to see folks experimenting with more social housing, and seeing housing as a human right.

I think healthcare obviously is also huge.

Healthcare, Medicaid, Medicare have been under attack by the federal government.

And so I do think we're going to have to get really creative about how we keep folks healthy, supported, safe, alive.

- Artist, activist, and community organizer, Jordan Seaberry, thank you so much for sitting down with me.

- Thanks, Ian.

Thanks for having me.

- Thanks for watching.

I'm Ian Donnis.

You can find all of our past interviews on the YouTube channel for Ocean State Media.

And if you love Rhode Island politics, sign up for my Friday TGIF column at oceanstatemedia.org/TGIF.

We'll see you next week.

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