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Contributor:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Babble On. | Login
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Channels: Contemporary ArtJulia Butterfly Hill
Julia Butterfly Hill, activist and environmentalist, tours the American galleries at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, with a member of IMA's new media team. The conversation is insightful, honest and revealing, discussing much of the works in the American gallery, as well as many of today's environmental issues.
So do you have much experience of your own with art, I mean, what role do you think art plays in your own life?
Art is actually really vital to me in my life. I write poetry. I'm more of a crafter than a visual artist oftentimes, but I do draw, although my drawings
tend to be more pen and ink. They look almost like tattoos, or something, but a lot of my work that I have done to raise funds,
a lot of it has been for raising funds for organizations that bring art into inner-city schools and provide afterschool programs for the arts and things like that. So, to me art
is not just about a painting on the wall. Art is about how do we communicate and express our experiences in a way that can create a common language,
even for people who are very different. And I think that that is a vital role that art plays that doesn't always happen in language, in our words, but art can create that space for people
to have an experience of something together that we oftentimes might not be able to experience just through a conversation.
I always tell people that, for me, art is about, what does it make you feel? It's not about, what does it make you feel like,
you're supposed to know about the art, rather, what does it make you feel? What does it make you think? Not about do you know how to be an artist? Or, do you not know how to be an artist? Do you know what is good art and what's not good art? Or, what is considered good art and not good art?
all those kind of things, I think that's where people get overwhelmed and lost in art. I see art as a way to think and to feel in an expansive way and that's something that is available for anyone,
and I tell people that if you see a painting and it does nothing for you, move on. I am not actually one of those people who think that every piece has to be judged and critiqued.
I think it loses what value it did have for the artist who created it.
Functional art...it's my favorite.
You say it's your favorite?
Uh, huh. In some ways it's my favorite, just in that
it's part of why I got into doing things, like making purses and jewelry, like ways for people to have art be really incorporated into their lives, not just hanging
on the wall, you know? And I think particularly my family, on both sides of my family, we have a lineage of wood-working
and I've always, since I was little, been around people working with wood and particularly a style that's now disappearing in our every...
it's like our fast food cultures, fast food of everything, including in our designs. It's like we build buildings to fall apart, not to last. We build furniture to fall apart, not to last.
So, when there's functional art, it's the gift of form and function coming together. I love traveling to Europe, partly because
there's so many opportunities to experience form and function together where it's not so much of that fast food mentality where things are meant to be destroyed; things are meant to fall apart.
It's just, I think our world is a little less beautiful when we don't think as artists in our lives in how we build, how we create including
in how we structure our societies. If we approached it more creatively, more with a passion for bringing form and function together, our societies,
our cities would be more beautiful places to live.
I haven't really thought of it in that way before. I think I tend to think about that perception more when I am looking at work,
Early American works of Native Americans. I think that those works of art tend to be ones that, for me, really call out, the very European
point of view...
Exactly.
...when you are seeing those images, but I never really thought about it in landscape.
You know, because the way my brain thinks, is I don't see people are separate from the planet, you know? We will see, you know, the pictures of the cows and the pasture
and we think that automatically, well, yes that goes together and we think of the pictures of people in nature and it's like...Oh look at those people out there having the picnic, or whatever, we really have this,
we've been taught to be disconnected and even in our viewing, often times the way we view things, animals and nature that's natural, people and nature that's a picnic,
that's a sidebar, that's something you do on occasion and for me that disconnect is part of why our world is hurting right now and our planet is hurting,
our families and our societies are hurting, because we've gotten so disconnected. So, when I see a picture of nature, in particular with people in it then my mind automatically goes to...
we are one with nature. Where did these people come from? Is this their traditional place? If not, who got displaced in order for them to be here? Like my brain just automatically
goes into that space because I don't see us as separate from the earth.
