A love story about the power of art as organizing Aja Monet and phillip agnew
Aja Monet: Our story begins
like all great, young love stories.
Phillip Agnew: She slid in my DMs …
AM: He liked about 50 of my photos,
back-to-back,
in the middle of the night –
PA: What I saw was an artist
committed to truth and justice –
and she’s beautiful, but I digress.
AM: Our story actually begins
across many worlds,
over maqluba and red wine in Palestine.
But how did we get there?
PA: Well, I was born in Chicago,
the son of a preacher and a teacher.
My ears first rung with church songs
sung by my mother on Saturday mornings.
My father’s South Side
sermons summoned me.
My first words
were more notes than quotes.
It was music that molded me.
Later on, it was Florida A&M University
that first introduced me to organizing.
In 2012, a young black male
named Trayvon Martin was murdered,
and it changed my life
and millions of others'.
We were a ragtag group
of college kids and not-quite adults
who had decided enough was enough.
Art and organizing became our answer
to anger and anxiety.
We built a movement
and it traveled around the world
and to Palestine, in 2015.
AM: I was born to a single mother
in the Pink House projects
of Brooklyn, New York.
Maddened by survival,
I gravitated inwards towards books, poems
and my brother’s hand-me-down Walkman.
I saw train-station theater,
subwoofing streets and hood murals.
In high school, I found a community
of metaphor magicians
and truth-telling poets
in an organization called Urban Word NYC.
Adopted by the Black Arts movement,
I won the legendary
Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam title.
(Applause and cheers)
At Sarah Lawrence College,
I worked with artists
to respond to Hurricane Katrina
and the earthquake;
I discovered the impact of poetry
and the ability to not just
articulate our feelings,
but to get us to work
towards changing things
and doing something about it,
when a friend, Maytha Alhassen,
invited me to Palestine …
PA: We were a delegation
of artists and organizers,
and we immersed ourselves
in Palestinian culture,
music, their stories.
Late into the night,
we would have discussions
about the role of art in politics
and the role of politics in art.
Aja and I disagree.
AM: Oh, we disagree.
PA: But we quite quickly
and unsurprisingly fell in love.
Exhibit A:
me working my magic.
(Laughter)
AM: Obvious, isn’t it?
Four months later, this artist –
PA: and this organizer –
AM: moved into a little home
with a big backyard, in Miami.
PA: (Sighs)
Listen, five months
before this ever happened,
I predicted it all.
I’m going to tell you –
a friend sat me down and said,
“You’ve done so much for organizing,
when are you going to settle down?”
I looked him straight in the face
and I said, “The only way
that it would ever happen
is if it is a collision.
This woman would have to knock me
completely off course.”
I didn’t know how right I was.
(Laughter)
Our first few months
were like any between young lovers:
filled with hot, passionate, all-night …
AM: nonstop …
PA: discussions.
(Laughter)
PA: Aja challenged everything
I knew and understood about the world.
She forced me –
AM: lovingly –
PA: to see our organizing
work with new eyes.
She helped me see the unseen things
and how artists illuminate
our interior worlds.
AM: There were many days
I did not want to get up out of bed
and face the exterior world.
I was discouraged.
There was so much loss and death
and artists were being used
to numb, lull and exploit.
While winning awards, accolades
and grants soothed so many egos,
people were still dying
and I was seeking community.
Meeting Phillip brought so much joy,
love, truth into my life,
and it pulled me out of isolation.
He showed me that community
and relationships
wasn’t just about building
great movements.
It was integral in creating
powerful, meaningful art,
and neither could be done in solitude.
PA: Yeah, we realized many of our artist
and organizer friends were also lost
in these cycles of sadness,
and we were in movements
that often found themselves at funerals.
We asked ourselves
what becomes of a generation
all too familiar
with the untimely ends of lives
streamed daily on our Timelines?
It was during one
of our late-night discussions
that we saw beyond art and organizing
and began to see that art was organizing.
AM: The idea was set:
art was an anchor,
not an accessory to movement.
Our home was a home
of radical imagination;
an instrument of our nurturing hearts;
a place of risk where were dared
to laugh, love, cry, debate.
Art, books, records and all this stuff
decorated our walls,
and there was lizards –
walls of palm trees that guided
our guests into our backyard,
where our neighbors would come
and feel right at home.
The wind –
the wind was an affirmation
for the people who walked into the space.
And we learned that in a world –
a bewildering world
of so much distraction –
we were able to cultivate a space
where people could come and be present,
and artists and organizers
could find refuge.
