Latest / FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD / #41 ART AS ACTIVISM: “The Mourning After”

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#41 ART AS ACTIVISM: “The Mourning After” · FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD

• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hey y'all, it's Beth Arnold from the Inside Out Notes from a Liberal Southern Woman.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome and glad you're here.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's April 23rd, 2026, and I'm reading Art as Activism, The Morning After.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's morning with a U.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's morning as in grief.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Art as activism, the morning after.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: When my husband, the Lone Wolf, and I moved to France, it was to follow in the footsteps of painter Henri Matisse.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: The point was for us to follow the trail of this artist we admired and in the process to learn to see.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: We were beginning life in another country and in immersing ourselves in the art of Matisse and surrounding ourselves with the wonder of art in general, we hoped to perceive the world and ourselves in a fresh way.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I became a happy workaholic recording our journey in one of the digital revolution's first blogs, which was creating a template for what today seems commonplace.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I felt most myself in France, inhaling every new experience.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: An artist is an explorer, Matisse once said, and I learned that this was a path to who I am.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Art carries human life and culture forward in such consequential ways that it's impossible to imagine our existence without it.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Such were my thoughts about a month ago when dear friends introduced the Lone Wolf and me to the Franklin G.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Burroughs, Simeon B.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was charming, but what I didn't expect was the activist art of retired educator Joanne Morgan in a stunning exhibition called The Morning After.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Morgan's pieces are fabric art, quilts, actually.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: They are social commentaries on gun violence in America, on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, on families painfully separated by the border, and even on a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and his cadre of elite sexual predators.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And even on a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and his cadre of elite sexual predators.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now working on pieces about immigrants and ICE, Morgan uses the events that break our hearts to create art that forces us to see and feel the human loss in our consciousness.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: On the museum's website, Morgan considers her artwork her form of activism, activism against violence.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Her fabric memorials, as she refers to them, are quilted wall hangings that pay tribute to victims of violence.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: The work evolved out of a convergence of global, personal, and national events beginning with the tragedies that ignited the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: The untimely events of Brianna Taylor and George Floyd and other national events became the subject of her work.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: While quilting is not exclusively Southern, quilts are a deeply rooted part of Southern culture.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Southern quilting traditions were shaped by African American, Scots-Irish, and German communities, each bringing their own techniques and meanings to the craft.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: My Kentucky grandmother, who grew up deep in Appalachia and Hazard, was a quilter.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: The South has some of the most famous quilting traditions in America, such as the quilts of Gee's Bend in Alabama.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Morgan is brilliant to use something as personal, as intimate, and as expressive of families as quilting in order to express the pain of these disasters.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Quilts are traditionally three-layered bed coverings, top, batting, and back, stitched together for warmth.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: They hold deep symbolic meaning representing love, family, history, and memory, and they function as treasured keepsakes, often commemorating life events such as marriages or births.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: In Morgan's art, the commemorations are of things that have devastated not just families and friends, but us as a society and culture as a whole.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: The museum curators had placed boxes of tissues throughout the galleries of Morgan's exhibition, and we definitely needed them.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: One can't absorb the power of these pieces without weeping.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Joanne Morgan was born and raised in California, where she earned her BA degree at the California College of Art before moving to the University of Wyoming to study sculpture.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: She learned her love of art history there and received an MFA in studio art before going on to UCLA for her PhD in art history.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Morgan became a scholar of Black history and culture and is the author of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture, 2020, and Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture, 2007, which was awarded the Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2008.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Morgan is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and Art History at Westland, Illinois University.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: She retired in 2019 and moved to Surfside Beach in South Carolina and started this new artistic work in 2020 after seeing a quilt exhibition which reminded her of her own family's quilts.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Morgan had never used fabric as a medium, but in the beginning of COVID, she bought a sewing machine and learned to use it.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: She started on small projects and moved on to the intricate pieces she chose.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: In the online platform dedicated to sharing the stories of makers, artists, and crafters to inspire everyday creativity newsletter Create Whimsy, Morgan said, After I learned to sew, I decided to create a figure that could offer comfort.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I had long been inspired by the imagery of Mexican deities such as La Virgin de Guadalupe, Nuestra Senora de la Santa Muerte, and San Martin de Poraz, Shango of Yoruba origin, and Hopi Catsinas were also inspirations, as was the Mexican folk saint Santa Muerte, especially popular with lower classes in the disenfranchised.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I called my figure Lady Corona and provided her with attributes, 19 roses, symbolic of COVID-19, gloves, a face mask, and a small crown, Corona in Spanish.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like a deity or favorite doll, Lady Corona is a sympathetic presence, an intercessor, or a spiritual connection.