I think one of the great things about art is that it can challenge people, and people can still remain open often times. Whereas if people are challenged
in the realm of person to person in communication, people shutdown, and when we are shutdown, we are not open to learn anything new, we are not open to having our mind shifted in anyway.
Art is, even when it's challenging, often times is still challenging in a way that's open that has people really thinking in a different way that leads them on a journey that might not happen otherwise
and, to me, that's one of the many vital roles that art plays. I don't see art as separate. I wish that we lived in societies
where we didn't have to have just big museums for people to come to because art would be the automatic expressions of communities all over.
It would be on every street corner, every light post would have art on it, you know, every electric box would be art, it would be everywhere, and we would have institutions like this
for the finer art that we don't want exposed outside and maybe getting destroyed by the elements but that art would just be so much a part our natural landscape in our cities and our societies,
but, for now, that's starting to come back, slowly but surely.
And this one grabs my attention, again, because I look at how we have created human societies disconnected from nature,
so when I see this, I just immediately am drawn to this stump in the foreground, but there's not much trees left and then there's smoke coming up from the factories in the background and to me
this is kind of the story of what we have called progress, and I often times have to think of, what is real progress?
And Richard St. Barbe Baker has a quote, "What price progress if it cost us the earth from underneath our feet?" And when I look at this painting
I hear that quote. Part of the work I'm passionate about is about highlighting businesses that are actually transforming what business means. That people
actually, often times, are misguided in the society because they think economics and capitalism are the same thing. That capitalism is actually designed to how can you extract from people
in a place in order to create wealth. The actual translation of economics, the root word for economics, is oikos, which means house or home
and the original true actual translation of economics is to take care of or steward ones home, and how is that we allowed for businesses to do something so radically
different and still call it economics, you know? What most people are being taught in college for economics is not actual economics, it's not teaching them about how to use business as a way of caring for the earth
and caring for one another, which is what economics is supposed to be. So, part of the projects I work on is uncovering the businesses who are choosing to return to the original meaning of economics and who are
using the gifts that business have to offer and using those as a gift to the world. The current conversation is called the triple bottom line.
I mean just like taking it below where it's ever been before like considering people, planet, and profit altogether. Other projects I am working on is a lot of people who are doing reclamation
of bringing nature back into cities. One of the things that I talk about is that we have to make cities more livable so that people stop leaving cities in order to live.
With 6.8 billion of us, and growing, we can't all have a huge plot of land somewhere. We have to find ways to create cities that are livable and one of the immediate results
when that happens is crime goes down, health goes up, there's a lot of real societal positive impacts when we bring nature back, so people who are working on community gardens,
people who are working on doing open space reclamation. There's this great project in Portland, Oregon called City Repair and they started and continued to this day to use of lot of art in
what they do, so they went to all these places that used to be public open spaces that have been slowly encroached upon by the bending of laws and the result being people are connected
to one another and they started creating impromptu art projects in all these open spaces to reclaim public space and now they have all of these beautiful places all over Portland and Portland is now considered
one of the greenest and nicest cities in the country to live in and part of it is through the work of this organization called City Repair. So, those are the kind of things that I like to be involved in,
who's creating the solutions right now and how can we spread the word and how can we create more of it.
For the people who will be watching this video, we're sort of wrapping up, what would you want to be the take-away message?
Like, what is the final word that you would give to the people that are watching this video?
For me, if you look at life, life is a creative experience. Life is creativity constantly expressing itself. Life is always in motion,
life is always evolving and transforming. It is this ongoing art experience called life and, for me, I would hope
that people would remember that and in remembering that realize that all of us are artists whether we recognize it or not, we might not be a trained artist, we might not be recognized
as an artist, but because we're alive, we are creative beings expressing ourselves. We can't help but be creative, and when we reclaim that creativity,
and we begin to express from that place, we often times find a lot more joy, a lot more vibrancy, a lot more beauty in our personal lives, in our community and in the world.
Well, every "art knower" says almost the same words what she says about what art means for she.
no new here :/
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