PA: This became Smoke Signals Studio.
AM: As we struggle to clothe, house,
feed and educate our communities;
our spirits hunger for connection,
joy and purpose;
and as our bodies
are out on the front lines,
our souls still need to be fed,
or else we succumb
to despair and depression.
Our art possesses rhythmic communication,
coded emotional cues,
improvised feelings of critical thought.
Our social movements should be like jazz:
encouraging active participation,
listening,
spontaneity and freedom.
What people see as a party …
PA: is actually a movement meeting.
See, we aren’t all protest and pain.
Here’s a place to be loved,
to be felt, to be heard,
and where we prepare
for the most pressing political issues
in our neighborhoods.
See, laws never change culture,
but culture always changes laws.
Art –
(Applause)
Art as organizing is even changing
and opening doors
in places seen as the opposite of freedom.
Our weekly poetry series
is transforming the lives of men
incarcerated at Dade Correctional,
and we’re so excited to bring you all
the published work of one of those men,
Echo Martinez.
In the intro, he says …
AM: “Poetry for the people
is a sick pen’s penicillin.
It’s a cuff key to a prisoner’s dreams.
The Molotov in the ink.
It is knowledge, it is overstanding,
it is tasting ingredients
in everything you’ve been force-fed,
but most of all, it’s a reminder
that we all have voices,
we all can be heard
even if we have to scream.”
In 2018, we created our first annual
Maroon Poetry Festival
at the TACOLCY Center in Liberty City.
There, the Last Poets,
Sonia Sanchez, Emory Douglas
and the late, great Ntozake Shange,
performed and met
with local artists and organizers.
We were able to honor them
for their commitment
to radical truth-telling.
And in addition to that,
we transformed a public park
into the physical manifestation
of the world we are organizing for.
Everything that we put into poetry,
we put into the art, into the creativity,
into the curated kids' games
and into the stunning stage design.
PA: Our work is in a long line
of cultural organizers
that understood to use art
to animate a radical future.
Artists like June Jordan,
Emory Douglas
and Nina Simone.
They understood what many of us
are just now realizing –
that to get people to build the ship,
you’ve got to get
them to long for the sea;
that data rarely moves people,
but great art always does.
This understanding –
(Applause)
This understanding informed the thinking
behind the Dream Defenders'
“Freedom Papers,”
a radical political vision
for the future of Florida
that talked about people over profits.
Now, we could have done a policy paper.
Instead, artists and organizers
came together in their poetry
to create incredible murals
and did the video that we see behind us.
We joined the political precision
of the Black Panther Party
and the beautiful poetry
of Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada
to bring our political vision to life.
AM: Now thousands of Floridians
across age, race, gender and class
see the “Freedom Papers”
as a vision for the future of their lives.
For decades, our artists and our art
has been used to exploit,
lull, numb,
sell things to us
and to displace our communities,
but we believe
that the personal is political
and the heart is measured by what is done,
not what one feels.
And so art as organizing is not
just concerned with artists' intentions,
but their actual impact.
Great art is not a monologue.
Great art is a dialogue
between the artist and the people.
PA: Four years ago, this artist …
AM: and this organizer …
PA: found that we were not just a match.
AM: We were a mirror.
PA: Our worlds truly did collide,
and in many ways …
AM: they combined.
PA: We learned so much about movement,
about love and about art
at its most impactful:
when it articulates the impossible
and when it erodes individualism,
when it plays into the gray places
of our black and white worlds,
when it does what our democracy does not,
when it reminds us
that we are not islands,
when it adorns every street
but Wall Street and Madison Avenue,
when it reminds us that we are not islands
and refuses to succumb to the numbness,
when it indicts empire
and inspires each
and every one of us to love,
tell the truth
and make revolution irresistible.
AM: For the wizards –
(Applause)
AM: For the wizards
and ways of our defiance,
love-riot visions of our rising,
risen, raised selves.
The overcoming grace –
fires, bitter tongues,
wise as rickety rocking chairs,
suffering salt and sand skies.
Memories unshackled and shining stitches
on a stretch-marked heart.
For the flowers that bloom
in midnight scars.
How we suffered and sought a North Star.
When there was no light, we glowed.
We sparked this rejoice,
this righteous delight.
We have a cause to take joy in.
How we weathered and persisted,
tenacious,
no stone unturned.
How we witnessed the horror of mankind
and did not become
that which horrified us.
PA: Thank you.
AM: Thank you.
(Applause)