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than standing alone and aloft, I place Lady Corona into interactive contemporary situations at Black Lives Matter protests, comforting children at the U.S.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Southern border.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Art is communication, a method of discovery and a necessity for the soul.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Art is pure expression to communicate complex emotions or ideas.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Art is therapy and healing both for those who make it and for those who see it.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: It can be used as a clinical tool to process trauma and improve mental well-being.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Art is pure pleasure and beauty, but most importantly to this discussion, art is social activism.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: It challenges norms, protests injustice, and raises awareness of important issues that we need to challenge and uproot while empowering communities.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Art is seeing us as we really are.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: This exhibition forces viewers to see and feel the massive trauma of the victims of violence and the people who love them and the reverberations in the communities in which they lived.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: It makes us face our own humanity and our collective responsibility for our friends, neighbors, countrymen, and other human beings, no matter who they are.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump's total lack of empathy is something that keeps popping up with synchronicity in what I'm reading and in videos I'm seeing, especially in a conversation between Timothy Snyder and Phillips P.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: O'Brien, who has become one of my must-reads.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: This explains a lot about Trump's failure as a president and as a worthy human being.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: But for the rest of us who do understand empathy and do accept social responsibility, Morgan's pieces immediately draw us in.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: I could make the case that every piece of art is activism for the artist who's revealing themselves creatively.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: In Joanne Morgan's case, she's focusing her eye and ours on harsh and provocative events and realities.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: As uncomfortable as it is, it is evolution catalyst for our own personal growth that extends out to our neighborhoods and regions and eventually to the larger world.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to show you Morgan's work.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you can get a sense of the power of her pieces from my photographs.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to describe them here for you guys that I'm reading this for, but I hope that you will go to the piece itself and look at the images.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: She has, for example, Virginia Jufray.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: She has thoughts and prayers, the children from Uvalde, the mom's parents from Uvalde, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the people at the border whose families are separated.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: These are very, very powerful and emotional pieces.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I sincerely hope you'll see them because they punch you in the gut and make you really feel this.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Art is a scream of freedom, said Christopher Paul Robeson stated that artists are the gatekeepers of truth and civilization's radical voice.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Dissident artist Ai Wei Wei argues that activism or resistance is a necessary condition for human existence, and famously declared, everything is art, everything is politics.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with him.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: A common sentiment in activist art is that art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: This quote is most often attributed to Cesar A.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Cruz, a Mexican-American poet, educator, and human rights activist.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: It originally appeared as the title of his 1997 poem, To Comfort the Disturbed and to Disturb the Comfortable, Onward Children of the Sun, in which, as reported by Graffiti Street, he explores the horrific acts humans inflict upon one another through imperialism, war, capitalism, bigotry, and censorship.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't able to find the poem itself, though there are many references to it, because surely this is the closest we come to the raison d'etre and the universal value of activist art.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: It has been the mantra of British street artist political activist Banksy.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Also in Graffiti Street, Banksy's statement, Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, underscores how his art often confronts pressing issues such as war, poverty, and systemic injustice.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: His work serves to challenge societal norms and provoke thought among his audience.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: The essence of the quote highlights the dual role of art and society both as a source of solace for the struggling, known as the disturbed, and as a vehicle for unsettling those who have grown comfortable within the status quo, referred to as the comfortable.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Picasso said art was a way to wash the dust of everyday life from the soul.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It serves as a form of communication, a method of discovery, and a necessity for the soul.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also the souls of all who see it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in the case of Morgan's work, it is for all these precious victims, their loved ones, and their communities to be seen.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: In the future, Joanne Morgan has been selected as one of 12 artists for the Juried Exhibition in the Making Contemporary Craft from South Carolina, opening at the South Carolina State Museum on October 10th, 2026.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: The showcase highlights contemporary interpretations of traditional techniques.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: In my humble opinion, I believe Morgan's pieces would be perfect for an exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and their new refreshed galleries that reflect recent collecting priorities of craft and indigenous art.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: As an Arkansan, I'm proud of the world-class institution that Alice Walton has created in Bentonville, Arkansas, recognizing diverse members of our American life.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is what Trump and the Christian nationalists never understand.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Our diversity is our strength.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I highly recommend you visit.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Go to Bentonville, Arkansas.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I hope you all will go to the text piece to see these incredibly powerful images, these pieces of art.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And thanks for listening.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Come back again soon now, you hear?